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ABSENT WITHOUT LEAVE - DVLAWhen you last took a day off, was it for a real illness or did the thought of going to work just make you sick? Mat Snow finds out how one employer, the DVLA, is tackling the truantsOne Wednesday morning last month, BBC News bulletins led on a statement by health secretary, Alan Johnson, that he wanted doctors to take a lead in tackling "sick-note culture", to address the problem of 175m working days lost in the UK to sickness each year at a cost of £13bn. The BBC's second news story that morning concerned a data disc containing DNA profiles from crime scenes sent by Dutch police to the Crown Prosecution Service, where it lay unregarded for a year on the desk of an official on long-term sick leave. Whether casual or serious, absence from work through sickness is near the top of the political agenda, especially in the public sector, where the taxpayer foots the bill. What better place to visit, then, to explore "sick-note culture" than the HQ of a government agency so endemically unwell that last November House of Commons public accounts committee chairman Edward Leigh was moved to remark "sick leave seems to be a way of life. On average, each employee is off sick for nearly three weeks each year. The fact that [the agency seems] to function adequately despite this amazingly high rate of absence is a matter for surprise, to say the least." Over a sprawl of low-cost postwar public housing and a cemetery in the Swansea suburb of Morriston, looms the Heath-era cuboid that is home to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA). Small wonder local GPs commiserate, "You poor sod," when signing a DVLA employee off sick, according to David Evans, the agency's energetically reformist director of central operations, responsible for 2,500 staff. Contrary to the mood of disbelief and despair that emanates from parliament at the figure of more than 11 sick days on average taken annually by every member of staff - on top of 30 days' paid leave plus statutory holidays - Evans believes the DVLA offers a good news story in the making. It's a story whose roots go deep into the fabric of what the DVLA does and the people it needs to do it. The agency is, above all, a data collecting and processing factory, and so has always been staffed by an army of low-grade clerical workers, 70% of them women, mostly young - that is, enjoying the first flush of adult freedom with all its temptations, swiftly followed by the demands of babies and toddlers. "It's a well-known fact that, with women problems, health and caring factors too, high levels of female staff contribute to a higher level of absence through sickness," says human resources director Avril Beynon. "And any organisation which has most of its staff in junior grades suffers from higher absence through sickness; likewise part-time workers, of which we have lots. We have here all the demographic factors known to militate against having the best attendance." So what can you do? "There is no magic bullet," says David Evans, but the DVLA directorate believes that improvements in attendance can only flow from good management. And that is something, according to staff past and present, the agency lacks. The problem, according to retired manager Jack Fell, is that "extremely tedious, target-led work at lower levels" was being supervised "on an old-fashioned factory basis. Even at higher management levels, a lot of staff felt unheard and disenfranchised. People couldn't wait to get out and take redundancy." He describes a common scenario of his day, where a member of staff suffering a painful and even debilitating bad back - a condition notoriously difficult to disprove medically - would start taking more days off than strictly necessary. After all, the civil service system entitles you to full pay during any self-certified or sick-noted absence for up to six months in your last five years of employment. It's a grim picture corroborated by a former telephone agent in the DVLA's 650-strong call centre who was relieved to escape a regime inflexible in adapting to the needs of a new parent - "my manager told me she wasn't prepared to change my hours because then she'd have to change them for everyone" - and where the targets were so tough you didn't even have time to learn the names of team-mates seated either side of you before the headset had to go on. Though absenteeism through sickness has sat at the top of the DVLA's agenda ever since its foundation, only in the last seven years was a long-term strategy to address it set in motion by a new chief executive, Clive Bennett. He began by bringing in the private sector to upgrade buildings and technical infrastructure which had been crumbling for decades thanks to Treasury neglect. The builders and desk-space planners are in, and while parts of the estate remain shabbily institutional, most staff now work in a far more congenial environment. Bennett's successor as chief executive, Noel Shanahan, is now focused on the agency's practices and processes. "In some parts of the business we have very good sickness rates, better even than in the private sector," he says. "They're often our local offices round the country with a small number of staff and very close management. Staff there are motivated not to throw casual sickies - they'll let their pals down because others will have to carry their workload. We want to create that emphasis throughout the business so that if people wake up feeling slightly under the weather, they go in to work because they don't want to let their boss or team-mates down. And here in Swansea our managers know to have a laugh with their teams about not overdoing it on the weekend of a big rugby match. We're helping our managers understand how that relationship and motivation works, how to give feedback and coach people." There is a management revolution under way at the DVLA. The old school rooted in what Shanahan calls the "command and control" tradition, the inflexible application of the rulebook, and promotion through time served rather than management aptitude, and early retirement is being offered. The loss of some excellent older managers is accepted as a price worth paying to get rid of the less good who have stood in the way of the new, mentoring, flexible, sympathetic and team-building generation. It's a long overdue revolution based on a great deal of evidence that hard-line management doesn't produce such good productivity as the more touchy-feely style. At the DVLA, this means introducing such people-friendly facilities as individually negotiable flexible hours, on-site creches, shift-swapping, mixing tasks for variety's sake and "duvet days", where up to two consecutive days off per month are allowed at very short notice with no questions asked, taken legitimately and honestly as part of the 30-day annual leave rather than falsely claimed as sick days. "At the contact centre, 25 to 30 people a day are taking advantage of duvet days, many of which in the past would have been taken as sick days," reports Shanahan. Flexible working, the team ethic, close management, promoting today's DVLA to local GPs to address prejudice based on a grimmer past and promoting a healthy lifestyle, are the main tools the DVLA believes will erode its sick-note culture. So much for the carrots: the stick is that, with the support of employees canvassed for their views, the numbers of DVLA staff sacked for poor attendance will be publicised; last year it was 42. One person's humane and caring workplace is another's gullible and politically correct shelter for shirkers. The likes of Edward Leigh MP might well embrace the philosophy of common decency in the workplace towards the genuinely sick, if those who fake it find they no longer have to in order to balance the demands of work and life outside. NEWS ARCHIVE
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