The joint Absence Management survey, released today by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and corporate healthcare provider Simply Health has discovered that stress is now the top cause of long-term sickness leave for both manual and non-manual employees.
This is blamed on increasing job insecurity and mounting workload. The report has also highlighted a significant link between job security and mental health problems as those employers planning to make redundancies in the next six months significantly more likely to report an increase in mental health problems among their staff (51%, compared with 32% among those that are not planning redundancies).
In addition a high level of organisational change was reported to be a major factor in the cause of stress. This is particularly prevalent in the public sector, where 50% of respondents reported an increase in stress-related absence.
