Absence management is a vital tool in your arsenal when it comes to insulating yourself from unexpected disruption and ensuring business continuity and success, no matter the circumstances. Unchecked absences can cause an unacceptable domino effect for your business. As winter draws nearer, the need for a well embedded people management system becomes more vital than ever- from the threat of spiralling absences due to the cold and flu season to the challenges of onboarding seasonal staff and the annual increase in demands which the holiday season brings.
Our latest webinar explores the importance of absence management as a tool not just for Christmas, but for all year round. We want to help you understand the dangers posed by unchecked absence and how sourcing the correct solution can help you overcome these challenges.
Don’t miss out on your opportunity to discover how to avoid the domino effect of unwanted absence this winter and sign up for the webinar coming to you live at 1pm on the 19th December. In the meantime, we thought we’d give you a little taster of what you can expect to find.
Some uncomfortable truths about absence:
There are some very blunt statistics surrounding absence which serves to highlight just what a crucial element of your people management function it is. The average employee loses 4.3 days per year to unplanned or unwanted absence, equating to a roughly 569 euro median cost per employee per year. If left unchecked, these costs can spiral out of control and the working days lost to absence can have far wider reaching impacts on business continuity.
Challenges presented by poor absence management:
- Lack of visibility-Older, more manual forms of recording absences and leave allowances can lead to a muddying of the waters and a lot of confusion both for employees and their HR teams. It is all too easy for more analogue input processes to become lost in the shuffle, leading to a breakdown in communication.
- Issues around staffing and resourcing-Ineffective oversight of absences within an organisation can lead to some businesses finding themselves caught out and scrambling to find appropriate cover for the absent employee.
- Financial impacts- As well as safeguarding the wellbeing of your employees, having oversight of employee absence can also help in greatly reducing the impact that sick leave can have on businesses financially. Effective oversight of sick leave will be vital in mitigating costs that come from a disruption to the workforce.
- Presenteeism- Ineffective communication around absences and employee expectations can have a knock-on effect on employees. If an absence is seen as a taboo within an organisation, this can lead to a culture of presenteeism where employees feel pressured to be at work more than necessary, never making use of their leave allowances in order to rest and reset themselves. An exhausted workforce will inevitably find themselves increasingly disengaged and less productive.
Steps you can take to improve absence management:
Organisations will need to consider the steps they need to take in order to foster a supportive and proactive approach to absence management:
- Set out clear expectations around absences and policies: Let your people know that absences are an accepted and normal part of working life. Ensure you have the agility in your set up to account for everyday occurrences of absence, be they planned or otherwise.
- Be empathetic and empower your HR people to drive discussions with employees around the causes of absence: One of the key contributing factors to employee absence is stress. As organisations begin to reconcile themselves with a largely hybrid workforce, it is important that their HR systems and processes are robust enough to enable them to effectively engage with employees and head off potential pain points before they spiral into long term absence.
- Free your HR people from absence admin: Comprehensive time and attendance software solutions now give the power to the individual employee to have visibility of their own leave allowances and empower them to push through their own requests. Self service functionality is an increasingly popular demand for organisations looking to take some of the burden away from their people teams.
- Time and attendance systems offer you the information you need in real-time: This means never being caught out by absences and ensuring that you can gather together the staff and resources you need to guarantee productivity even when the most key employees are taking a break and to guarantee accurate pay.
In light of the ongoing cost of living crisis and recession, the idea of transforming your software and technology may seem a pipe dream. At a time when finances are more constrained than ever, there is often little scope to go to market and find a solution which works for you.
We’ve created the Technology Adoption Fund specifically to allow organisations to continue investing in their people, even as the wider cost of doing business soars.
This fund can be used by organisations in the UK, Republic of Ireland, Canada, United States or Australia with fewer than 350 employees to support their investment in Advanced’s HR, Payroll, Time and Attendance, and Auto-Rostering software solutions.
Don’t miss out.
Hopefully, that’s whetted your appetite and helped highlight just how crucial it is for you to be on top of absence management within your organisation, not just during the winter months but the whole year round.
If you want more insights into how to ensure that absence management can become a core pillar of your people management experience, secure your place for our upcoming webinar happening at 1pm on the 19th December.
