Report: Evaluating Short Term Absence Management at Lloyds Pharmacy

This report evaluates short-term absence management at Lloyds Pharmacy, a healthcare service provider. It examines the impact of employee absenteeism on service delivery and compares Lloyds' performance to GlaxoSmithKline. The report includes a literature review exploring factors influencing absenteeism, such as employee engagement, job satisfaction, and work-life balance. The findings reveal a higher absenteeism rate at Lloyds compared to its competitor. The report utilizes both qualitative and quantitative research methods, including interviews and data analysis. Recommendations focus on improving employee health, increasing engagement, and strengthening supply chain management to mitigate the negative effects of short-term absences. The conclusion emphasizes the importance of proactive absence management strategies to maintain service quality and operational efficiency.

Running head: SHORT TERM ABSENCE MANAGEMENT
Short Term Absence Management
Name of the Student:
Name if the University:
Author Note:

1
SHORT TERM ABSENCE MANAGEMENT
Executive summary
The objective of the paper is to evaluate the presence of short-term absenteeism in Lloyds
Pharmacy. It has been found that this sickness is there in the pharmacy of Lord as most of the
people are absent due to sickness for 10 days in a month. This has a bad effect on the company.

2
SHORT TERM ABSENCE MANAGEMENT
Table of Contents
1.0 Introduction................................................................................................................................3
2.0 Main Body/Discussion...............................................................................................................4
2.1 Literature Review..................................................................................................................4
2.2 FINDINGS.............................................................................................................................7
3.0 Conclusion and Recommendation.............................................................................................9
3.1 Conclusion.............................................................................................................................9
3.2 Recommendation to Lloyd Healthcare Organization..........................................................10
Reference Lists..............................................................................................................................11
Bibliography..................................................................................................................................12
Appendix........................................................................................................................................14

3
SHORT TERM ABSENCE MANAGEMENT
1.0 Introduction
Lloyds Pharmacy Clinical Homecare has been supporting patients of the United Kingdom
since its inception in the year 1975.The company has wide range of experiences in providing
healthcare services to its customers all over the United Kingdom. The company provides
healthcare services at home to patients in several domains which include delivery of medication
at home to providing nursing facilities at the comfort of home for patients with critical
conditions. The company has a customer base of more than sixty thousand patients. The
company was known as Bupa Home healthcare in 2016 but the company was acquired by
Celesio UK group of companies. Since the beginning of 2017, business units of Celesio’s
Evolution Home Care Services and Lloyds Pharmacy Clinical Homecare services are
functioning as a single business unit. The employee base of Lloyds Pharmacy includes nurses,
drivers, office support teams and pharmacists. The major stakeholders of Lloyds Pharmacy
Clinical are its customers, its employees and its investors. The stakeholders of the company also
include its partners, that is, pharmaceutical companies which support Lloyds Pharmacy to run its
homecare business unit by providing a good supply chain and logistics management facility for
smooth delivery of medicines and healthcare products at patient’s home. Short term absence
management of employees of Lloyd Pharmacy is the area of human resource management that
will be critically reviewed in this report. When employees take short term leaves due to poor
health or emergency situation, it is difficult for a company like Lloyds Pharmacy to deliver its
business requirements, that is, it gets challenging for the company to efficiently meet its service
delivery promise to its customers. Hence, short-term absence management of the company will
be discussed in the report. This topic of short term absenteeism mainly due to sickness is chosen
for analysis because Lloyds is a healthcare service provider and a pure service organization.

4
SHORT TERM ABSENCE MANAGEMENT
Timely and efficient service delivery is of prime importance in a service organization.
Employees of Lloyd healthcare service provider should be in good health in order to serve its
customers, absenteeism among drivers and employees of logistics should be reduced to achieve
efficient delivery of medicines to customers and absenteeism among nurses can hamper critical
patients. The chosen topic will address this problem (Jakobsen and Jensen 2015).
2.0 Main Body/Discussion
2.1 Literature Review
According to Bhui et al. (2012), there is a close relationship of meaningfulness, well
well-being and engagement of employees and management of short-term absenteeism. The
author explains that engaging the employees at workplace and creating meaningfulness of work
can motivate employees at workplace and help in the effective management of short-term
absenteeism.
For a healthcare service provider, engaging its employees like nurses at workplace by
providing them proper training like learning under the supervision of an experienced mentor and
learning new specialty of healthcare management, providing them with flexible work schedule
can reduce short-term absenteeism at workplace.
Providing autonomy to the employees like practicing under own license and allocating
budgets for training of the employees by introducing them to new practices and procedures of
medicine can provide them meaningfulness at work-place and thus can facilitate management of
short term absences.

