You’ve recorded the absences – what now?
The next stage is to analyse the data at its most basic level: calculating the days lost to absence. From there, you will be able to use this data and identify absence patterns and trends.
You need to ask yourself a few questions
• What is the balance of short and long-term absence?
• Is absence higher in a specific area of the business?
• Do absence patterns occur at specific days of the week or at certain times of the year?
• Is absence higher by age, gender, seniority or function?
Think back to the limitations of the spreadsheet
In order to gain detailed and easy to understand information about absence levels, you need to re-format the data. Undoubtedly, this involves some advanced knowledge of Excel at the very least. Moreover, each new report requires you to start from scratch. This is a time-consuming process and resource could be better utilised elsewhere. Finally, this method doesn’t help you in proactively managing staff absence cases.
How can an absence management system help me?
All good absence management systems should provide reports as standard, allowing you to run detailed absence statistics in just one-click and you should not spend your time re-keying or re-checking your work.
The software should be simple to use regardless of your mathematical knowledge and should be geared up to give you this information in a couple of clicks. Moreover, this kind of system will turn raw data into an easy to understand accurate, timely and professional report. It should then be available on demand to distribute via email or via the monthly board pack.
A mobile HR system with self-service facilities will also provide employees with crystal-clear visibility of their own sickness levels.
Dashboards
In addition to traditional reports, good absence management systems allow you to monitor absence in real-time in a highly visual format.
Dashboards will collect data and deliver it via easy to understand charts. Using dashboards, managers could log on first thing in the morning and see all absence in the team and better monitor the situation as it unfolds.
Information you could include might consist of:
• Benchmarking figures: Enabling you to compare your absence levels against other companies – both nationally, locally and in comparison to sectors.
• Company-wide comparisons: The lengths, types and frequencies of absence across your organisation as well as different departments.
Armed with these up-to-the-moment statistics, decision-makers have the detailed and accurate information they need to investigate reasons for absence and develop procedures, programmes and incentives accordingly.
Key absence reports:
As a guide, the most basic of HR systems should enable you to calculate:
Lost time rate:
This calculation enables you to calculate the % of total time available that is lost due to absence within a specific period. This is useful as a starting point for analysing lost time across your entire organisation and will enable you to spot patterns of absence. Is the figure higher during peak production or selling time? Is absence depending on seasonality?
Frequency:
This type of calculation has the advantage of showing you the difference between short term and long term absences. By calculating the average spells of absence per work/department, you can highlight and target areas of issues.
Bradford factor:
Developed by the University of Bradford in the 1980s, this now familiar type of calculation is used in HR to measure worker absenteeism. It’s based on the theory that short, frequent and unplanned absence area more damaging than longer ones. In order to give a true picture, the employee’s Bradford scores should be set against other methods for measuring absence as well as your own qualities research.
The formula is: B = S ² x D where:
• B is the Bradford Factor Score
• S is the total number of spells of individual absence over a set period
• D is the total number of days of absence for that individual over the same period (typically 52 weeks)
You could for example compare Tim who takes seven days off in one hit to recover from an injury and has a Bradford score of seven with Kelly, who takes six absences for minor illness over six days with a Bradford score of 216. You can easily understand who does the most damage to your business.
