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What happened to health and safety?

HR loves to wrestle with big concepts, but there are three little words you probably won’t have heard at the CIPD’s annual conference and exhibition in Manchester: health and safety. Derided by comedians, unloved by professionals and widely misunderstood, health and safety (H&S) is yesterday’s big idea: a serious (sometimes fatal) business, but one that still conjures up images of the Chuckle Brothers and misplaced banana skins.

The smart money today is on well-being – and, according to Philip Gennoy, HR director of insurance giant Allianz, that’s because taking a more holistic view of employee health, with a particular focus on preventing debilitating illnesses, makes sound commercial sense.

“It’s more engaging to talk to someone about their health than to do a desktop assessment,” Gennoy told a seminar at the conference. “And if you’re serious about productivity, marginal improvements in well-being can make a massive difference to your financial results.

“A lot of current [HR] practitioners have H and S as a bedrock… but the reasons people are off work are very rarely about accidents that happened at work. It has far more to do with other things in their lives. A focus on health and safety it misses the reasons people are absent, how fit and productive they are and whether they are stressed,” he said.

Allianz – with 4,000 employees in the UK – uses levels of long-term sickness, and time taken to rehabilitate people back into work, as key business metrics. But it also empowers local business units to do the softer stuff, including massage and reflexology, that gives its staff a lift and might help stave off illness. It looks for HR employees who “get” the well-being agenda, as well as upskilling its existing staff.

The cost of absence per employee is down to £600 this year, from £673 in 2011, according to the CIPD Absence Management Report 2012. But in certain industries, and pockets of the public sector, it wouldn’t be hyperbolic to describe long-term sickness as an epidemic. As an insurer, Allianz has a vested interest in keeping us all fit and healthy; as an employer, it’s clearly come to the same conclusion.