We recently attended the Health and Wellbeing @Work conference in Birmingham where Senior Researcher from Tilburg University Dr Margot Joosen presented her findings from a study focusing on returning employees to work who were or had been absent with a mental health issue.
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At the recent Health and Wellbeing @Work conference in Birmingham, Royal Mail’s Lead Ergonomist, Corinne Parsons, presented how they had planned their strategy for reducing absence due to musculoskeletal disorders. As background information Ms. Parsons highlighted that the main long-term sickness absence causes at Royal Mail are mental health (20%), musculoskeletal disorders (23%), and injury (23%). Furthermore, they have an ageing workforce and their workforce is 85% male.
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Britain’s Healthiest Workplace has found that employees with flexible hours and the ability to work from home report lower absences and greater job satisfaction, and consider themselves to be in better physical and mental health. Those with inflexible hours, who are office-based and who face long commutes, are less productive and in poorer health.
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In this fair processing notice, “The client” or “the controller” means employer organisations, who contract Honeydew services. “Personal information” means information about the employees of the client, and from which the employee could be identified, including information which may be protected under the privacy or current data protection laws.
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One of the key guiding principles of Data Protection legislation is that personal information should only be shared on a ‘need-to-know’ basis. Individuals who don’t need to know specific details about a person in order to do their job or to complete a task, shouldn’t be given access to those details. 
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Wellbeing is more than an avoidance of becoming physically sick. It represents a broader construct that includes physical, mental and social health. Employers play a key role in how employees feel at work and this will have a direct correlation on how well they perform.
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Honeydew’s contact centre partner, Ventrica, goes from strength to strength. Ventrica help deliver Honeydew’s Day-1 Absence Reporting service, which runs on the Engage platform.

Record number of awards for customer service in the last three years

This year Ventrica has already won awards for ‘Best Outsourcing Partnership’ and ‘Best Advisor’ in the London & South East Contact Centre Awards and are up for a record five awards in the European Contact Centre and Customer Service Awards that are announced at the end of November.
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Did you know that EU law prevents employers from carrying over the first four weeks of employees’ statutory annual leave? The only exception is when an employee is unable to take the leave because of sickness absence. If the leave is not taken, it is lost.

In the UK, employees are guaranteed 5.6 weeks of annual leave. Employers cannot give employees payment in lieu of their statutory minimum annual leave entitlement.

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A new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will soon replace the old Data Protection Act (1998). The GDPR will apply in the UK from 25 May 2018. The government has confirmed that the UK’s decision to leave the EU will not affect the commencement of the GDPR.
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For the first time since 2009, XpertHR annual absence survey 2017 shows an average absence level above 3%. Among the 588 survey respondents that provided data on absence rates for 2016, the national average stood at 3.2% of working time, equivalent to 7.4 days per employee. To help compare with the preferred metric used in CIPD annual absence survey, this year’s median figure in XpertHR data was 6.6 absence days per employee. In 2016 CIPD reported a median level of 6.3 days per employee. 
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