Managing staff sickness can be tricky.
Each day that a team member is not at work is lost productivity and unlike annual leave, it is hard to plan for. Most countries have no legal requirement to pay employees for days off due to sickness. This means that there are various approaches to sick leave and sick pay, depending on the requirements of your firm.
What is your sickness policy?
Some companies offer no pay for sick days, with government-funded schemes such as the UK’s Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) giving the employee a basic income after the first few days. Other companies pay for the first few days of sickness, essentially covering the period before SSP kicks in. Others are more generous still, offering pay for, for example, the first 10 days of sickness in a year.
Finding the policy for your firm is a matter of balancing factors such as lost productivity, increased cost if the nature of your business always requires absent staff to be replaced, and discouraging staff from “pulling a sickie”, against HR factors such as ensuring staff feel cared for and make sure you support team members with serious or ongoing medical problems.
Recording & Reporting
After you have chosen your policy, monitoring and enforcing it is still a major task, but it’s one that can be made simple with LeaveWizard. Our intuitive interface gives you access to reports including the Sickness by Month report. This report will help you track sickness and absence throughout the year.
This means that you are able to see how much sick leave individual members have taken over a given period, as well as identify patterns of absence. Does an employee frequently take Mondays off sick after heavy weekends? Did all of an employee’s sickness just happen to occur during the World Cup, or when major music festivals were happening? These patterns can indicate that employees are abusing your sickness policy, and form a part of your disciplinary procedure.
Similarly, reports can help you to identify and support those employees who are having medical issues. In some cases, employees who need assistance with being able to work are shy about coming forward to their boss. Sickness reporting can help you to be proactive in allowing them to keep working at their best. Some companies set a trigger for a number of days’ absence after which the company will formally review the situation with the team member, exploring the reasons for absences and offering support if necessary.
Try it for free!
Why not try out our innovative leave management solution and see this reporting for yourself? LeaveWizard offers a free trial so you can check out all of our features for managing absence and annual leave.
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