Good absence data is more than dates and times
As the title states, good absence data is more than dates and times – and this has been proven more than ever here at Honeydew recently.
The team at Honeydew Health are used to gathering and sorting data for audits of historic absence statistics on behalf of clients to get a clear picture of absence from before implementing Honeydew’s absence and attendance management system, Engage.
The information that we like to see includes the following:
- Full absence history for each employee
- The total cost of these absence spells
- The sum of sick pay cost
- Number of long term absentees
By using Engage, all of this information is available at the click of a button and shown in a nice, easy to read graph. However, trying to gather this information when a company has used the more manual methods of capturing absence data (e.g. manual data entry by managers and e-mail correspondence) is far more difficult than you may like to think.
On a day-to-day basis, your line managers may only be interested in knowing when someone is off sick and how long it will be before they are back. But in order to really understand what effect absence has on your organisation you need to know the full cost and scope of the problem.
Our clients are always shocked to hear that they have overpaid employees by thousands of pounds just because their absences were not accurately logged. Or that the MD didn’t know that they actually have a number of employees off sick with serious illnesses that have been off work, and paid, for hundreds of days. It’s far more common than you may think and requires a lot of effort to discover. Thankfully, systems such as Engage now exist and can make your HR or management team lives a lot easier.
Once all the data is gathered to move to an online system (which we can also do for you with our fully managed package), you will never look back. No more time will be spent having to analyse spreadsheets or piecemeal information. It’s all logged, in one place and available immediately.
If you want to know how Engage can help you collect good absence data or to make sense or your data, just get in touch for some impartial advice – we’re very friendly here at Honeydew Health!