Your thoughts please...

Who are the best people to ask when considering which improvements/changes to make to Office Control? The answer is clearly you. You use Office Control regularly, and you best understand how it can serve you better and that's what we want to achieve.

To help you tell us how to improve Office Control and which new features to add, go to Office Control UserVoice. Here you can add new ideas and thoughts or vote on existing ones to encourage development in that particular area.

We very much appreciate you taking the time to get your voice heard.

New Leave Policies

As you know, Office Control can help you manage your leave by adding leave policies which are check when a leave request is made. These can ensure department levels are maintained or key employees are not away at the same time.

We have added 2 further policies to help in this area. They are 'Maximum number of days allowed for a leave type' and a series of Location based controls.

Office Control already maintains annual leave entitlement with various configurable elements designed to streamline your effort in this area - but previously it allowed any number of days to be booked against all the other leave types available. These can now be controlled with a policy. For instance, if your company allows Birthday leave days to be requested you will probably only want your employees to take 1 a year. Now Office Control will manage this automatically.

We have had department based policies for some time, now Office Control allows the same policies to be added by location. This has added significantly to Office Controls ability to help you control your employee's leave right across your company.

Office Control is now even more secure

Office Control now creates a 1024 bit SSL encrypted session when ever any client logs on. This scrambles all data sent to and from our servers until the client logs off ensuring complete security during the process.

The encryption is visible by the following characteristics:

1. http://www.office-control.co.uk changes to https://secure.office-control.co.uk
2. A lock appears next to the address bar or at the bottom of the page (depending on the browser)
3. By clicking on the lock, you can view the SSL certificate

Main Benefits of Office Control

Less time consuming

Office Control has been designed to make absence tasks (such as requesting and approving or self certifying sickness) as quick and painless as possible.

Office Control moves the task through your company’s procedures automatically and quickly removing the need for the paper chase.

All absences are recorded accordingly and highly configurable reports are available to view absence activity at the click of a button.

Better management

Office Control will check requests against your policies to ensure particular situations do not occur. Office Control will then notify the line manager of the conflict or deny the request immediately depending on the policy strength.

Office Control gives the manager all the information they need to make appropriate management decisions.

Office Control will compare sickness absences against your company’s preferred levels and highlight employees that are exceeding these levels – allowing you to examine the employees absences in more detail.

Automated

Entitlement is automatically calculated for each annual leave request depending on the employees specific work pattern.

Policies can automate the denial of leave requests.

Multiple leave types can be requested such as compassionate leave and maternity leave etc

The tasks required for a sick employee returning to work are automatically scheduled depending on the length of time absent such as a return to work interview.

Versatile and configurable

We have developed Office Control to be highly configurable to suit the majority of Company procedures.

We do understand that each business is different and always welcome specific requests to adapt and add features to Office Control to shape it to absolutely fit your company’s requirements.

FREE on-line employment law and health & safety training programme

Office Control is delighted to invite you to join a FREE on-line employment law and health & safety training programme.

To take part you don't need to leave the office! This innovative programme promises practical and plain English advice to help you deal with some of the challenges of both employment and health & safety law. To participate, you simply log on via your desktop/laptop and join the training sessions. It's free and we think it's the way to go! We are pleased to offer the following sessions:

Handling Long Term Absence. 12 noon. Wednesday 3 October 2007.

The Role Of Risk Management In Effective Health & Safety Management. 12 noon. Wednesday 17 October 2007.

Playing The Stress Card To Avoid Disciplinary. 12 noon. Wednesday 7 November 2007.

Accidents At Work - Avoiding Prosecution And Personal Liability. 12 noon. Wednesday 7 November 2007.

And there's more!

If you're a business owner, director or senior manager we'd also like to invite you to join, free of charge, a "Better Hiring, Easier Firing!" seminar. This half day event will tell you how to hire and how to keep the good people. It will also tell you how to fire the poor performers and time wasters. The seminar will be presented at venues around the UK so there will be one near you. Please don't miss it!

To reserve a place (its free!) at the webinars and/or seminar, please book online here. Alternatively, for more information, please see the brochure (pdf).

Tackling Sickness Absence

The CBI and AXA carried out a survey recently and found that workplace absence is costing the UK economy £12.2bn per annum - and that £1.7bn of that cost is due to staff "pulling sickies", rather than absence resulting from genuine ill-health. Remember that the true cost of the “sickie” includes the cost of covering salaries for absent staff, the resulting overtime and temporary cover, and lost service or production time!