5
SHORT TERM ABSENCE MANAGEMENT
For a healthcare service provider, short-term absences of employees due to ill health can
be managed by providing discounted healthcare services to employees like proper timely access
to doctors, hospitals and medicines.
Absence management is the method to organize a program to control the short-term
absences of employees in an organization. Short-term absences can be a result of multiple factors
like illness, emergency situation like injury. Short-term absences in an organization are often
unplanned and uninformed (Hopkins, Dawson and Veliziotis 2016). For a healthcare service
provider, the clients of the organization are its major stakeholder. The service organizations
provide critical services like healthcare to patients and in this type of organization service quality
and timely delivery of services play a vital role. Failure of timely delivery of services in a
healthcare organization can lead to critical situation of patients. For a pure service organization
like a healthcare service provider the people or employees of the organization like doctors and
nurses are in direct contact with its clients, that means, patients and so short-term absences in this
type of organization can directly hamper a patient’s health. For an organization which provides
home delivery of medicines, it is of paramount importance to have an efficient supply chain and
logistics management system. Absence of employees of such organization like drivers can
disrupt the operational efficiency of its logistics and supply chain management which will lead to
failure of service promise to its customers. Therefore it is of prime importance to manage short-
term absences in organizations like healthcare service providers.
According to Mowday, Porter and Steers (2013), there is a close connection between
intrinsic factors of employees like job satisfaction and short-term absenteeism. In the book,
Employee-organizational linkages- The Psychology of commitment, absenteeism and turnover,
the author states that employees should be psychologically connected to the organization.

6
SHORT TERM ABSENCE MANAGEMENT
Employees of an organization should have the feeling of being a committed member of the
organization. This can be achieved by creating a supportive work culture where communication
is open and employees are motivated to come to work owing to higher level of job satisfaction.
The inner values of the employees should be in alignment with organizational vision, mission
and motto so that employees are able to connect with the organization at an internal level which
will drive their inner motivation to be more regular at workplace thus reducing absenteeism. In
this book the author states that the external environmental factors like demographic factors, for
instance more women at the workforce, technological factors, like inability of the employees to
cope-up with the change in technology and socio-economic factors like poor work-life balance
and economical factors like low wage of employees affect organizational linkage of employees
with the organization and can affect short-term absenteeism. The author states that employees
should be able to connect with the organization and should be driven by intrinsic factor like Need
for Achievement as mentioned in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to be more regular at workplace.
The author also argues that apart from the several disadvantages of short-term absenteeism like
disruption at work, inability to meet the service promise to its customers, there are also certain
advantages of turnover and short-term absenteeism in an organization. Absenteeism can enable
other employees of an organization to learn a new skill to accomplish the business targets or it
can enable other employees of the organization to fill the gap of the absent employee by taking
up a more challenging role.
In the article, the author states that it is of prime importance to manage the health of
employees at workplace to reduce short-term absenteeism. This can be achieved by providing
healthy foods to employees at workplace and creating health awareness programs like awareness
of Diabetic arthritis, thyroid and other chronic diseases. In order to manage short-term

7
SHORT TERM ABSENCE MANAGEMENT
absenteeism, organizations should ensure that employees have a good mental health .This can be
achieved by providing employees with a better work-life balance, by creating a flexible work
environment which ensures a flatter structure in the organization and effective communication
should be encouraged among co-workers . There should be different healthcare activities that can
be conducted by an organization like doctor check-up, yoga and meditation services, healthcare
awareness programs and events to manage short-term absenteeism (Howard, 2017).
2.2 FINDINGS
The research of Lloyds Pharmacy short-term absenteeism data shows more that 10 sick
days within 26 days. These data has been collected by both primary and secondary research
methods using quantitative research technique (Ritchie et. al. 2013). On the other hand one of the
competitors of Lloyds Pharmacy such as GlaxoSmithKline has less number of absenteeism. The
absenteeism rate of GlaxoSmithKline is 5 sick days in every 26 days. This can be seen in
Appendix 1 of the paper. The absenteeism rate of Lloyds is double that of its competitor. The
less number of absenteeism in GlaxoSmithKline has made it the sixth largest company in the
world supplying Pharmaceutical products.
Company Name Number of
Absenteeism
Lloyds
Pharmaceutical
10
GlaxoSmithKline 5
Table 1: Absenteeism rate
Source: (Author’s creation)
The stages of research process are definition of the research problem, that is,
management of short-term absenteeism at workplace, reviewing the literature where the literature

