Monday · 8 June 2020

How workplaces record absence

Posted by Call In Sick Tips Revealed · Filed under Workplace · Permalink

Absence recording looks like clerical work and behaves like policy. What an organisation chooses to count determines what it ends up managing, and most of the disagreements about fairness in this area are really disagreements about the counting method.

There are two broad families. One counts days lost, which treats a fortnight as fourteen times worse than a single day. The other counts occasions, which treats them as equal. Both are defensible and they point in opposite directions, so an organisation that uses one number in its reports and the other in its individual reviews will produce decisions that nobody can predict.

The trigger point

Somewhere in most systems sits a threshold that converts a record into a conversation: a number of separate absences in a rolling period, or a score combining frequency and length. The intention is consistency, and within limits it delivers it. The weakness is that a threshold cannot distinguish between a run of unrelated minor illnesses and a pattern, which is precisely the distinction the conversation is supposed to establish.

That is why the better systems treat a trigger as the start of an enquiry rather than a finding. Where it is treated as a finding, people learn the arithmetic quickly and manage their absences around it, which produces longer absences rather than fewer.

What the record is for

A record serves several purposes that pull apart. It supports pay, which needs exact dates. It supports staffing, which needs advance warning and cover. It supports occupational health, which needs pattern and context. It supports a possible dispute, which needs contemporaneous notes. A single spreadsheet column cannot do all four, and pretending otherwise is how organisations end up with data they cannot use.

Two practical habits improve almost any system. Record the fact and the dates separately from any judgement about them, so that a note written in irritation on a busy morning does not become part of the permanent record. And distinguish absence related to a long-term condition or to caring responsibilities from ordinary short illness, because grouping them together produces both unfair outcomes and useless statistics.

The test of a recording system is not whether it produces a tidy figure for a report. It is whether a person reading the file a year later can tell what actually happened.