Many companies have already seen the value of having a digital solution for registration of time & attendance. But it is not only important to have control of employee attendance – it is equally important to be able to manage their absence.

Many companies have already seen the value of having a digital solution for registration of time & attendance, supporting employee clock-in and clock-out, overtime and supplements to ensure the correct payroll basis. The solution might even support registration of which tasks and projects the working hours are spent on. This saves time for both employees, payroll administration and finance, and provides accurate data for planning and follow-up.

However, it is not only important to have control of employee attendance. It is equally important to be able to manage their absence – planned as well as unplanned.

Why digital absence management?

Most T&A software solutions support the ongoing registration of sickness, holiday and other types of absence for payroll calculation purposes.

But what about the underlying administration of the different absence reasons?

In the same way as working time is regulated by law and local agreements, there are also rules around holiday and sickness that companies must comply with. And with many employees, it is a huge administrative burden to handle this manually. Thus, many companies will benefit from digitalizing these processes. This will not only ensure that vital information is available to both employees, managers and HR – and that relevant follow-up will happen in time. It will also provide a number of financial gains that will affect the company’s bottom line results!

Managing absence due to sickness

Every year, absence due to sickness costs companies billions of pounds. The average sickness absence rate in UK companies is 1.9%, corresponding to 4.1 days per employee. This does not only leads to lost production but might also result in expensive overtime payments to colleagues who must work extra. Thus, there is a great financial gain in increasing focus on the employees’ well-being and working dedicated to reduce their absence due to sickness.

Many companies have an internal policy that outlines what to do but lack the overview of when to do it.

With ProMark, the company can automate the sickness absence management and pick up when irregularities occur. By monitoring when the company’s limit values are exceeded, the system can initiate pre-defined workflows. This provides several options for structuring the follow-up on sickness:

• If an employee has taken more than a certain number of sick days within a given period, the system will send out a notification. This will enable the company/manager to be more proactive and promote an early intervention to prevent future absence
• If the absence period is longer, the system helps to administrate illness/absence talks with employees and other kinds of follow-up

Easy handling of rolling sickness policy

If the company offers sick pay to the employees above Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) keeping track of how many days they have taken, how many days they have left (compared to entitlement) and what they are owed is quite an administrative burden.

This can be handled without manual intervention too. By splitting the illness into different periods like for instance waiting days, company sick pay and statutory sick pay, and defining the number of days before changing to the next type, ProMark can handle this automatically. If the sickness entitlement depends on the employee category and seniority with the company, this can also be supported.

The total number of company-paid sick days can either be summed up over a 12-month rolling period or a fixed period of a year (entitlement year) to prevent that a person exceeds the sickness entitlement of company-paid sick days.

ProMark will not only ease the administrative processes in the HR department. It will also ensure that current law and policies are respected and might have a preventive effect on the absence. And this will have a bottom-line effect. A reduction in absence due to sickness from 1.9% to 1.4% could correspond to a significant amount of the total payroll value. And less absence increases productivity.

Thus, there is every reason to digitalise the employee policies and create more visibility around absence. With the help of the ProMark Absence-KPI, the company can get an exact overview of what absence due to sickness costs right now, which departments are most affected and more.

Advanced holiday management

While sickness is often unplanned, it is different with holidays. Usually, holiday planning is something that both the employee and the company are interested in getting in place well in advance as it provides the best foundation for long-term planning.

In many companies, employee holidays are administered in the HR system. But managing holidays for your employees can be a quite big administrative task (as pay for holidays taken must be entered into the payroll system to get correct pay). And the more employees, the bigger the task …

Some companies need support for both elements, others just for one of them.

It is in the company’s interest that employees take the leave they are entitled to. Thus, it is important that employees have a precise, real-time overview of untaken leave in order for them to book their time off in due time. If the employee cannot take all their leave, they can carry over untaken leave into the next year – or request to have it paid off. All this is supported by our solution.

ProMark operates with ‘reservations’ which prevents an employee from taking (or carrying over) more holidays than what has been accrued. And with automatic notifications concerning approvals the company can ensure that they are made in time. Additionally, HR can get an overview of what managers approve and what is carried over.

ProMark ensures timely and uniform holiday management. The company avoids irregular handling and incorrect pay or holiday balances, as the system can notify employees, managers, payroll administration on tasks that need to be taken care of. This eliminates manual work, reduces errors and saves time across the organization.

Financial gains and increased trust with less administration

There are many advantages to gain from digitalising the absence management processes in the company. Some of them are:

• Cost optimization: Automating time-consuming, manual workflows for both employees, managers and in payroll administration reduces administrative time, cost and the risk of errors
• Compliance: The company will get support to comply with different working time rules, local agreements and internal policies regarding holiday and sickness
• Timeliness: The company reduces the risk of losing public refunding of sickness benefit, they are entitled to
• Trust: Increased trust between the employee and the company. The employee can rest assure that everything is under control