If your team members show up at work inconsistently and you’re always too late to make a note of their absence or don’t even know why they’re missing, your business is in big trouble.
Absenteeism – aka unplanned absences without a valid reason – is a costly thing. In the United States alone, absenteeism-linked productivity losses reach as much as $1,685 per worker a year. Thus, depending on your team size and staff members’ ability to cover their absent colleagues’ work duties, frequent no-shows can easily result in an immense money drain.
To avoid these unpleasant consequences, save vital business resources and maintain a good level of productivity in any situation, you need an effective absence management strategy that includes:
- Informative time off policies
- Well-functioning absence tracking procedures
- Efficient leave planning tools
So, in this article, we’re going to discuss a few excellent ways to improve your absence management practices. We also will detail on how such a quality piece of timesheet software as actiTIME can help you with this task.
What Is Absence Management and Why Is It Essential?
Absence management is the combination of organizational programs and practices aimed to reduce absenteeism and maximize business productivity.
- It starts with establishing a wholesome workplace environment where each employee feels safe, comfortable, and supported in their daily professional activities.
- It includes the promotion of discipline regarding day off taking, which comprises the adoption of clear leave management rules and team education about them.
- And last but not least, it involves staff absence tracking and analysis – the two processes that are core to keeping absenteeism under control and finding ways for improvement.
When carried out well, absence management allows you to understand why your employees take time off and see how frequently they do that. This way, it helps prevent excessive day off taking and identify the instances when your team members miss work without a solid cause.
Note that while the goal of absence management is to prevent absenteeism, it’s not about the encouragement of presenteeism at all. Forcing your employees to be available and work no matter what is of no good for anyone. If a person attends the office when sick or anxious about a family emergency, they cannot be as productive and organized as their healthy and untroubled colleagues. In fact, they usually end up just muddling through the workday and may even affect other team members in a negative way, multiplying workplace inefficiencies and reasons for absenteeism.
Overall, the objective here is to find an optimal balance between exercising the strict measures of control over excess absences and supporting those who really need time off to recover from a disease, cope with burnout or take care of important personal matters. Hopefully, the practices described below will assist you with that.
How to Enhance Your Absence Management Experience
First of all, start with the development of a clear and comprehensive time off policy. Specify in the document how much paid or unpaid time off each worker will have per year, how they are supposed to request days off, and on which occasions a leave request may be declined. Describe your time off accrual procedures, common leave types, and possible ad hoc arrangements. Then, make sure that everyone in your team knows and understands the rules.
The next step is to find and adopt a great piece of software that allows for flawless absence management, and we already have a perfect option prepared for you. actiTIME provides users with tools to track their working time, analyze productivity results and monitor project costs. Apart from that, it includes a few nifty leave management features.
Let’s look at them closely here:
1. Flexible time off management settings
No matter which type of leave policy you decide to implement in your organization, actiTIME will always readily adapt to it due to its highly flexible software configuration. In actiTIME, you can:
- Establish your own time off / sick days accrual rules – point how many days off a person can take a year and how often their leave balance will be replenished;
- Set time off accrual limits and indicate whether the earned leave balance should be reset and nullified on a particular day of a year;
- Create multiple custom leave types to add the necessary level of detail to your absence tracking data and have complete insight into why your workers miss work.
Even if each of your team members enjoys an individual leave benefits plan and your time off accrual rules vary from one person to another, actiTIME has you covered. Using this time tracker, you can easily personalize absence management settings for every separate employee or manually edit their time off data.
To find more information on how to do that and explore how to take full advantage of actiTIME’s flexible time off configuration in different organizational scenarios, be sure to read this detailed post.
2. Fully automated absence tracking process
With actiTIME, you don’t have to input any data or make complex calculations manually since it tracks and accrues employees’ time off in a downright streamlined way. Handy automation boosts process efficiency by a large degree and reduces the risk of error. This way, it helps you to save time and money throughout the absence management cycle.
3. Advanced leave management through actiPLANS integration
actiTIME supports integration with a plethora of valuable tools, and one of them is a robust absence management solution – actiPLANS.
This software provides users with a variety of advanced absence management features for long-term vacation planning, immediate leave notification, and in-depth data analysis. Besides, it is incredibly convenient to utilize for every stakeholder involved in the absence management process:
- Leaders can streamline the approval of leave requests, review staff availability in real time, or quickly generate comprehensive absence tracking reports to evaluate the absenteeism rate and inform decision-making.
- HR or finance professionals may use the automatically accrued time off data and employees’ balance histories to simplify and speed up payroll calculation.
- And the rest of the team will undoubtedly appreciate the actiPLANS mobile app for it lets users log days off and inform colleagues about lateness or other changes in personal work schedules promptly and on the go.
It’s super easy to activate actiPLANS integration right from your actiTIME account and then switch between the two pieces of software with a single mouse click. To see for yourself how effortless it is and gain all the plentiful benefits of streamlined absence management, sign up for a free actiTIME trial today and sync it with actiPLANS via the add-on settings.
For detailed instructions, visit this page.
