South-West has joint second highest absence rates in Britain

A report from the HR website XpertHR shows that median sickness absence rates in the South-West were 2.8% in 2017, which is joint with the North-West and only beaten by Wales at 3%. (The others were the North East and Scotland jointly with 2.5%, South East at 2.3% and London at 2%.) Absence rates are highest in large organisations and in the public sector. The survey was based on responses from 287 organisations with a combined workforce of 398,453 employees.

The median number of days lost to employee taking sick leave in 2017 had decreased by 1 day from the 2016 results. Although an encouraging result in the right direction, 5.6 days lost per employee is the level that has held sway since 2010. With sickness absence a constant problem, the need for clear and comprehensive absence management is obvious.

Financially the survey found the median cost to employers of these absences rose from £455 to £570 in 2017. This is considered to be an unrepresentative result as many companies will only be counting any salary costs and not taking into account other factors such as reduced levels of customer service, slowed production times and missed business opportunities. To get a truly accurate picture of your company’s cost of sickness absence, your absence management procedures need to have a way to record as much detail as possible of your employee absences.

XpertHR Senior HR Practice Editor Noelle Murphy said:

“Sickness absence has a direct impact on business, and employers are consistently interested in initiatives to measure, manage and tackle the problem. But many HR departments fall at the first hurdle – not knowing the true cost of absence or the reasons underlying it. Better measurement of sickness absence and its associated costs should in turn make it easier to persuade managers to engage with absence management initiatives.”

Here at Time and Attendance South West, we have the ideal product for you to finally get the full picture of your sickness absences and how to manage them.

Our flagship WinTA.NET is an integrated workforce management solution, with several features which make it ideal for absence management. It incorporates a dedicated Absence Planning and Entitlement Management feature, as well as allowing the creation of individual shift patterns, absence allowances, and job costings. Not only can you see exactly who is absent and when, but you can also analyse the data to start working out how much their absence has cost you in lost productivity.

Our comprehensive but user-friendly software comes pre-loaded with a graphical calendar charts that provide a clear and colourful way of viewing an individual’s or a department’s absence records, with different colours for different types of absences. This is useful for you to spot obvious patterns in the absences, but it can also be useful for the employee too, who may genuinely not have realised the pattern in their sickness absences and could then address it.

WinTA.NET would rapidly identify missing employees that are expected to be at work and then inform you via automatic email reporting. This enables you to address problems virtually as they happen, rather than finding out through more indirect methods and possibly days later depending on the structure of your workforce.