Office Control partners, Ellis Whittam, believe that the CBI/AXA survey underestimates the real cost of “sickies”. Ellis Whittam estimates that the real cost to the UK economy is at least £20bn per annum.

Unfortunately the Treasury has ruled out the idea of allowing tax breaks to employers that monitor their workforce’s health, so employers are left to carry the cost of sickness absence, both genuine and non genuine. This burden can be crippling if left unchecked.

What can you do? If you have a problem with sickness absence then Ellis Whittam suggests a three pronged attack:

Firstly, carefully and cleverly monitor the frequency of absence so that you quickly pick up on unacceptable attendance patterns. We suggest that you use a system called the “Bradford Factor” to monitor absence. The best way to do this is by way of Office Control software that will alert you to a potential problem at an early stage.

Secondly, consider putting in place an occupational health system to monitor staff health and to pick up problems before absence occurs. The occupational health process should start at the recruitment stage with health monitoring questionnaires. Once an employer has some base line data it can monitor employee health on an ongoing basis, including vision, hearing, lung function etc. This is an easy sell to employees because they get an annual health check and it provides invaluable information to employers. A good occupational health system should mean that you can spot patterns that may give rise to genuine claims in the future - and take action to avoid the problem.

Thirdly, as soon as you pick up on an unacceptable frequency of absence speak take expert advice and, if appropriate, move quickly to a formal disciplinary process.

Ellis Whittam works closely with Office Control to offer clients occupational health services and unlimited employment law support. If you would like more information about Ellis Whittam please email markellis@elliswhittam.com.

Improving the application of leave policies

In a fast-paced business environment it is understandable for line managers to have to decline a request for leave from time to time.

Denying leave requests are perfectly acceptable so long as they are declined for business reasons and can be justified accordingly. Additional information should be available about denied leave requests in your employee handbook and the process for appeal of a denied request should be explained clearly. Employers should also include the justification for denying leave and the consequences of such an action in the employees' contract of employment.

There are many reasons to restrict leave such as:

• When it leaves a knowledge or hierarchy gap
• When workloads are expected to increase during a particular period
• Controlling workforce levels to maintain day to day work flow
• Not enough notice given

The above reasons are not exclusive and in many cases will vary depending on the company in question. For instance, a sales team might be restricted by marketing schedules or monthly sales deadlines whereas a manufacturing company will need to ensure health and safety personnel and first aiders are available in sufficient numbers and appropriate numbers of skilled machine operators are maintained to continue production.

This sort of business intelligence is often taken for granted and not formalised but enforced randomly where the time and situation allows. In certain situations a collective approach across departments would serve the business better. For instance, many company activities are connected though multiple departments and involve many aspects of the various teams such as project management and business development. In fact, very rarely does a department stand alone so absence management should be centrally managed as well. This does not mean centrally approved; simply applying management rules throughout the business which the managers are then to review absence requests against.

Unfortunately few managers take the necessary time to review the requested leave and just authorise as a matter of course, only to encounter the problems at the time of the absence. This is not a failing of the manager, more the company by demanding the managers' attention stays focused on day to day tasks. A head down and charge attitude is often restricted to this day, this week and sometimes to this month. Very few managers are peering more than 6 months into the future, predicting workloads, workforce levels, sick rates etc and who can blame them?

In order to effectively manage leave requests there must first be a central dump of leave information that the manager can access (filtered in some cases), record to and review, to be able to compare any number of leave policies appropriately. The process must be quick and efficient but not able to circumnavigate when preferred. Relevant leave policies that relate to the employee requesting the leave should be clearly visible and those that conflict should be highlighted to ease management.

OfficeControl goes one step further by allowing leave policies to be given strengths: alert or enforce. Alert policies inform the manager which policies have been conflicted, where as enforced policies notify the conflict to the employee requesting the leave. This gives the additional benefit of stepping the highlight of a problem, for instance 1 away from a department is acceptable, 2 needs more consideration but 3 is impractical.

Leave policies, whether informal or formally implemented are the structure to which your business can operate effectively while managing its employees' right to annual leave. It is a key area that will respond well to business change and will return the investment in all areas you would expect; better productivity, improved morale, fewer workload bottlenecks, better business responsiveness and so on.Improving the application of leave policies should be on your agenda and with OfficeControl it's just a phone call away.

