| No. |
Preventive measures |
| Group 1. Causes of a medical nature |
| 1. |
Identification and elimination of the causes of accidents |
| 2. |
Improvement of work on the formation of workplaces for those job positions that are defined as being critical due to a high rate of sickness and for certain reasons (folding tables, replacing a concrete floor with a wooden floor, or eliminating draughts, etc.) |
| 3. |
Health maintenance programmes in collaboration with social insurance (back therapy training, movement school, nutrition, or autogenic training, etc.) |
| 4. |
Consensus with trade unions on the degree of privacy protection for employees and a deeper examination of the nature of a sickness |
| 5. |
Enhancement of organisational sports (exercise machines, renting swimming pool lanes, morning occupational gymnastics, online recommendations for working on a computer, or family sports competitions, etc.) |
|
When hiring, special attention must be paid to an employee’s critical features, such as red eyes or problems with their back if the position is in a subdivision with sedentary activity. Identify employees with addictions (to alcohol, drugs, shopping, or gambling, etc.) |
| 6. |
Collaboration with social insurance agencies and the enterprise’s medical unit in questionable cases |
| 7. |
Identification of the cases of depersonalisation due to emotional burnout |
| 8. |
Sequential control of the situation and taking responsibility for such activities as informing and confirming the cases of an employee‘s sickness (an employee must provide a witnessed document confirming the reasons of their absence from work) |
| 9. |
Keeping in touch with an absent employee (by phone, e-mail, or in person) |
| 10. |
Conducting a talk with an employee who has returned to work after a sickness (including preventive talks) |
| 11. |
Standardised documentation for the talk upon the return of an employee |
|
Group 2. Organisational and administrative causes |
| 12. |
Keeping in touch with doctors who often give sick leave without any objections |
| 13. |
When hiring, special attention must be paid to an employee’s critical features, such as red eyes or problems with their back if the position is in a subdivision with sedentary activity. Identify employees with addictions (to alcohol, drugs, shopping, or gambling, etc.) |
| 14. |
Intensified care of the staff on the part of the management |
| 15. |
Make the consequences for absences from work and downtime visible |
| 16. |
Informing employees about absences from work and their consequences (systematised statistical data which is useful in the process of a discussion) |
| 17. |
Disciplinary actions (suspension of payments for time missed, including the deduction of payments in case of questionable behaviour during a sickness, official confirmation from the first day of sickness, etc.) |
| 18. |
Deactivation of e-mail and providing a fixed period of time (half an hour at the beginning and at the end of a working day) for personal communications in order to reduce “mixing” work and private life during the working day |
|
Cameras monitoring employee behaviour outside their workplaces (smoking, communication, or talking on the phone in the hall, etc.) |
| 19. |
Dissolution of employment (signing an employment termination agreement by mutual consent of the enterprise and employee or dismissal) in case of a highly expressed absence from work being recorded for a long period of time with negligible chances of improvement) |
|
Group 3. Working conditions |
| 17. |
Equipping existing workplaces in order to reduce the thresholds of obstacles that an employee may encounter after a long absence |
| 18. |
Moving to other workplaces |
| 19. |
Identification and elimination of management problems |
| 20. |
Conducting research on the topic “Labour satisfaction/production environment” (as one of the measures for reducing downtime) |
| 21. |
Regular discussions regarding absence from work with individual groups of employees |
|
Group 4. Management (including management style) |
| 22. |
Appreciating employees who are rarely absent from work (including, for example, different kinds of rewards such as lump payments for going to work and back home by bicycle) |
| 23. |
Developing an anti-mobbing strategy and informing employees of what they should do in case of bullying, undermining of authority, or bossing |
| 24. |
Supporting managers due to the fact that the topic of downtime is harder to discuss if an employee is close to them (the algorithm of a discussion, legal dependences, what can and cannot be done, useful criticism, etc.) |
| 25. |
Supporting employees with children (an agreement with kindergartens, partial payment for a babysitter, “mum for hour/day” programmes), consultations in the organisation with visiting psychologists and teachers, flexible work schedule, providing a list of websites with addresses of childcare agencies/specialists, playrooms with a nursery teacher in the organisation. |
| 26. |
Organising a programme involving taking care of elderly relatives and care for children. The idea of the programme is to help employees take care of the elderly at home with the help of a nurse (with partial reduced charge), provide a shortened working day with the possibility to perform some tasks from home, raise the spirits of employees through educational and informational support, and conduct talks with colleagues and manager |
| 24. |
Regularly keeping managers up-to-date (as a suggestion: useful and actionable information, or discussion on the topic) |
| 25. |
Step-by-step adaptation (elimination of the threshold of obstacles) of an employee after a long absence supported by social insurance (sickness benefit fund) |
| 26. |
Formation of an “attendance culture” (Ruhle & Süß, 2020). |
