Health by design & short-term absences

How our approach to short-term absences supports our health by design strategy

Health by design is a proactive care model — supported by our approach to short-term absences. By helping organizations better understand presenteeism and absenteeism, we can help them take proactive approaches and provide the right tools and support to keep their employees healthier and at work. With access to leading edge tools and health management partners, organizations can keep their employees healthy and better manage performance in the workplace.

Our approach to short-term absences supports our proactive health by design model throughout the total health journey. Here are three key advantages:

1. Prevention: Keep Canadians healthy and at work

Canadian employers want better health outcomes for their employees with improved disability management near the top of their list.¹ In order to help organizations prevent more absences and keep their employees at their best, it’s our recommendation to take a preventative approach.

By integrating with our health and wellness services, we can help organizations give their employees the help they need to stay healthy. A comprehensive health plan does more than just prevent absences — it also may help prevent employees from being present but not at their best — otherwise known as presenteeism. Because when employees are healthy, they are able to be more productive and may take less absences from work helping organizations grow stronger.

2. Intervention: Prevent absences by understanding them

80% of Canadian employers want to better understand absenteeism in their organization.¹ Once organizations understand absenteeism, they can take a more interventive approach.

To help prevent absences from happening, we harness analytic reporting, so organizations are enabled to connect the dots between insights and absences. These meaningful insights provide a better understanding as to what's happening with absences in Canadian organizations. This is key to intervention and ultimately preventing more absences in the future and keeping more employees healthy at work. Because when organizations can better manage their most important asset, it’s a win-win for all.

3. Recovery: Provide the right support

Without a comprehensive short-term absence plan in place, organizations can see almost twice the cost in sick leave.³ But there’s more to a comprehensive plan than just providing income replacement and case management when an employee is sick.

Instead, organizations need to provide the right tools and support at every step of the journey to help more employees stay healthy, productive and at work. Our end-to-end case management approach focuses on positive outcomes to help organizations resolve absences safely and earlier —  so when an employee does get sick, they can make the transition back to work safer and faster with the right support.²  

With our approach to short term absences, we can provide the tools, support and services necessary to help organizations better manage their best asset. And being engaged throughout an employee’s health journey is how we get there. Whether it’s taking preventative measures to keep employees healthy at work, interventive measures to prevent absences, or recovery measures to support employees and get them back to work safer and faster.

We look forward to helping more organizations take a proactive approach to short term absences to help keep their employees healthy, and see their organizations grow stronger as a result. Learn more about our Short Term Absence Solution.

¹The Sanofi Canada Healthcare Survey, 2019
²Absence and Disability Management: Trends in Organizational Health Management, The Conference Board of Canada, 2018
³Benefits Benchmarking 2019: Innovation and Flexibility Lead the Way, M.Haberl and N.Stewart, The Conference Board of Canada, 2019