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.