How to record absence efficiently and effectively

Running an HR department is a constant juggling act. You’re multitasking all the time and doing your best to keep those plates spinning.

What every efficient organisation needs are smooth processes that run themselves as much as possible, leaving you free to get on with the jobs that need your personal touch.

Pure^® Human Resources is a Hampshire-based HR consultancy that has been providing professional and expert advice to its many satisfied clients for over 10 years.

We can help you to put robust processes in place to record your employees’ attendance and flag any absence issues – minimising your admin resources and maximising useful information at the touch of your fingertips.

It starts with the data

You only get out what you put in. There are fantastic software systems available now, that make absence recording really easy for your managers. We are familiar with several systems and can guide you on which might work best for you.

The easier you make it for your managers to keep on top of recording sickness absence, the more comprehensive and accurate your reporting will be.

Accurate reporting gives you the awareness of any absence issues that you can then manage appropriately with your employees.

Some companies have a trigger point system that might, for example, flag more than three periods of sickness absence in a six month period. Others might have a benchmark where any more than four periods of absence in a rolling 12 month period, or a certain number of days absent, would trigger an ‘alarm’ with a manager that says that individual’s absenteeism is quite high, and it could be time to have a discussion with them.

People who have had a long, continuous period of absenteeism tend to be more noticeable than those who have frequent, short absences.

Recording absences efficiently ensures that multiple instances of lower profile days off here and there don’t slip under the radar.

If someone is not being as genuine as they could be with their sickness absence, knowing that you are monitoring their absence can make them more conscious about their choices and motivate them to improve their attendance, before a situation escalates.

Why recording sickness absence is important

It is really difficult to manage absence if you don’t accurately know what you’re dealing with. Your records could be reassuringly positive, demonstrating that you have excellent attendance rates.

This would be great news that you could feedback to your employees in a positive, morale boosting way.

Alternatively, you might have blips in an otherwise positive situation, that form pockets of issues you’ll want to manage or, at the other end of the scale, the reports you run from your record keeping might flag absence levels that are unacceptably high when compared to industry benchmarks, and need immediate attention.

What you need to record for sickness absences

As well as recording sickness absence, it’s important to record employees’ holiday leave so that you can make sure they are taking what they are entitled to and getting a rest.

Conversely, it’s also important to monitor holiday records so that people don’t take more holiday than they are entitled to, which doesn’t only mean that you as a business are not getting the time you are paying that employee for, but it could cause disgruntlement and poor morale amongst other employees if it’s not checked and reined in.

Tracking holidays also means that you can ensure everyone isn’t off at the same time and that you are maintaining adequate cover in each department, to keep your organisation running efficiently at all times.

Regarding sickness absence, it can be an enlightening exercise to monitor employees’ sickness absence on Mondays and Fridays, after bank holidays or after taking periods of holiday leave. If you see a pattern there, it might be something you would want to raise with that employee.

If you have an employee on long-term sick, it is essential that you record their absence accurately, which will be required for payroll who will be managing their statutory sick pay. This is paid from day four of a sickness period and up to a maximum of 28 weeks.

You will also need to record and share with your payroll department the timings and amounts of any discretionary payments on top of that statutory sick pay.

How you can spot an issue

Using software to manage attendance makes it easy for any issues with absence to be flagged, especially with the trigger points that you will have set up, to help identify the tipping point from reasonable to unreasonable attendance.

If an individual has had one or two long periods of absence, there may be an underlying condition that you need to refer to Occupational Health and understand more about the person’s circumstances.

Or, if your reporting shows that an individual has had repeated periods of short-term absence, you may want to see if there is a pattern or a theme to those absences; for example, is the individual providing different reasons each time?

How Pure® Human Resources can help

We can help you to put efficient absence recording software in place. A good system will make it easy to keep your absence instances recorded, and quick and simple for you to monitor your employees’ attendance levels, running reports whenever you need to, on whatever data parameters you choose.

We can also help you to make sure that all your record keeping is GDPR compliant and have a GDPR training course.

Contact Pure Human Resources

If you have any HR queries or requests that we could help you with, our friendly and expert team would love to hear from you.  We offer a Pay As You Go HR service, allowing you to access HR advice as and when you need it, meaning you only pay for what you use.

You can call us on 01794 329470, email us or fill out our Contact Form.

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