How to check your leave

Checking your leave on OfficeControl couldn't be easier.

Simply log in to OfficeControl and go to Holiday > leave already booked. This section will show you all leave that you have requested and its status. This includes requested, in review (conflicted with a leave policy), cancelled and denied.

As a manager, with 'review leave' permissions, you can view all approved leave for those that you manage in Holiday > Review leave. This page is also used to approve or deny requested leave from those that you manage.

OfficeControl can also give certain users complete access to all leave requests from all employees. This may be required by HR, Directors or overviewers of the system.

Checking Leave (1.0Mb)

Employment Law, HR and Health & Safety Help

A Buyers Guide

Businesses of all sizes face a huge and growing burden in managing work place laws and regulations – from employment law issues to employment relations to health and safety compliance.

The difficulties of regulatory compliance and the financial uncertainty of high legal fees and compensation have created a new market regulatory services that challenges the traditional “pay as you go” solicitor’s model.

The concept is simple – a single fixed annual fee buys you unlimited advice and assistance; contracts of employment, policies and documents that are updated as necessary; plain English legal updates; training; representation at the Employment Tribunal; and legal expenses insurance that pays compensation awarded against the company plus health & safety defence costs if things go pear shaped.

One might have expected solicitors to capitalise on this trend – they have not. The most successful business model in this sector comes from entrepreneurial teams that combine employment law skills, personnel and health and safety professionals with legal expenses insurance. These businesses are known as “regulatory consultancies”. The market is already worth about £350 million and growing at about 20% per annum.

For businesses the great attraction of the regulatory consultancy is clear. It is a fraction of the cost of employing additional legal or health and safety professionals on site and with the long stop of legal expenses insurance it has the added benefit of security and certainty of cost.

Can the regulatory consultancy model really deliver the high quality and responsive service that you need? The answer is a cautious “yes” – but be careful!

Client feedback suggests that the best regulatory consultants offer super service at great value. However, as ever, it is important to sound a note of caution.

The Law Society does not regulate this market and there are, of course, some cowboys out there. If you are considering a regulatory consultancy, follow these simple rules:

• Seek written confirmation that all employment law advisers are either qualified solicitors or otherwise qualified by legal examination.


• Seek written confirmation that the fee includes unlimited advice and assistance (including drafting), tribunal representation and insurance to pay compensation awarded against you.


• Seek written confirmation that the business is regulated by the Financial Services Authority.


• Seek written confirmation that an independent legal expenses insurance policy will be purchased in your company name and ask for a copy of it (beware those that promise only a “guarantee”).


• Carefully check the monetary limits that the insurance policy imposes?


• Check that all the health and safety consultants are qualified by examination? Ask what qualification each has.


• Check that the contract does not demand a lengthy notice period to cancel at the end of the fixed term, for example 6 months? What happens if you don’t give sufficient notice that you want to cancel? Some providers "hide" a clause in the small print that says that if you fail to give a certain amount of notice to terminate at the end of the fixed term the contract is deemed to automatically renew!


• Check that all documentation provided will be tailor made, specifically for your business.


• Ask for at least 3 client names and take up written references? Carefully check that the service delivered is as good as the sales pitch.


• Be realistic. If you are promised a great service at a bargain basement price you will be disappointed. Pay peanuts, get monkeys!

The best regulatory consultancies are now challenging some of the UK’s best firms of solicitors for employment law and HR support work from some of the UK’s leading employers. That can only be a good thing!

Office Control works closely with leading regulatory consultancy Ellis Whittam to offer its clients fixed fee employment law and health & safety support services. If you would like more information about Ellis Whittam please email markellis@elliswhittam.com.

Free setup service

We understand that the workload involved when transferring from one system to another can be daunting. That's why, until the end of May 2007, we are offering to do the transfer for you. Simply complete the setup form and send it to us. We guarantee to have you fully set up, all your employees informed and properly trained within 48 hours.

We won't make a big fuss because it's what we do; simplify and streamline otherwise complicated processes.

PS. We'll even set up your trial of OfficeControl (up to a maximum of 20 employees)

The need for an absence policy.

Absence policies are important as they communicate the company’s procedures and expectations to your employees. They are the first step before implementing any absence management tools such as:

• Return to work interviews
• Trigger mechanisms to review attendance
• Attendance bonuses or incentives
• Absence rate as a key performance indicator

Ensuring your employees understand what is required of them, what your company considers acceptable and what the consequences are of any absence before any absence is taken is essential.

