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The overall absence rate in manufacturing dropped in 2017 to 2.2%, down slightly from 2.3% in the previous year.

This emerges from the latest Sickness Absence Benchmark survey from the Engineering Employers Federation (EEF), its annual survey of days missed by employees due to sickness in the manufacturing industry.

The average number of days a year lost to sickness absence per employee also declined slightly to 5, down from 5.3 in 2016. At an average of 6.1 days (absence rate: 2.7%), manual employees lost more than double the number of days to sickness absence than those in non-manual roles, who missed an average of just 3 days a year (absence rate: 1.3%).

The survey shows that there is slight variance in days missed across sectors. The rubber, plastics & chemicals sector had the highest average number of days absent at 5.5 and the metals sector the lowest at 4.7 per employee in 2017.

There were differences in the number sick days taken between larger and smaller companies too. Smaller companies, with a workforce of up to 50, saw employees each miss on average 3.7 days a year, whereas companies with over 500 employees saw staff miss 7.3 days.