Absence Management

What is absence management? Absence management is about reducing employee absenteeism (usually due to illness or injury) through policies and procedures. In order to have an effective impact, these policies and procedures will need to be communicated to both employees and managers, with management/HR taking a pro-active role in applying them. Some organisations prefer to use the term attendance management as it is considered more positive and this may even extend to rewarding employees for good attendance. Why is absence management important? The CIPD Absence Management Survey report found that: on average an employee is absent for 6.9 days per…

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….