Hi Emma

Just purely rough / anecdotal from past experience but would think most employers (80% or more?) do (quite rightly IMHO) pay at least some significant contractual sick pay on top of the pittance that is SSP. And that most private sector employers limit the entitlement for recent / new employees and increase it for long service ones.

Would regard maximum entitlements of eg 3 months full pay followed by 3 months half pay as generous and far more common in the public sector. Blue chip . / big private sector employers rather similar but smaller employers less and often a lot less (maybe around half that typical for them) or totally discretionary.

Hi,

My company is a small marketing agency. We pay an employees full salary for sickness for up to a maximum of 15 days in aggregate in any period of 52 weeks. This is inclusive of SSP. Any further payments additional to SSP are discretionary.

I hope this helps for your comparison.

Hi Emma

The company I currently work for are exploring changes to the current sick pay scheme and I obtained a survey report from Xpert HR using the free trial and we have used this as a starting point for discussion about changes which we found very useful. We are still working on a draft proposal, but I would recommend this as an excellent benchmarking tool. We also have started to collate absence data across the last 2 years to look at trends and where the cost of absence are high and the different causes of absence. Other aspects to consider are the loss of productivity and the way in which the absence management systems are working and how they can be improved. Alongside this it is also important to consider any improvements that can be made to promoting better health at work initiatives, improving working conditions and staff morale too. Hope this gives you some feedback for thought .

Emma - have you completed your research? Can it be accessed andif so where?