ON the ground floor of the Royal Mail’s huge Mount Pleasant sorting office in London, an army of postal workers is busy feeding letters into machines that can now decipher even the most spidery human handwriting.

Three floors up, a dozen colleagues are spending the day at the gym. Helped by occupational-health specialists, they are working out in a room full of equipment or doing step exercises, sit-ups and stretches. They stop just once to watch a video that challenges “fear and belief systems” around what they are capable of after injury.

The gym, thought to be the only rehabilitation facility in the UK to be housed on company premises, aims to get sick Royal Mail staff well enough to rejoin their coworkers on the sorting floor. The £350,000 facility is a key part of an antiabsenteeism programme that Royal Mail - struggling to survive in a changing marketplace - claims has cut absence from 7% to 5%, saved £227m and brought 3,600 staff back to work since 2004.

A study by the London School of Economics this month claimed that if other UK business sectors with poor absence records adopted Royal Mail’s combination of health/rehabilitation programmes and rigorous absence monitoring, they could save £1.45 billion a year.

The latest CBI/Axa survey found absences cost the UK economy £13.2 billion last year and said 12% of the 172m days lost were not genuine. These 21m “sickies” - most commonly taken on Fridays and Mondays and after bank holidays - cost the economy £1.6 billion. The survey found the gulf between absence rates in the private and public sectors at record levels, with a 5.8day average per person in the private sector compared with 9 days in the public.

Companies spend relatively little on employees’ health, but Dr Steve Boorman, Royal Mail’s chief medical officer, makes a strong case for wellbeing initiatives and, in particular, for the company’s rehabilitation centre, designed to deal with the longest and most chronic sickness absences that cost companies most money. Then again, he’s had to practise the sell – inside his own organisation.

“The rehabilitation centre is an expensive resource, and management needed convincing it would work,” he said. “But when we did the first evaluation six months after the centre opened, we discovered a return of £2.50 for every £1 invested and after 18 months, £4 for every £1 invested. Along with the hard benefits of reduced sickness absence and increased productivity, there was also the soft benefit of being seen as a caring employer.”

Most of those referred to the centre have been absent from work for months, or even years, and are being treated for muscu-loskeletal complaints (often back problems), which rank alongside stress as the most common reason for being off work. Despite dealing with the “hard core” end of work absence, the unit manages to get 80% of employees back to work.

Boorman believes it is precisely because the unit operates on Royal Mail premises that it is so successful. “When you are off work you lose contact with the business, colleagues and the work routine,” he said. “Coming here for your treatment stops that happening.”

He said there had been cynicism among the workers, too, with many believing the centre was just to save money for Royal Mail and that it was not about the good of employees, Boorman said. “But the employees have changed their view and so has the union,” he added.

Larry Bekoe, 47, working out in a corner of the gym, is one of its biggest fans. The rehab centre has helped him get back to near-normal working after an 18-month absence. He slipped a disc – although that took months to diagnose – after trying to lift an 11kg bag that turned out to weigh 29kg.

“This centre has been great for me,” said Bekoe. “Without it, I would have been like a zombie on the painkillers I was taking.”

Bad backs are often considered to be an excuse for malingering but there can be little doubt that many cases – including Bekoe’s – seen by the centre are genuine or that poor NHS advice and treatment sometimes can turn relatively minor injuries into serious ones.

Bekoe said the usual advice from doctors was to rest. According to Tom Ronan, occupational therapist with Rehabworks, which runs the Royal Mail centre, not exercising an injury is often the worst advice. Bekoe spent months on his back waiting for an MRI scan, and then months more waiting for an operation. By the time he was referred to the rehab centre by company doctors, he was desperate to work. Though he was on full pay for the first six months off and half pay for the following six months, he pointed out that he lost all the overtime pay that many Royal Mail staff rely on to make ends meet. He also said that in the final months he was not paid at all. With three children to support and a mortgage, he had become very “stressed and depressed”.

“People just don’t believe you when it is back pain,” he said. “But then I didn’t believe in back pain until it happened to me. I’m still on painkillers but I’ve reduced them and I feel more confident after attending the centre. The staff built up my exercises and I am training my mind that eventually the pain will go away.”

Royal Mail engineer Mark Crowe, 39, also lay at home for months waiting for an MRI scan for back pain, but that wait almost killed him. He was in so much pain that he couldn’t eat but didn’t realise how dangerous the painkillers were on an empty stomach. Crowe ended up being rushed into intensive care and had to have two operations on his stomach before he could have an operation on his back.

“I was referred to the centre after I came back to work,” said Crowe. “I’ve just finished three months in the centre and though I still have a lot of pain, I can manage it better. The hospital didn’t explain the pain or how to deal with it but this programme has helped me understand and that has taken some of the fear away.

“I have the confidence now to exercise through the pain. If I had known how to treat it at the start I don’t think I would have been off for so long.”

That’s precisely why Boorman argues that wellbeing initiatives such as the rehab centre are vital to the Royal Mail. And why he feels strongly that other companies should consider similar initiatives to improve both the health of employees and their own bottom line.

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