This press release was originally featured in The Telegraph.
GoodShape has proven to help companies reduce sickness absence, cut costs and improve both employee health and productivity with its AI end-to-end absence management and health intelligence platform.
Britain’s business leaders face sustained pressure.
“With constrained budgets and limited hiring flexibility, growth can no longer come from expanding headcount”
says Ed Radkiewicz, Executive Chairman at software company GoodShape.
“Productivity must also be recovered by bringing people back to work already on the payroll, making health and sickness absence critical executive levers for performance.”
The commercial impact of absence is substantial. In a 5,000-employee organisation, absence can equate to 250 paid staff not at work every day, creating persistent, costly and operational disruption and an invisible drain on productivity.
Despite its scale, absence is framed as an HR challenge and managed reactively. As a result, it is treated as an administrative burden instead of an executive priority and controllable performance driver.
Today, enterprise-level discipline is applied to operations and customers through ERP and CRM systems. What’s been missing is an equivalent system for workforce health and attendance, which gives leaders accurate data and confidence that investment in this area is diligent, structured and worthwhile. Demonstrated by cost and risk mitigation, improved productivity and delivered with a tangible ROI.
However, a new generation of workforce health platforms is applying the same rigour to this issue. By integrating accurate data capture, early access to personalised digital self-care and orchestrated employee health services (e.g. occupational health, EAP), guided manager action and real-time data analytics, the emphasis shifts from tracking to actively reducing absence and preventing reoccurrence, leading to better performance and the retention of talented and skilled employees.
GoodShape exemplifies this approach. Its end-to-end platform powered by AI and data connects the journey, from day one of an absence through to intervention, recovery and return to work. Additional value comes from predictive analytics, developed in conjunction with Deloitte leveraging GoodShape’s proprietary 1.5 billion workforce health datapoints, forecasting long-term issues and staff turnover risk 12 to 24 months ahead.
For over a decade, across the private and public sector, GoodShape has managed 30 million absence days, delivering an average absence reduction of over 20% in the first year. This equates to 1% recovered productivity without increasing payroll cost. In addition, where UK organisations in 2025 saw an increase in absence of 20% year on year, long-standing clients of GoodShape benefited in continued reductions.
“Executives have few cost-effective productivity levers left to pull at scale. Workforce health and attendance supported by an AI end-to-end technology platform is one within leadership’s control, aligning cost reduction, performance and employee wellbeing into a single, strategic outcome.”