Pam Parkes

When I joined Croydon in 2004, the council had a big problem with sickness absence. The average (excluding school staff) was almost 13 days per employee each year, one of the worst figures in London, and was costing us around £250,000 a month in lost productivity.

Senior management had no confidence that HR or line managers could tackle the problem. In many ways they were right – our policies were thicker than War and Peace and it seemed a taboo subject for managers to tackle head-on.