Employee benefits for pharma and life sciences

Five things worth having a position on.

• Work design and workload. Laboratory and manufacturing schedules are structured differently from commercial ones, and a single workload position rarely fits both. Covered in the psychosocial risk checker.
• Benefit provision and communication. One benefits communication across research, plant and office populations usually lands with one of them. Covered in the employee benefits guide.
• Absence and return to work. Where work is scheduled around equipment or protocols, absence cover is a planning question as much as a people one. Covered in return to work plans.
• Access to the support that already exists. Site-based staff and field staff reach support differently, and both need a route that works without a corporate laptop. Covered in the employee assistance programme guide.
• Evidence and governance. The record has to cover the whole workforce, including the populations that are easiest to overlook. Covered in the employer duty of care guide.

The previous version of this page used Human Health and Social Work Activities as its evidence. That classification does not describe pharmaceutical manufacturing, biotechnology or research, so it has been removed. Splitting this page by population would need distinct valid sources for each, which we do not have.

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.

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 here describes your workforce. It describes questions that tend to matter in this kind of organisation.

Published data cannot tell you how your own people are doing, or whether what you pay for is being used. Those are answered by asking, and the answers are yours rather than a benchmark's.