4 Ways to use absence reports to your business’

advantage

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Absence reports provide you with valuable insight into your workforce and productivity.

If you have employees then they will usually take annual leave or sickness days and at some point you will need to report back with this information.

If you don’t use business software for your absence management, absence reports can be time consuming and tricky.

Having to manually search through paper absence requests can be more hassle than it’s worth, especially when you include any missing files or discrepancies.

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Absence management software can make absence reports a lot easier.

With reporting and exporting tools you can easily download all the data you need to make a meaningful report.

Some software like Clarity365 even gives you real-time dashboards of information, cutting out the tedious data analysis process.

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Are you already using absence software to speed up your reporting?

It can still be difficult to create an absence report that actually helps benefit your business.

Read on to find out four ways to create an insightful absence report you can use to your business’ advantage.

With past data you can discover which department, or individual user has the most sickness days.

Use bar charts or pie charts to easily see which departments are responsible for the most absent days, whether this is by week, month or even year.  

Discover regular absentees

This information can then be used to help users or departments reduce sickness absence. This might be introducing the flu jab or a new exercise and healthy eating initiative.

You might also monitor individuals who seem to have a large number of sickness days to make sure these couldn’t be avoided or are being entered wrongly.

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In large companies with many departments working together, clashing holidays can be a common occurrence and can cause conflict.

Without absence management software it’s even easier to make the mistake of two or more people having the same authorised annual leave.

Combat clashing holidays & unproductivity

Clashing holidays can create many problems, especially if other departments or employees are waiting on a tight deadline.

By looking into your data from the past months or years, you can see the time of year and most common days each department books as annual leave.

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You can then put a plan in place to tackle this from encouraging employees to book time more evenly to creating a new policy by which employees must give a months’ notice before booking annual leave.

Of course clashing holidays can sometimes be unavoidable. However, by creating absence reports can help you look ahead and plan for any staff shortages or unproductivity this can bring.

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Monitor the disruptiveness of sickness

Most of the time sickness absences can’t be helped and we all need a day off once in a while to get ourselves better.

However we often forget the disruptiveness such a short notice absence can cause.

By generating an absence report, you should be able to discover if there are any correlations between time of year and sickness and then monitor these to see if you can create a better absence strategy.

Looking into the cost and frequency of sickness, you can discover just how disruptive short term absence can be to your business.

You could then use this report to talk to any managers about ideas to reduce sickness in their department and reduce last minute panic when someone has an unexpected day off.

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As already mentioned absence reports can be a great way to see what may need changing in your current absence management strategy.

If you haven’t got a strategy in place, reports are also a good way to see what should be included when developing one.

Make important decisions about your absence management strategy

For example, by looking at the absence reason employees entered when booking a day’s leave you can discover exactly why they needed the time off. If you don’t currently use reasons, consider doing so.

This way you can see if an employee had half a day off to attend a doctor’s appointment, or simply in lieu of overtime worked. If many employees are working late and taking time in lieu it may be worth looking at changes to working hours or contracts.

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An absence management strategy which looks at sickness, your annual leave policies and clearly sets out what is expected when a staff member is ill can help cut confusion and save money lost on unexpected days off.

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Absence reporting can be extremely beneficial to a business if carried out correctly. Using reports to create a good strategy and monitor holiday and sickness can help make managing absence much easier for your team.

If you still use paper forms or spreadsheets to book holiday, why not consider the move to an absence management system like Clarity365?

Not only does it create a simple and more compliant way for your employees to book holiday, it also makes approvals easy for managers too, while absence reporting can be done in the click of a button.

Find out more about Clarity365’s online absence management

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