How to manage absence in the workplace

The ability to capture absence data at source in a system that also integrates with your wider workforce management, scheduling and rostering processes, is important for predicting times where there are increased levels of absence in your organisation. For examples, people taking annual leave during school holidays and more people taking sick leave during the winter. A wider visibility of holidays booked across teams also helps prevent clashes and avoids impacting the productivity of specific teams or departments.  

With a more accurate view of potential sickness absences, time worked and holidays booked across the organisation, scheduling is much simpler, and can be readjusted in real time. This scale of workforce capacity planning is particularly vital for organisations with hourly-rate shift based staff in order to identify where extra resource or cover may be required, and ensure the right level of staffing in busy periods.  

Tracking time, attendance, holidays and absence across a large workforce can be challenging, not to mention costly, without having a single source of truth when it comes to data. An integrated absence management system that shares data with your other HR software, such as your workforce management and payroll systems, helps prevent duplicate records, human error and ensures a more accurate payroll.  

An automated absence management system can help reduce errors and save on administration time. For example, absence management software should be able to make automatic pro-rata adjustments for new starters and leavers, as well as changes in full time equivalence (FTE), length of service and promotions, removing the need for manual processes, in turn improving accuracy. 

A major benefit of absence management software is the ability to automate processes, freeing up your HR team to focus on more strategic initiatives. You can automate clocking in and out processes, and automatically calculate holiday entitlement and pay – based on your organisation’s specific requirements – as well as statutory sick pay, maternity/paternity/shared parental pay, and unpaid leave where there is no statutory entitlement to pay. 

As an example, Cineworld Group PLC have made significant time savings with our absence management systems. Tom Manning, Operations Project Manager at Cineworld says, "A task that took six hours to write a roster now takes less than 60 minutes. Holiday requests and shift swaps are automated, taking no management time. It’s not very often we get the chance to hand back five hours to every senior manager every week."

Read the full Cineworld case study.  

The latest absence management systems will deliver secure ownership of data into employees’ hands, enabling them to manage their own personal records, view annual leave entitlement, request and check holiday approvals, book time off in-lieu and clock-in and out. This removes admin time for managers, speeds up processes and avoids confusion over holidays left to take.  

Some systems feature mobile apps too, making annual leave processes for employees and managers even more flexible and generally enhancing the employee experience. Our self-service HR software, for example, can be integrated with absence management modules. 

Despite the pandemic, UK sickness absence has been falling. However, this is not reflected across all sectors - with those in frontline roles unable to work from home (such as health and social care and the public sector ) reporting  increases. As a result, employee absence is still impacting the UK economy and is estimated to exceed £100bn annually. 

However, very few individual employers actually monitor the cost impact of absence on their organisation. On average employees take 3.6 days of sickness absence per year, but the direct and indirect costs (from unexplained absence, inaccurate sick pay calculations, reduced productivity and the impact on other departments and teams) can be difficult to calculate and understand. 

Integrated absence management systems can shed light on the cost impact of absence across your organisation and will feed data automatically into your payroll to ensure you're paying people correctly. It will also help to reduce costs by understanding the root cause of sickness absences.  

Absence management is more than just tracking leave. The data generated from integrated systems enables you to analyse absence patterns and trends in detail and plan, strategically, where to focus resources to deal with any challenges with absenteeism and to mitigate future risks.  

With tools to notify managers automatically of trends to be investigated, organisations can begin to develop a more proactive approach to managing sickness and associated costs. Having integrated systems enables managers to get a dashboard overview of absence, and drill down into concerning areas by department or individual. 

Research by the Department for Work and Pensions showed that the majority of employers agreed that there was a link between work and employee health and wellbeing (91%). 

However, for too long many organisations have had a negative view of absence. But the reality is, work-related stress, anxiety, and depression now account for more than half of all sick days taken in the UK and mental ill-health is costing UK employers up to £7bn a year. 

Absence management data can be used to inform wellbeing strategies and to reduce the costs associated with absenteeism such as decreased productivity, hiring temporary staff, outsourcing work, paying staff overtime to complete work or impacting the wider team wellbeing from increased workloads. Managing these things will help reduce the risks of wider cultural issues of poor wellbeing. 

Learn more about supporting your workforce with our health and wellbeing hub.  

Low absence rates can in fact be a sign of a cultural problem with wellbeing. UK sickness absence rates fell to 1.8% in 2020 which is the lowest since records began. Research shows that presenteeism levels have reached record highs with more than half of all UK employees continuing to work when ill instead of taking time off, which we know can lead to lower productivity and ultimately stress and burnout. 

Presenteeism is costing UK organisations more than four times as much as mental ill-health related absences and with nearly half of HR leaders acknowledging that burnout is responsible for up to 50% of employee churn. We can use insights from an absence management system to identify presenteeism challenges and use strategically to put in place way to create a working culture that helps reduce and ultimately prevent stress and burnout and decrease staff turnover.