Yesterday, we released our Labour Day Reality Check (see the news release here - or the op/ed here) asking why government employees take an average of 12 sick days a year in B.C., while private sector workers take 7.4. CTF supporter Larry Gray wrote an email on how to tackle the problem - and graciously agreed to allow us to publish it here as a guest blog:

I took over a very large private sector operating division in 1998 that was doing very poorly. We turned it around and the following was just one step.

One thing that was quickly noticeable was an overall attendance problem and I requested that the HR Dept start compiling data on sick days by employee.

We found in the first two years  of data that year over year the top ten offenders in terms of total days off  (exempting major illnessses, eg heart attack, etc.) were the same employees in both years! These were one day at a time sick days and mostly Monday and Friday offenders.

We quickly placed additional supervision around these employees and basically weeded them out over time by managing their overall performance ie productivity etc.

It's no coincidence that the worst sick day offenders are usually your worst performing employees. These characteristics go hand in hand. You hold them accountable in every area of employment and soon things start to improve or they leave one way or the other.

Even though an average of 18 annual sick days is outrageous I bet if the federal government ranked all employees by department as we did with ours, then it will be determined that the top 20% contribute up to 80% of the total sick days.

Focus on those culprits for the biggest bang in improvement.

And while they're at it; downsize the Federal Govt for starters.  The welfare state is just too big. It's a feeding frenzy and not much else anymore.