8
SHORT TERM ABSENCE MANAGEMENT
is reviewed from three sources, formulation of hypothesis, preparing the research design, data
collection and interpretation of data.
The sources of research methods that are used by the authors in the literature review and
in findings of Llyods Pharmacy absenteeism data and are primary sources and secondary
sources. The different research methods that are used by the authors in the literature review and
collection of data of absenteeism of Lloyds Pharmacy are both qualitative methods and
quantitative methods. Qualitative method of data collection includes observation, textual and
visual analysis which the author can do from books and videos, The most common method of
research that can be used in research related to healthcare industry are 1) Interviews and Focus
Group Interviews. Questionnaires are also means of data collections. Questions to the target
audience can be both open ended or close ended. Questionnaires format should be interesting so
that the clients do not lose interest to answer the questions. Focused group interviews are
conducted in five to six groups. It is a method of qualitative research where the main advantage
is that the environment of this focused group interviews is interactive and there is a chance for
discussion among its participants. The focused group interviews enables to unfold the views,
opinions, beliefs of the participant audiences about a particular research topic (Drummond et. al.
2015).
The collection of data of the Lloyds Pharmacy Clinical Homecare’s employee database
and their sick leaves are done using quantitative data collection methods. Quantitative data
collection procedures includes telephonic interviews, computer aided data collection methods,
face to face interviews. Quantitative data collection often involves statistical and non-statistical
sampling techniques. Quantitative data are presented in a numerical format like the data of
absenteeism in Lloyds Pharmacy are presented in an excel sheet (Smith 2015).

9
SHORT TERM ABSENCE MANAGEMENT
The collection of data about short-term absenteeism is of prime importance in Lloyds
Pharmacy Clinical Homecare company as it will enable the company to take important business
decisions in order to fight competition from GlaxoSmithKline .This data collection will enable
the company to analyze the root causes of ten sick days within twenty six days and thus the
company will be able to effectively manage its short-term absenteeism mainly due to sickness
(Bryman and Bell 2015).
Benchmarking of Lloyds Organization against the Literature Review
The best practices of Lloyd organization should be effective management of health of its
employees so that the organization is effective on providing healthcare services to its patients or
customers. The organization should increase employee engagement, job satisfaction of its
employees, provide them work-life balance, flexible work schedule and health awareness
program should be conducted within the organization for effective management of short term
absenteeism mainly due to sickness of its employees. Lloyd organization should have a strong
supply chain and logistics management system so that the gap due to absenteeism is filled and
customer’s health is never ignored due to absent employees (Fang, Huang and Karpoff 2016).
3.0 Conclusion and Recommendation
3.1 Conclusion
It can be concluded from the three literature review that has been discussed that
management of short-term absenteeism is of prior importance to an organization so that
workflow is not disrupted. An organization is responsible to its stakeholders like the investors,
suppliers, customers and employees. Therefore management of short term absenteeism in an
organization can be achieved by introducing an open and supportive work culture where there is

10
SHORT TERM ABSENCE MANAGEMENT
open communication among co-workers, introducing concept of employee engagement by
organizing training and personal development of employees, introducing flexible work schedule
and work life balance.
It can be concluded from literature review that managing health of employees is of prior
importance in an organization so that sick leaves and unplanned leaves do not harm the business
process. In order to do so the mental and physical health of employees should be protected by
creating a supportive work environment where employees have strong feeling of membership
with the organization and his intrinsic motivational factors like job satisfaction increase. Also
physical health of employees should be taken care of by introducing health awareness programs
like fitness programs, healthy diet awareness and regular doctor check ups
3.2 Recommendation to Lloyd Healthcare Organization
The objective of Lloyd Healthcare Organization should be to reduce its absenteeism rate by 40
percentages within the next quarter. In order to do so the organization can take following steps.
1) Increase employee engagement of its nurses by training them in modern procedures of
healthcare. The nurses should be mentored well and they should have access to modern
technology and they should be intrinsically motivated to serve the customers, that means,
patients of the organization.
2) Flexible schedule and job rotation facilities can be provided to nurses and employees of
supply chain like drivers.

