Corporate Health Check

Everyone at work will probably need to take sick leave at some point during their working lives and in most cases this lasts a few days. However, long term and frequent absences can have devastating effects on the wellbeing of employees and the performance of organisations. The costs of sickness absence are astonishing

  • Over £12 billion a year to UK businesses
  • £666 a year for every worker employed (CIPD, 2008)

By effectively managing sickness absence and return to work you can achieve the following business benefits:

  • Improved business performance
  • Retention of valued staff
  • A safe and healthy workplace
  • Employee engagement

So the question is 'How healthy is your organisation?' and are you experiencing any symptoms of corporate ill health, for example:

  • Do you have high levels of sickness absence?
  • Are you constantly juggling staffing and resources caused by absences?
  • Are you losing valuable staff because of ill health?
  • Are you experiencing high levels of complaints from customers?
  • Is staff morale low?

By conducting a Corporate Health Check you can take proactive steps to improve your policies and procedures before these symptoms have a devastating effect on your businesss performance. The corporate health check is a 5 step process:

  • Review of existing baseline information
  • Review of policies and procedures
  • Embedding assessment
  • Gaps analysis
  • Corporate health action planning

Review of existing baseline information

  • Sickness absence
  • Staff turnover
  • Staff survey outcomes
  • Customer satisfaction
  • Complaints
  • Health and safety incident reporting

Review of policies and procedures including

  • Sickness absence management system
  • Systems for staff to raise concerns about their work and work environment
  • Quality management systems
  • Health and safety management systems

Embedding assessment

This stage essentially checks whether the policies and procedures that are in place are being applied in all areas of the business and are working effectively (embedded). This assessment involves a Corporate health survey and Corporate health workshops.

Corporate health survey. The corporate health survey is distributed to a sample of staff (normally on-line) to assess embedding of policies and procedures and establish health needs.

The Corporate health workshops

The Corporate health workshops are carried out across the business with key stakeholder groups to assess embedding of policies and procedures.

Gaps analysis

Gaps can then be identified against:

  • Existing systems. Whilst there may be policies and procedures in place, these may not be embedded across all areas of the business. Areas where there is lack of evidence of effective application are documented with recommendations to support action planning for effective embedding.
  • Good practice. Following the review of policies and procedures, gaps are identified against good practice (drawn from a range of sources depending on the nature of the policy), these gaps are documented with recommendations to support action planning for policy and procedure development.

Action planning

Support is provided in developing an action plan to improve Corporate health and review effectiveness against baseline measures.