All business owners should consider implementing an occupational health policy, especially when recruiting, expanding, or looking ahead.

Improve health and safety standards.

Having a well-structured and clear approach to occupational health, will undoubtedly improve health and safety standards within your workplace over time.

This is due to providing health and safety training and managing how incidents are reported and resolved. Regular training enables your team to be more aware of working safely, as well as the ability to identify hazards sooner, preventing incidents overall.

Achieve better retention rates

If you fail to cater for employee health concerns, you risk losing staff. Recruitment can be a lengthy and costly process therefore, it is important to offer the right help and support within your business to encourage staff retention.

Part of your efforts to retain, could be to offer occupational health support and quality health and safety training opportunities. Staff who feel supported, empowered, and knowledgeable, are more likely to stay with your business for longer.

Reduce long-term sick leave

As of July 2022, a record 2.5 million people were experiencing long-term sickness in the UK. Having several team members on long-term sick leave often results in other employees picking up their workload.

Increasing workloads without support can lead to extra stress, burnout, and increased sick leave across the business. If this turns out to be the case, and your business doesn’t have an effective process in place to support them, this can have a detrimental impact both inside and outside of work.

With occupational health support, those on sick leave are better supported, have quick and easy access to a range of specialist services and certain cases that may have led to long term sick leave could be avoided altogether due to pro-active support.

If your employees need health assessments or diagnostic support, you can refer them to your occupational health team and reduce their wait. This can help take away the worry and implement faster treatment to help them recover and return to work.

Occupational health experts can assist with absence management and making workplace or role adjustments to make it easier for an employee to return to the workplace.

Deal with fewer incidents.

If you’re not actively tracking and monitoring incidents within your workplace, you can’t identify trends and create solutions.

Ongoing surveillance checks provided by an occupational health provider ensure that your employees are safe to work in their current or future roles. Among other benefits, it means you can prevent health problems and stop incidents from occurring in the first place.

Enhance your company’s reputation

If your business has a productive and well-supported team, it’ll have a positive impact on your overall reputation. A better reputation often means increased business opportunities coming your way, and when it’s time to hire, a better standard of job applications.