11
SHORT TERM ABSENCE MANAGEMENT
3) There should be sufficient skilled manpower of the Lloyd organization to fill the gap of absent
employees so that workflow is not disrupted.
4) The organization should be able to manage both physical and mental health of its employees
by organizing doctor check-ups, health awareness programs, introduction to healthy and
nutritious diet. Since Lloyd is a healthcare service provider, it has tie-ups with huge panels of
doctors and pharmaceutical companies. It should be ensured that the employees of the
organization should get discounted services on pharmacy and doctors.
5) Health of women employees of Lloyd organization should be given special attention as
women suffer from various health problems like thyroid, arthritis and they have to take maternal
leave for childcare. Women nurses should be introduced to healthy diets and health awareness
programs and special schemes like paid maternity leave will reduce the rate of unplanned
absenteeism in the company.

12
SHORT TERM ABSENCE MANAGEMENT
Reference Lists
Bhui, K.S., Dinos, S., Stansfeld, S.A. and White, P.D., 2012. A synthesis of the evidence for
managing stress at work: a review of the reviews reporting on anxiety, depression, and
absenteeism. Journal of environmental and public health, 2012.
Bryman, A. and Bell, E., 2015. Business research methods. Oxford University Press, USA.
Drummond, M.F., Sculpher, M.J., Claxton, K., Stoddart, G.L. and Torrance, G.W.,
2015. Methods for the economic evaluation of health care programmes. Oxford university press.
Fang, V.W., Huang, A.H. and Karpoff, J.M., 2016. Short selling and earnings management: A
controlled experiment. The Journal of Finance, 71(3), pp.1251-1294.
Hopkins, B., Dawson, C. and Veliziotis, M., 2016. Absence management of migrant agency
workers in the food manufacturing sector. The International Journal of Human Resource
Management, 27(10), pp.1082-1100.
Howard, D., 2017. Don't let short-term thinking create long-term absence. Occupational Health
& Wellbeing, 69(1), p.13.
Jakobsen, M. and Jensen, R., 2015. Common method bias in public management
studies. International Public Management Journal, 18(1), pp.3-30.
Mowday, R.T., Porter, L.W. and Steers, R.M., 2013. Employee—organization linkages: The
psychology of commitment, absenteeism, and turnover. Academic press.
Ritchie, J., Lewis, J., Nicholls, C.M. and Ormston, R. eds., 2013. Qualitative research practice:
A guide for social science students and researchers. Sage.

13
SHORT TERM ABSENCE MANAGEMENT
Smith, J.A. ed., 2015. Qualitative psychology: A practical guide to research methods. Sage.

14
SHORT TERM ABSENCE MANAGEMENT
Bibliography
Ates, A., Garengo, P., Cocca, P. and Bititci, U., 2013. The development of SME managerial
practice for effective performance management. Journal of Small Business and Enterprise
Development, 20(1), pp.28-54.
Boulware, L.E., Cooper, L.A., Ratner, L.E., LaVeist, T.A. and Powe, N.R., 2016. Race and trust
in the health care system. Public health reports.
Bryman, A., 2015. Social research methods. Oxford university press.
Calder, P., Shaw, S., Roberts, A., Tennant, S., Sedki, I., Hanspal, R. and Eastwood, D., 2017.
CONGENITAL ABSENCE OF THE FIBULA: OUTCOME OF AMPUTATION OR
EXTENSION PROSTHESIS IN THE MANAGEMENT OF SEVERE LOWER LIMB
DEFORMITY. Bone Joint J, 99(SUPP 11), pp.7-7.
Cohen, L., Manion, L. and Morrison, K., 2013. Research methods in education. Routledge.
Rubin, A. and Babbie, E.R., 2016. Empowerment series: Research methods for social work.
Cengage Learning.
Starkey, K., 2015. The strange absence of management during the current financial
crisis. Academy of Management Review, 40(4), pp.652-663.
Stocker, R. and Macdonald, P., 2013. The benefit of coenzyme Q10 supplements in the
management of chronic heart failure: a long tale of promise in the continued absence of clear
evidence. The American journal of clinical nutrition, 97(2), pp.233-234.
Wright, L., 2014. Demedicalising absence management. London: Personnel Today.

15
SHORT TERM ABSENCE MANAGEMENT
Appendix
Appendix 1
Lloyds
Pharmaceutical GlaxoSmithKline
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Number of Absenteeism
Number of Absenteeism
Figure 1: Rate of absenteeism
Source: (Author’s creation)