Managing and monitoring staff absence sucks a lot of time from HR departments or those responsible for people management, especially in small businesses.
When the busy summer holiday months come around, or when winter and back-to-school bugs tear through your headcount, you need something to make life easier. You need to ensure that your team receives timely, accurate responses and has sufficient data to base decisions on that enhance your management approach.
You need Absence Management Software if...
- You’re spending time recording leave and absence: Whether you already use absence management software or not, you need to be aware of the time the process takes on both sides—yours and your employee's.
- You’re regularly making and correcting mistakes. Your staff is getting too little or too much leave according to their entitlements. Are there regular differences of opinion on this?
- You have requests filed by paper and left on your desk. Or have trouble finding them in your inbox. Is your system watertight enough to avoid any ‘what’s the latest version of that file – and where is it?’ issues?
- During busy request periods, can you systematically and instantly see which request was filed first and who has priority?
If you're still unsure, ask yourself these questions:
- Have you got an official Absence Management Policy in place?
- Are you accurately recording sick days? Are there trends and patterns? Are they plain to see at a glance? When you see certain individuals are regularly sick on a particular day of the week, you can act accordingly to work with that individual to find a solution to overcome the cause.
- How are you recording the causes of absence? Do you have a repository at your fingertips of all the sick notes you need for each absence related to each staff member?
- If you had a legal case from a past or present employee, for example, would you have all their files in one place, with accurate, complete record-keeping of their work patterns, punctuality, and absence levels?
If the answer is no, help yourself with Absence Management Software
If absence records have self-service elements, such as uploading doctors’ notes or certificates, you will have even more free time. If you use timesheets, you’ll know who was at work or not to check the system on who should have recorded a day off and why.
Self-service elements also offer other time-saving benefits, including allowing employees to check their own leave balances without needing to request information.
When these checks and self-service elements can be made using any device, from a desktop browser to a mobile app, without operating-system-dependent issues that slow down the process, you will have brought your request and response times in line with modern expectations.
Knowing patterns of absence can allow you to plan in advance for busy periods and have more economical, suitable replacements in the wings ahead of time.
Absence software automation will help illustrate up-to-the-minute leave balances with either visual presentations or data exports.
Setting up an absence management system should be intuitive and fast. There’s no point in having a super system if it takes too much time to set up and deploy—plus the team has to like the experience, and the leadership team should have positive buy-in.
Even if you have efficient manual paper-based systems now, how can you be sure annual leave calculations are correct and made consistently?
Part-leave-year calculations are notoriously difficult to get right. A management system will deliver instant responses using consistent methods.
Do you have any idea how much absences cost you? Without a reporting function, you won’t be able to track missed days with the specific costs associated with an employee.
If you make compensation, benefits, and salary details reportable alongside missed days, you will have all the data you need at your fingertips.
We often hear that the ability to track and act on repeated unnecessary costs, such as absences, delivers almost instant ROI to customers. Let alone the usual admin-associated savings.
Of course, not all absence is associated with checking up on staff or trying to pinpoint troublesome team members.
Being able to measure jury service days, and the impact of maternity or long-term sickness leave, allows you to review your policies and make provisions for cover to ensure a happy team feels supported and valued so that morale levels are kept high and that nobody is feeling stretched to provide cover.
Successfully managing employee absences using holiday management software is vital to anyone running a business, especially a small business.
Staff absenteeism affects productivity, costs money and has a massive influence on well-being and company morale.
The more control you have over absence management, the more you and your team will reap the rewards.
