Employee retention is a key measure of your workplace policies and culture. If you find that it’s difficult to keep employees, it’s time to do an honest audit.
Sometimes, employees would love to stay at their jobs. But life strikes and things like accidents, illnesses, rehab, injuries, or family issues make it impossible.
They know their employer won’t work with them, and they have to quit. How can you stop this from happening?
Of course, it starts with a transparent, understanding culture. But implementing a return to work program can also help. That’s why we’ve assembled a guide to the benefits of a solid return to work program.
Better Dynamics
Employer-employee relationships make or break the workplace. Employees need to know that they are cared for. It’s a symbiotic relationship.
When you care about your employees and their health, family lives, and personal needs, they will return this care with high-quality work, honesty, and commitment to their roles.
To do this, employees need to understand that you’re with them for the long haul. If you want employees that stay for five, ten, or fifteen-plus years, you need to know they’ll change drastically over that time.
A decade can change everything. Someone could get married, have children, get a cancer diagnosis, get in a car accident, or need rehab. You can pack an entire lifetime’s worth of events into ten years.
When you make a job offer with the intention of keeping an employee long-term, you’re signing up for their life, too. If employees know that you have their back, this is smart management that results in higher retention, morale, and overall productivity.
Maintain Team Dynamics
If you have a plan in place for injured employees to return to the workplace, they’ll know that there is still a place for them. When someone, particularly a key team player leaves for a short time, the team might be thrown into disarray.
Who will cover them? How long will they be gone? What about their projects and other deadlines?
This is a key part of business ownership. Keeping the dynamics of your team steady is crucial for morale. It also means that if you have a program in place, employees can get back to work faster.
This will prevent a disruption in productivity and team dynamics. That way, you don’t spend weeks or months without a crucial player.
Reduce Turnover
Hiring temp workers to replace missing permanent employees is often the name of the game. After all, what else can you do when one of your main players needs a little time on the bench?
If you can leverage your return to work program, permanent employees can get back in the game sooner. This means that as a small business owner, you won’t carry the cost of onboarding new employees for such a short amount of time.
Maintain Your Morality
Employers sometimes suffer a bad rap when it comes to workplace rehabilitation. They can often come off as uncaring or cold. After all, if there’s a warm body filling the position, what do they care?
This attitude is detrimental and unethical. Avoid this take on your rehabilitation program by working with employees and listening to them.
If an employee says they need two weeks off work to rehabilitate, listen to them! The return to work program is meant to provide employee protections, not make them vulnerable by forcing them to return to work before they’re even ready.
Good business ownership relies on give-and-take. Listen to your employees, and know that you’re providing a sense of professional and financial security by having a plan to onboard them back into the full-time workplace.
Valuable Contributions
People come to work with all sorts of assumptions. Their past experiences have skewed their views of employers, managers, their own place in the workforce, and capitalism in general.
When people show up with negative assumptions, they can be difficult to combat. However, no one wants jaded, cynical employees!
Earn their trust by showing how much you value their contributions to the workplace. You want them back as soon as they’re ready to do so, and your return to work program proves it.
It’s a great way to show each employee how much you care about their individual wellbeing.
Provide Financial Security
Employees typically make less on disability pay or other safeguards that were meant to reduce stress while you can’t work full-time. In fact, due to bureaucratic safeguards, think of it like unemployment.
Hopefully, you’ll get it as soon as possible. But waiting for it to show up can be quite stressful! In fact, some people have reported their unemployment money not showing up till they were already working at a new job for a month!
This can cause lots of financial stress, which isn’t the best environment for someone to rehabilitate. If you offer them the opportunity to come back to work and make their old wage, it can be a huge deal.
Of course, you’ll want to make any accommodations necessary. Realize they may not be their old self, and driving them into the ground will do no one any good.
Work Within Their Means
A rehabilitation program is flexible. Don’t treat it as a way to milk the most productivity out of your workers. Instead, treat it as an opportunity to deal with workers in the most humane way possible.
Be ready to provide physical accommodations, such as seated positions for roles that are typically performed standing, or wheelchair ramps. Alternative or shortened hours are also quite helpful. A good workplace rehabilitation provider can help you with this.
You can include these accommodations in your official return to work program. But you can’t plan for everything, so know that you may have to adjust your approach depending on the employee’s specific situation.
Benefits of a Return to Work Program
A return to work program is a good opportunity to show employees that you care, build morale, and boost productivity. It protects you legally, morally, and professionally. With the right partners, you can start building your program today.
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