Coping with Unplanned Absences

A Pocket Guide

Sarah Cook

• Publisher: ITGP
• Year: 2010
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781849281614
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Unplanned absence from work could cost the UK economy as much as £12 billion a year!

When your organisation can no longer meet its deadlines, or provide customers with the high quality of service they expect, you have a problem. Unplanned absence also has a bad effect on morale, putting the rest of the team under pressure as they struggle to deal with the additional workload. Unplanned absence can occur as a result of force majeure (for example, when an airline is hit by strike action), or because of poor employee motivation and commitment.

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. While you may not be able to prevent unplanned absence altogether, the advice contained in this guide will help you to keep the extra costs and disruption associated with unplanned absence to a minimum.

Benefits to business include:

• Reduce the incidence of unplanned absence
  When employees take "duvet days" or "pull a sickie" to watch the Cup Final, productivity and morale suffer. This pocket guide tells you some simple measures you can take to put a stop to Monday morning syndrome at the office.

• Ensure continuity of service
  Following the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland, there was travel chaos throughout Europe. This is only the most dramatic example of those unplanned absences that are caused by circumstances beyond an employee's control. However, you cannot afford to let something like this stop your business in its tracks. By following this pocket guide's advice you can ensure continuity of service.

• Take advantage of available technologies
  Thanks to the laptop and the smartphone, people who cannot make it to the office can still carry on working. This pocket guide offers you useful advice on how to make the best use of IT when your company is confronted with an unforeseen absence.

• Bring the employee back into the fold
  Use this pocket guide's recommendations to manage your employee's return to work after a period of absence.

For expert advice on how to handle unexpected absence, order this pocket guide now!

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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Practical Steps and Legal Aspects
• Chapter 3: Covering the Work of Others in their Absence
• Chapter 4: How Technology Can Help You
• Chapter 5: Returning to Work
• ITG Resources