Broadly the policy should include chapters covering the following topics:

Policy Statement

1. Your commitment to employee wellbeing
2. Briefly describe the what the policy explains
3. Who has been involved in the creation of the policy & encourage staff involvement

Key Principles

1. Describe your sick pay scheme
2. Punctuality & attendance expectations
3. List support offered for genuine reasons of absence
4. Occupational health adviser involvement
5. Disciplinary procedures
6. Confidentiality
7. Notification of absence procedures
8. Self-certification arrangements
9. Return to work discussions
10. Absence due to disability/maternity

An example policy can be found at the ACAS website

Useful indicators of unplanned sickness absence

Sickness absence from your employees can affect your business in different ways, from lowering morale to the administrative task of covering their workload. Each of these effects will hinder the productivity and success of your business and its reputation in your industry and more importantly to your customers. That's why it is important to maintain a system that will closely monitor all absence from work and alert you when the situation becomes unacceptable.

There are a number of ways to measure absences, the most common being the absence rate. This rate shows the lost time that the individual has occurred over a period of time, usually a year. The UK average absence rate is 3.5% which amounts to 8 days absence per employee per year (CIPD survey 2006). The absence rate is calculated as follows:

Absence rate (%) = Days absent in period/Workdays in period

The absence rate is a good indicator of how much absence your business is enduring but it is flawed when viewed in isolation because it lumps all types of absence together and 1 or 2 long term absences can overly impact the result.

In order to get a view of absence levels weighted to highlight more disruptive absence namely frequent, short term sickness you will need to employ the Bradford factor. The Bradford factor marks an employee who has taken 10 incidents each of 1 day with a higher Bradford factor to an employee who has taken 1 incident of 10 days. The calculation is as follows:

Bradford factor = (Number of incidents in period x Number of incidents in period) x Total number of days absent in period

It is important to review the Bradford factor for an employee against their colleagues Bradford factors either across the whole company or in their department to gather comparative examples.

A similar method of monitoring absence is to count the total number of days absent due to sickness and the number of incidents over a specified rolling period. This is more advantageous than the Bradford factor alone as it takes in to account any improvement in absenteeism over time from the employee, perhaps after the situation being discussed with their line manager.

This method of monitoring offers the opportunity to set trigger points. This allows the company to set a number of incidents and a number of days in a rolling period that, once breached, is considered to be unacceptable absence and an alert is added to the employees record against incidents or number of days (which ever has been breached). The corresponding report created should be sorted by incidents and then days because, as proved for the Bradford factor, incidents are more disruptive and so should be highlighted as such.

What can you gain by improving the management of absence?

Everyone takes holidays and falls sick from time to time and that’s something you can’t change. Furthermore you already have an absence process in place. Why change?

Unless you are assigning significant resources and time, we feel that there is a better, more effective way to manage and control all absences from your company.

What have you got to gain by improving the management of your company’s absence?

• Accurate implementation of annual leave entitlement
• Improved application of absence policies
• Quicker processing of annual leave and sickness
• Detailed recording of every sickness absence
• Reduced sickness absence
• Better control of leave approvals by line managers/HR
• Reduced administration

You’re probably thinking that to improve these areas will have to cost your company more time and money than it does currently. This isn’t the case. We will show you how it will take less time to manage than your current method, be more accurate, record better information and most importantly, cost you less. The new procedure will very quickly save your business money by reducing sickness absence and manage leave more effectively (by maintaining suitable work levels).

Over the course of this monthly newsletter we will cover each of these areas in more detail or you can simply go to OfficeControl for the answer straight away.

Our monthly absence newsletter

Why not sign up to our monthly newsletter containing all things absence related including relevant issues, improvements, news, ideas, advice, discussion topics, legislation, new features of Office Control, case studies, guest writers, related issues and much more.

Just complete the form at the bottom of the column on the right and click submit.

To those of you that choose to sign up we at Office Control say thank you.

How to Review Leave

The line manager will receive an automated email from OfficeControl informing them that a leave request is waiting to be reviewed. The email also includes the name of the employee, their leave dates and the type of leave requested.

From here the manager can log in to OfficeControl and after navigating to Holiday > Review leave will see the request waiting to be approved. The requests are listed in order of time requested with the oldest requests at the top.

