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Broken down into its core elements, effective absence management can be seen as a combination of ten strategic and operational activities.

Strategic

1. Taking preventative and educational measures to encourage employee well-being
2. Establishing policies to tackle long-term absence e.g. occupational health intervention
3. Managing absence in the context of other Human Capital Management disciplines, such as performance management
4. Establishing an effective disciplinary framework
5. Analysing trends and investigating root causes of absence

Operational

1. Gathering and distributing up-to-date information about absence to line managers, HR and other interested parties (e.g. insurance companies)
2. Actively managing and intervening in absence episodes, from arranging initial cover to offering rehabilitation programmes and conducting return-to-work interviews
3. Enforcing disciplinary procedures
4. Maintaining absence records
5. Calculating the costs (direct and indirect) to establish business impact

HR professionals instinctively recognise which of these components generates the greatest value from a people management perspective. After all, at heart absence management isn’t about keeping records or distributing data – it’s about prevention and intervention. Return-to-work interviews, trigger mechanisms to review attendance, the use of disciplinary procedures and encouraging line managers to take primary responsibility for managing absence are all identified by CIPD as effective approaches for managing short-term absence. Meanwhile, the involvement of occupational health services and the provision of rehabilitation programmes, along with flexible working opportunities, are some of the options for managing those off work long-term.

In addition to providing support for employees who already face health problems, there is mounting evidence of the benefits of taking a proactive, preventative approach. A growing number of organisations are now focussing on promoting employee well-being as a means of reducing absence costs and boosting productivity – and some are even linking health and well-being promotion to management competences.

But these strategic issues can’t be tackled in isolation, and an organisation’s ability to develop and execute a high-value absence management programme rests in part on how successfully it completes the operational components – essentially, managing data and workflows. And in practice, for every sophisticated absence initiative launched by organisations such as GlaxoSmithKline (see Part Three), there are ten, twenty or a hundred more organisations struggling to get to grips with the basics.

Take the beginning of an absence episode. In many organisations, employees simply call into their department or send a text message to a colleague on the first day that they’re sick. The line manager’s immediate priority is to mitigate the business impact of the sickness, which usually means assessing workloads and priorities and where appropriate, arranging cover. At some stage HR will also be informed, perhaps by email or on a paper form.
Given that absence is usually unforeseen – early cold symptoms notwithstanding – and often creates significant short-term difficulties, it’s not surprising that the process doesn’t always work smoothly. Informing HR is unlikely to be top of mind for the line manager, so inter-departmental information flows are often haphazard – particularly if the manager is unaware of the different processes that need to be triggered in HR. In some cases, details of the absence don’t even get from the message taker’s desk to the line manager sufficiently quickly.

These problems percolate through the rest of the absence process. If basic absence data doesn’t make it to HR, in turn the processes required to deal either with short-term absence (such as disciplinary hearings) or long-term episodes (such as occupational health interventions) won’t be triggered on time, if at all. Similarly, if procedures aren’t comprehensively enforced, important steps in the absence cycle – such as return-to-work interviews – are likely to be missed.

These issues are frequently compounded by data management problems. With manual systems, data that’s already been entered once in an email often needs to be rekeyed by an administrator into the HR system, which brings in the potential for errors and is inherently inefficient. In addition, many companies have no central information store for their absence data, with information distributed across emails, spreadsheets and different HR management systems. Even if absence data is successfully captured at the start of an episode, it’s a common mistake for absence records to be left open after the employee has returned to work, undermining the accuracy of historical data. It’s no coincidence that when organisations come to upgrade their HR systems and look to ‘clean up’ their data, incomplete absence records is usually one of the biggest headaches.

Nor is it a surprise that in Webster Buchanan’s survey of HR managers earlier this year, 78 per cent of respondents agreed that the difficulty of getting relevant data together undermines their reporting and analytical capability.

Combined, these data and process failings create both operational and strategic problems. They make absence management processes clumsy and inefficient, causing unnecessary difficulties for both HR and line managers. They derail efforts to tackle unacceptable absences through disciplinary procedures. They undermine HR’s ability to make effective interventions in order to reduce both short- and long-term absences. And they thwart organisations’ efforts to understand and tackle the true causes of absence. In short, they’re costly to employees, costly to line managers, costly to HR – and costly to the organisation.

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