THE IMPORTANCE OF SICK LEAVE MANAGEMENT

Employee absences have a detrimental impact on small to medium sized businesses. The way a company handles sick leave has a direct influence on business operations. If handled poorly, one can expect a drop in efficiency, overall performance and productivity.

Some employees may need to take sick leave due to illness while others take it for personal reasons because they’ve exhausted their actual vacation days. Providing this time for your staff demonstrates your care but it’s not always easy to offer.

Having appropriate sick leave management software protocols in place enables you to do the following:

Have a Clear Definition of Job Expectations

Employees need to know how much paid sick time is allocated to them and how your attendance policy operates. Typically, businesses would print out their attendance policy, have a new employee take a glance and sign it, then place it in their employee file. This is not an effective solution. How many times have you read the entire policy?

Absence management software enables you to update and define your attendance policy. It is easily available to all staff. They may view it to check their schedule and or to determine how much sick leave time they are left with.
Deters Unnecessary Sick Days

Absence management software clearly displays the number of sick days available to each staff member. This easily discourages an employee from taking too many sick days and encourages them to comply with your attendance policy.

Ensures Coverage for All Shifts

When sick leave is formally offered, employees must submit a formal request to take this time off. They cannot simply call in sick. This helps find appropriate coverage for the shift. A formal sick leave protocol is even more important if your company is a multiple department or shift environment. If an employee in a particular department is unavailable for a shift, you can easily make provisions to cover their time with an advanced notice system.

Avoid Trends and Patterns in Absenteeism

Time management software helps you accurately track time off taken by employees. This software will show you a particular employee’s time off trends, i.e. take every other Friday off. Spotting such anomalies helps you single out employees who are abusing the attendance system. You can easily address this issue and prevent duplicate behaviours amongst other employees.

Increases Job Satisfaction and Morale

Even though it’s not mandatory, when a company is able to offer paid time off, it positively affects an employee’s confidence. For example, Google offers employees up to 15 days of paid sick leave per year in the first three years. This figure jumps to 20 days after the three year period. Employees are also allowed to donate their time to other employees.

Absence management software can easily help you implement and track a paid sick leave policy. Sick leave and absence management software enables you to toss out your outdated paper filing system and put in something that is in real-time.