By clicking on the absence type you are taken to the request form itself. Any reason given for the leave request will be shown here.

If the absence has conflicted with a leave policy, it will have been highlighted in the initial email, the status of the request will show In Review rather than Awaiting Approval and a link to the conflicts will present itself against the request record. By clicking this link all the policies that this request conflicted with will be shown.

Ultimately the manager can choose to approve or deny the requested leave. An email is then sent to the employee with the appropriate decision. A record of the leave request is kept for both approved and denied leave requests which is available to view for both the employee and their manager.

See the following screen video capture on how to review leave in OfficeControl.

Reviewing Leave (1.6Mb)

Your Cost of Absence

Download the Absence Cost calculator (29 Kb)

How to Request Leave

A number of individuals can request leave on behalf of the employee as well as the employee themselves, such as their line manager and their assistant. Those members of staff with comprehensive access to OfficeControl also have the ability to request leave for everyone.

Multiple absence types are available to select from when requesting leave such as annual leave, compassionate, maternity and training. Only annual leave will reduce the employee's annual entitlement.

When annual leave is requested, OfficeControl calculates the countable days taken in this leave request and adjusts the employee's entitlement accordingly. An alert is raised to the employee if the entitlement remaining is insufficient to take the requested leave and the request is then stopped.

When requesting leave, OfficeControl will allow for all previously requested leave, standard and bank holidays and the employees work pattern (e.g. Monday to Friday).


Once the leave has been requested an email is automatically sent to the employees' line manager requesting their authorisation and a receipt is sent to the employee.

Forced leave can be requested for certain individuals, departments or the entire company. This facility could be used for office breaks (e.g. Christmas break), training days or factory shutdowns.

See the following screen video capture on how to request leave in OfficeControl.

Requesting Leave (1.6Mb)

Product Brochure

Download the Office Control brochure (726KB)

Absence control with OfficeControl

OfficeControl is a web-based service enabling your employees and managers to work closely together to reduce your company's absence rate and improve the management of annual leave.

OfficeControl helps you streamline the request and approval process of annual leave, while offering effective management and monitoring tools to improve control. OfficeControl will also record sickness absence. Office Control will monitor these absences and compare them against your company's accepted levels to highlight any issues for further investigation.

Ultimately, OfficeControl will remove the need for time-consuming paper-based management systems, giving better information and time to both managers and employees.

• Employee self-service
• Auto leave entitlement management
• Pre-management of leave requests within company policies
• Adverse injury (including health & safety and risk assessment)
• Automatic sickness monitoring against your accepted levels
• Sickness notification, self Certification and return to work interviews
• Integrated customisable reports (including absence calendar)
• Cost-effective/clear return on investment

Go to http://www.office-control.co.ukto start your free 28 day trial and see how OfficeControl could help your business.

Office Control Release Date

Office Control will be online and available to subscribe to from 13th November 2006.

Preview of Office Control

Office Control - Absence Management Online is nearing its release date. To give you an idea of what is to come here are some screen shots of the final design.

The screen shot above shows an employee requesting an absence (e.g. annual leave).

Above shows the screen where administrators can input company absence policies and work patterns.

Office Control is a comprehensive absence management system and as such this preview offers only a glimps at its offerings. This post is intended to give you an idea of what it will look like rather than what it will do.

If you would like to be one of the first to be notified of the release of Office Control, then send us an email.

How much are absences costing your business each year?

The average cost of sickness absence is £598 per employee per year.

CIPD Annual Survey Report July 2006

What is your current sickness absence rate?

The average level of sickness absence is 3.5% or 8 days per employee per year.

CIPD Annual Survey Report July 2006

Office Control Online Release Information

We are in the process of launching an online, Absence management website for businesses. Briefly it will offer employee self service, company absence policy application, online request and approval system, unplanned absence process management and many other key areas associated with absence management.

Over the next few weeks we will be finishing off the beta testing, rolling out the product to release candidates and plan to go to general release by November this year.

This is an exciting opportunity for business of all sizes to substantially reduce their costly employee absenteeism and manage the remaining absences much more quickly and more effectively.

The website will be available by annual subscription of just £10 per employee per year.

We are looking for 10 mid sized businesses to be release candidates for the product; 'Absence Control'. We are offering a lifetime discounted rate of 10% off for considered, regular feedback on user experience and facilities available. If you are interested please contact us on 0845 225 3006 and include your name, contact details and the size and type of your business.