Employee benefits for engineering and manufacturing

Five things worth having a position on. None of them is specific to this sector, but the answers usually are.

• Work design and workload. Shift patterns, overtime and cover for absence are the workload questions here, and they are the ones a risk assessment is meant to reach. Physical and psychosocial risk sit in the same workplace and are usually assessed by different people, on different cycles. Covered in the psychosocial risk checker.
• Benefit provision and communication. A benefit communicated only by email reaches the office. If part of the workforce has no work email, take-up figures will describe the office and the employer will read that as low interest. Covered in the employee benefits guide.
• Absence and return to work. Manual work makes return to work a question about what someone can currently do, not only about whether they are back. Phased return and adjusted duties need somewhere to be recorded. Covered in return to work plans.
• Access to the support that already exists. Support that requires an app, a login and a data connection is not equally available on a shop floor. Worth knowing which routes work without any of those. Covered in the employee assistance programme guide.
• Evidence and governance. From five employees the significant findings of your risk assessment have to be recorded, and health in that duty includes mental health. Covered in the employer duty of care guide.

We are not going to show you an industry absence rate here. The obvious move would be to take the national figure for the nearest official industry classification and present it as this sector's number, and the reason we have not is that the classification is usually wrong for the sector as people understand it, and the difference from the all-industry figure is often not statistically significant anyway. A headline figure that has to be qualified into nothing in the next sentence is worse than no figure.

The national picture is genuinely useful, and it is published properly on UK sickness absence rates, with the definitions, the low-sample flags, and the reasons it describes a population and not your organisation.

What we will say, from broking and workplace-health work rather than from a survey, is that the recurring problem in this sector is reach. Benefits are bought for everyone and communicated to the people with a desk. That is an observation, not a measurement, and it is worth checking against your own take-up figures before you act on it.

The guides these questions lead into, in the order most employers need them. The employee benefits guide covers what each arrangement is, what it does not automatically include, and what to ask before buying or renewing. The employer duty of care guide covers what is actually required of you, including the written record threshold at five employees. And the psychosocial risk checker walks the six HSE Management Standards, which is where work design gets looked at properly.

For the national data, and the reasons it is context rather than a benchmark, UK sickness absence rates has the 2025 ONS release broken down eleven ways.

Nothing on this page describes your workforce. It describes questions that tend to matter where work is done on a site and in an office at the same time.

National industry data cannot tell you whether your people are struggling, which of your shifts is under pressure, or whether the benefits you pay for are being used. Only asking your own workforce answers those, and the answers belong to your organisation rather than to a benchmark.