Absence Management

What is the Bradford Factor? The Bradford Factor is a way of measuring an employee’s absenteeism and is intended to highlight frequent short-term absence. The Bradford Factor can also be referred to as the Bradford Index or Bradford Formula. Why use the Bradford Factor? The Bradford Factor is usually used as a tool in part of the wider absence management process as opposed to a standalone tool. This is because of its heavy weighting on frequent short-term absence, which on its own could potentially be considered unfair or discriminatory. The tool can be used to identify trends and underlying patterns…

Absenteeism in the workplace is a perennial problem and one which many managers and HR departments struggle to deal with. The reason is simple; when a particular employee appears to be taking liberties with sick leave, the resulting discussions can be rather uncomfortable and tricky to approach. What if they are, in fact, genuinely suffering from a reoccurring illness? What if, as you suspect, they’re taking extended periods of time away from work under the pretence of being sick? Raising issues with such employees is challenging. It requires a mix of authority and compassion that is hard to get right….

The Bradford factor is a system which is used to evaluate the disruption an employee’s absence causes to your team or business. Without going into the algorithm too much, it operates on the theory that – Jack taking a day off every Tuesday for 5 weeks is much more damaging to the company than Janet taking a whole (5 day) week off in that time. Make sense? Well if you can’t wrap your head around it, there is nothing to fear as we have a fully working Bradford Factor calculator here. It is an interesting subject in HR as some…