Public and Commercial Services Union

How to dramatically reduce sick rates in DVLA – and not a stick or carrot in sight

Work makes you sick

Workers instinctively know this to be true.

Health studies support the view that much sickness is in fact generated by work organisation and work related factors. Therefore if work is changed then sick rates will fall – without the use of fines or warnings.

Researchers have discovered a number of factors in the workplace that significantly impact on health.

These are:

• Degree of control   Low control over the work process leads to greater ill health and sick absence. The two elements of work that go into the measurement of control are degree of authority over decisions and use of skills, including opportunity for developing skills.
   
• Degree of social support  Good levels of work social support reduces the risk of spells of sickness absence. Lack of support from supervisors and unclear or inconsistent information was associated with a twofold increased risk of poor general mental health. Similarly, a lack of support from colleagues was also associated with worse mental health.
   
• Income and wealth  Not surprisingly there is a link between low income and health.
   
• Job insecurity  This increases ill-health, particularly mental illness and use of health services.
   
• Change  Poorly managed organisational change harms health.

Therefore our message to DVLA management, or for that matter anybody else, is concentrate on the above factors.

Now we know that it will be difficult (for example increasing the amount of control operators have in the call centre) but it can be done; it has been done elsewhere.

Allowing workers greater control over the work process etc should lead to a permanent decrease in sick leave.

Surely that is what all of us want. Drop the stick and carrot – lets concentrate on changing work.

If you have any comments on this page or more generally then please e-mail us at dftgroup@yahoo.co.uk.

If you want to learn more then please follow any of the links in the upper right-hand panel. 

Now as with all complex matters there is a temptation to simplify things so to make them more readily understandable.

We have partly resisted that temptation and decided to include a lot of detail, so please be warned. Also a lot of the research shows the same thing; that is in civil service organisations such as DVLA there is a health ladder (the technical term is social gradient).

If you are on the bottom rungs of the grading structure, at AA, AO, EO level then your health will be generally worse than those further up the structure i.e. you will be on the bottom rungs of well being and health as well – a double whammy.

The great majority of staff cannot move far up the grading structure but there are measures that can be put in place in work to increase health and well being.