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Employee absences have a huge impact on the profitability of your business. If a member of your team gets sick, their work has to be assigned to someone else, or, in the worse case, put on hold. This puts a strain on the rest of your staff, as well as your company as a whole. This is an unavoidable part of running a business, but, without proper management, it can quickly escalate into a major issue. With that in mind, here are six ways to reduce employee sickness.

Choose Your Staff Carefully

Not all sick days are taken because the employee in question is sick. Sometimes they just don’t feel like coming into work. You can reduce these types of absences by choosing your staff carefully. Make sure that you opt for individuals with a strong work ethic and the right experience and qualifications behind them. Also, remember to check employee references for every hire.

Allow Flexible Working Hours

While absent employees may not be sick, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t have a valid reason for staying at home. Some people aren’t up to working at nine in the morning, while others have children and pets that need taking care off. Offering flexible working hours and the chance to work from home means that these individuals can work around their responsibilities.

Create A Better Workspace

The environment that you work in can have a major impact on your wellbeing. For this reason, you should create a better and healthier workspace for your team. Decorate with plants, buy ergonomic furniture, and invest in an office cleaning service. You may also want to provide healthy drinks and snacks for your team, as well as a gym membership or a space to work out.

Tackle Any Office Conflicts

Staff are much more likely to take the day off if they dread going into work. Because of this, you should try to create a welcoming and happy office environment. Tackling bullying, personality clashes, and any other conflict between staff and managers is a good place to start. Try to manage any problems as best as you can and offer professional mediation when appropriate.

Keep A Paper Trail

Absence is something that should be recorded in every workplace. After all, if you don’t keep a paper trail, you have no way of spotting patterns or trends, either in individuals or your workforce as a whole. When you measure employee absences, it allows you to identify potential problems, giving you the chance to address and work on them with the staff members in question.

Leave Your Door Open

Unfortunately, even when you keep records, there’s still the chance that problems could be occurring unnoticed. To give you the opportunity to manage these issues, you should introduce an open door policy. Allowing members of your team to talk to you now could help to prevent them from taking time off work later down the line.

Employee sickness is a major issue in almost every business, but, with these tips, you should be able to manage it better in your own.