Sickness absence is a growing problem for employers across the UK. The knock on impact on service delivery, increased workload for colleagues, lost productivity and the additional cost of covering absences, is considerable.
The national figures make the scale of the problem clear. In 2024-25 alone, employees took an average of 40.1 million working days off due to work-related ill health and injury, costing the UK economy more than £415m a week.
The public sector experiences even higher levels of sickness absence than the private sector, with stress, anxiety and minor illnesses among the leading causes of time off. The local government sector is feeling this acutely.
Conwy CBC is a case in point. Its latest self-assessment, covering April 2025 to March 2026, reported staff sickness absence of almost 12 days lost per full time employee. While this understandably attracted local concern, it's far from an isolated case. Many councils across the UK are grappling with similar challenges while balancing rising demand for services, tight budgets and ongoing recruitment pressures.
Sickness absence, however, is rarely one dimensional and there is no single solution. It requires a concerted effort and a consistent approach involving a variety of measures.
There are four areas that I think deserve particular attention:
Develop a strong attendance culture
It starts at the top. A strong attendance culture can't be a policy document sitting in a drawer, it has to be modelled by leadership and reinforced day to day. Managers and employees alike need to be properly trained in absence policies, not just be aware that they exist.
When managers understand how to have supportive, consistent conversations about attendance, and when staff can see that the organisation takes their health and wellbeing seriously, the culture around attendance starts to shift.
Prioritise prevention and early intervention
Prevention and early intervention are among the most effective levers for reducing long-term absence. Yet in most organisations, they're often the most overlooked.
It's essential to have appropriate support in place for employees, and to encourage open conversations about health and wellbeing, so that issues can be picked up and addressed while they're still manageable.
Many workplace wellbeing initiatives are designed with exactly this in mind. But a lot of them don't land as intended. Sometimes it's simply that people don't know the support even exists. Just as often, it's that the initiative itself isn't built to last.
That's because they are often built around a few key moments. A wellbeing week or a few lunch-and-learn webinars might create a valuable burst of engagement, but participation often drops once the initiative ends. Without ongoing reinforcement, healthy behaviours quickly fall away as people return to the demands of busy working lives.
What's needed instead is something that works over the long term, and that keeps delivering value well beyond the initial launch.
Encourage everyday movement
A movement-based initiative, grounded in everyday activity, can help employees build healthier routines that stick.
The evidence linking movement with better physical and mental health is overwhelming. Regular movement has been shown to reduce stress, improve sleep quality, increase energy levels and lower the risk of developing long-term health conditions.
According to the NHS, adults should aim for at least 150 minutes of moderate activity each week, yet many people fall short, especially for those based in an office.
For local government employees, whose days are often filled with back-to-back meetings or demanding frontline roles, movement can become an afterthought. When workloads are high, exercise is often the first thing people sacrifice, even though it's the very habit that could help them cope better with those pressures.
Employers can play a role by creating environments where everyday movement is encouraged and achievable whether that means supporting regular breaks, encouraging walking meetings where appropriate, or helping employees get outside during the working day.
When movement-based programmes are accessible and remove the barriers associated with rigid fitness goals, employees are far more likely to engage consistently and experience long-term benefits.
Make healthy habits rewarding
Creating the opportunity for movement is one thing. But getting people to actually take it up, consistently, is another. Instead of asking people to stay active simply because they should, organisations have an opportunity to rethink their approach and create environments where healthy behaviours are recognised and rewarded, not just encouraged.
That's a distinction I think about a lot, having co-founded incentifi. Rather than intensive fitness programmes, we focus on rewarding everyday movement with financial benefits.
Healthy choices are far more likely to become habits when there's something in it for people beyond the promise of feeling better eventually. And that something has to be a reward people actually want, not one HR has decided is good for them.
For councils, the obstacle is often budget, and that pressure is unlikely to ease any time soon. With competing demands and limited resources, investment in employee wellbeing initiatives can sometimes be seen as a nice-to-have rather than a priority. But the cost of staff absence creates its own financial pressure making it even more important to ensure wellbeing initiatives are focused on approaches that genuinely engage employees and that support healthier behaviours over the long term.
Paul Kelbie is co-founder of incentifi
