The cold snap has arrived, and unfortunately, with winter, comes sickness and many businesses are faced with escalating employee absenteeism and requests for sick leave. But there are tools and techniques you can use to help quantify, monitor and manage the problem of sick leave and other unplanned absences.
As a company is likely to experience more disruption from frequent short term absences than an employee who has one period of absence for 3 weeks, we recommend using a method to monitor these odd days away.
The Bradford factor is the most useful tool for doing this. It is calculated as follows:
S x S x D = Bradford points score
where: S is the number of occasions of absence in the last 52 weeks and D is the total number of days’ absence in the last 52 weeks.
So, using this calculation on an employee who has had 14 days off work in the past year:
By quantifying frequent leave of short periods you can monitor them and take action when you feel excessive absenteeism is negatively impacting business operations. Sometimes, the best starting point is communicating the cost of sick leave and other unplanned absences to employees and letting them know the impact their absence has on the business – failing that, a formal disciplinary process may need to be started.
Tags: hr policies, sick leave