Understand and track employee sickness with edays award-winning sickness tracker

Sickness management refers to the process of managing sickness absences as they occur in the workplace.

Sickness absences should always be logged, along with a reason for the absence. By doing so, recurring absences can be quickly identified and proactive steps can be taken to offer additional support to the employee.

A clear absence management policy should also be in place as part of managing sickness. This will detail who an employee should inform if they are sick, the statutory sick pay they are entitled to, and what happens if they are sick for a longer period of time.

Sickness management also means people managers regularly checking in with an absent employee. It may be that reasonable adjustments can be made by the employer to facilitate the employee's return to work, or their working environment or schedule going forward if they have a recurring health issue.

A sickness tracker such as edays is a system designed to quickly record and view all absences in an organisation as they occur, providing clarity on who is off work and when.

With edays, managers can use the Bradford Factor scoring system to calculate an absence rate on a individual, team or company-wide level.

Triggers can also be set up to alert managers when that trigger is met. For example, if an employee is absent on three occasions over a set period of time.

Sickness tracking is important because it provides HR teams with an overall picture of how often absence is occurring in the workplace.

Sickness leave can affect productivity and output, add extra strain on individuals or teams that are having to cover, and be an expensive cost to an organisation. Therefore knowing exactly how sickness absence is impacting an organisation can help to empower HR and people managers to address any issues and provide additional employee support and ensure better resource planning.

There is no set length of time that is considered to constitute short-term sickness absence. In the UK for example, ACAS considers short-term sickness absence to be less than a week, whereas the CIPD considers it to be less than four weeks.

For HR, it is largely up to the preference of an organisation as set out in its absence management policy, as to what is deemed to be short- or long-term sickness absence.

In the UK, statutory sick pay is a legal entitlement that employees have, paid for by their employer, for up to 28 weeks. Some organisations elect to provide full pay to an employee for a certain amount of time (for example for the first few days of sickness leave), before starting statutory sick pay.

Like short-term sickness absence, long-term sickness absence differs from organisation to organisation. If an employee has been absent from work for a lengthy amount of time, or they have a recurring illness that requires them to be off sick regularly, these situations will be discussed with the individual. Reasonable working adjustments may be necessary, and the employer can seek medical guidance and certification from the appropriate healthcare providers to determine what is best for the employee and their role.