SMEs – how to successfully manage staff absences

A recent paper by BrightHR, Understanding the impact of staff absence – a guide for SMEs, has addressed how important it is that SMEs appreciate the impact that staff absences can have on the running of a business. Find the report in their download centre here.

According to their research, the average UK employee takes 6.3 sick days a year.

Smaller companies tend to have a less formal absence policy, and may not keep absence data, or may not run reports on what they have. 93% of companies surveyed do have a written absence management policy which is encouraging, but a lower number, 82%, actually collect absence data.
That means that 11% of those companies must be merely taking absence as a problem to be solved “in the moment”, with no chance for reflection or reports. This means that they will miss out on seeing patterns which could indicate problems.

Although 82% of the surveyed companies reported collecting absence data, only a third of the surveyed companies were using that data in order to monitor the impact that absences were having on their business.

Presumably for the rest of them, the data exists as either a few useless spreadsheets, or perhaps as part of disciplinary procedures.

Dealing with unacceptable absences is certainly important, and we’ll address it later, but it is not the only lesson that you can learn from examining your absence data.

For example, have you needed to hire temporary staff to cover absences, or needed to give other workers’ overtime pay? As well as the simple payroll costs there, the effort required to get these members of staff trained or familiar with tasks will produce a drop in productivity.

If you haven’t been replacing an absent staff member, particularly one who is often away, you may be accidentally contributing to a drop in morale in the rest of your team – which is also in turn likely to produce a drop in productivity.

There will always be people who take advantage of a system, and therefore your absence management policy should include a disciplinary procedure of some kind for what BrightHR calls “unacceptable absences”.
An employee’s absence levels can be considered unacceptable when:

• Investigations show the reason for sick leave was not genuine
• Absence levels become unsustainable, affecting the employee’s ability to fulfil their role

It is important to have a written disciplinary procedure to ensure that you treat everyone equally and have fully documented all your steps. This will minimise the chance of a disgruntled employee finding grounds with which to sue you.

The point at which absences become “unsustainable” is up to you, but certain things are required by law. See ACAS’ guide for managing sickness absences here http://www.acas.org.uk/index.aspx?articleid=4199 . Time and attendance software can help you to decide these by using the Bradford Factor, which gives numerical values to people’s absence records. You can set your own trigger points for when disciplinary procedures should be started.

A disciplinary procedure is necessary, but according to BrightHR you should make sure that your company culture is a “culture of attendance” where your staff feel like they will be believed and trusted when they tell you that they are ill. Automatically mistrusting anyone who rings in sick may help you to catch the odd malingerer, but it will destroy the good working relationship in your office.

Staff who don’t feel trusted are far less likely to put their maximum effort into their work day, let alone volunteer to stay late to work harder or to take on more responsibility within the workplace.