Legal and General is considering shortening its early notification period to just 10 days for group income protection customers.
The insurer's workplace intervention programme has been successful in achieving early intervention and high return to work rates, and it aims to improve these further.
L&G underwriting and benefits director Vanessa Sallows told WSB: "We ask for four weeks' notice at present and have the cash back incentive, but ideally I'd like to see it even less, so I'm looking at bringing it in to 10 days or even earlier than that.
"At the moment we get almost 70% of individuals back to work before the deferred period," she added.
Since 2006 the provider has paid back more than £1.5m to companies as a reward for notifying absences early.
The insurer also intends to release a set of online tools for employers and line managers to use to identify employees that may be at risk of mental health absence.
"We want to develop a tool to help employers and line managers to identify things such as stress and depression and put in place action plans to deal with it," Sallows continued.
"The main issue with mental health problems is identifying the core reason for the individual suffering from those issues and potentially being absent. So it's really looking at what that core issue is and putting in place the coping mechanisms.
"Line managers don't get sufficient training or help to deal with those issues, they are trained on return to work interviews, or for performance management and objective setting - but there's usually no support for them to have honest conversations about an individual's ill health.
"So we're putting together some tools to help line managers actually identify that and help with that," she added.
L&G expects to release the online tools within the next couple of months.
