Coping with Unplanned Absences

A Pocket Guide

Sarah Cook

• Publisher: IT Governance Ltd
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781849281614
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

This pocket guide, based on best practice guidelines, looks at what you can do to ensure your employees fulfil their obligations and turn up as required. It then gets to grips with the question of how your organisation should handle unplanned absences before and when they arise. 

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

Why this pocket guide?

When a member of staff is unexpectedly absent from work it raises immediate cause for concern with regard to:

• the likelihood of missing deadlines

• disruption to the quality and continuity of service delivery

• increased workload and pressure for team members who take on other’s work

• time invested by managers and team leaders in resourcing and HR issues

• costs involved in hiring temporary or replacement staff

• loss of productivity and efficiency

• drop in motivation and employee engagement and commitment

• decrease in internal and external customer satisfaction and retention

• reputational risk for the organisation of not providing an excellent service.

The annual cost of unplanned absenteeism is estimated to run to between £10 and £12 billion in the UK. On average, each employee has 8.3 days’ unplanned absence from work each year. Studies show that unauthorised absence is most likely to occur in certain groups, such as younger people, new starters, manual workers and people who work in larger organisations where absenteeism is not so readily noticed. However, recent force majeure events, such as bad weather and airport closures have proven that unplanned absenteeism can affect many thousands of people in businesses across the globe.

In this book I offer practical advice to help you better manage unplanned absences, so as to minimise the impact on you, your colleagues and team members, your customers and business reputation.

Reasons for absence

Let’s start by considering the causes of absence from work, remembering that there are many valid reasons why people can be absent. These include authorised holidays, compassionate leave, time off to care for dependents, paternity and maternity leave, adoption and parental leave, study leave, as well as time off for jury service and trade union duties. Employees have a legal right to be absent for these and many other reasons. If you are unsure about employee rights, a good source of reference is the Acas website: www.acas.org.uk.

The focus of this book is unauthorised, unplanned absence. This can be caused by short- or long-term sickness, including stress, persistent lateness or ‘duvet days’, where employees decide not to show for work. Sometimes called ‘Monday morning syndrome’, this type of absence may be linked to major sporting events or national holiday periods e.g. taking an unplanned absence either side of a Bank Holiday. It can also be caused by external factors, such as weather and travel disruption.

Preparation to prevent being caught out

There are a number of practical actions that you and your organisation can take to minimise the incidence of unplanned absence and to ensure the smooth operation of your business, should unplanned absenteeism occur.

Step 1: Ensure that expectations of attendance are set out in employee contracts

Make sure that employee contracts of employment refer to regular and punctual attendance and that the agreed attendance times are clear. This will reduce any risk of the employee claiming that there was flexibility on hours of attendance, if this was not the case.

Step 2: Have a clear absence management policy

A fundamental step is to ensure that your organisation has a clear policy in place that outlines information on employee terms and conditions relating to taking time off work. This is a legal requirement and should be made clear to all employees. Typically, this policy is contained in an employee handbook. I suggest that you find a copy of this (or ensure one is created) now.

Check that your policy is comprehensive. In addition to legislative details, such as statutory sick pay and contractual sick play, does your policy:

Table 1: Assess your absence
management policy

Now is a good time to review your policy to identify how your policy and procedures cover employees who are absent due to circumstances beyond their control (the closure of airports because of the volcanic ash eruption is one example). Does your policy make it clear where the employee stands? Does time lost need to be taken as holiday entitlement, for example? Is it clear what the reporting and return to work arrangements will be?

Step 3: Ensure that line managers, team leaders and supervisors, as well as team members, are aware of the policy

Having a robust HR policy is all very ...