Measuring sickness

I do it as a % of the expected hours the staff member will be paid for. So we include OT and Annual leave.

Hi,

I keep my sickness calculation straight forward, as the reality is that you normally only need to know the % of an agent or teams contractual hours which are spent on sick leave.

However, what I find more useful is to monitor overall staff availability/absence as a % which accounts for other types of absence such as dependency leave or last minute holiday requests. I work this out by firstly discounting annual leave which is booked with plenty of notice (i.e. if you want people to book leave more than 2 weeks before the date, then anything booked this far in advance is not counted against them or the staff availability statistic - but still monitored of course!). From this, the staff availability % is then affected only by last minute annual leave, sickness, dependency leave etc. Basically anything you can't really forecast or account for. I also record and add back in any additional staffing cover we have help out in the team during these times of absence or agreed overtime with other staff.

I have designed an excel spreadsheet to monitor this for my team, where I just enter in the hours missed by each employee each month (broken down into Monday - Friday as I originally noticed patterns of sickness taken on set days of the week!!) and add in any extra hours worked or cover acquired. I find this very useful when put alongside other bits of MI as sometimes sickness may not bee too bad, but other forms of absence may have had an adverse effect on performance.

Whilst my own spreadsheet is not necessarily going to be a one size fits all solution, I would be happy to send it over if you would like to take a look?

As an example - Say I had someone who worked 7.5 hours a day and there were 20 days in that month; Then lets say this person took 2 hours sickness/absence on one Monday and 15 hours total over two Fridays, but they also had booked 2 days off on annual leave well in advance. Lastly lets say I did not get anyone in to cover this absence. The calculations in my excel spreadsheet would effectively look like this:

Monthly Contracted Hours = 7.5hrs x 20 days = 150 hrs

2 days (15hrs) annual leave (booked in advance = NOT DEDUCTED)

Monday absence = 2hrs
Tuesday absence = 0hrs
Wednesday absence = 0hrs
Thursday absence = 0hrs
Friday absence = 15hrs
TOTAL ABSENCE - 17hrs

(Same as above for additional cover/overtime - in this example 0 on all days)

Contractual hours ACTUALLY WORKED = 150 - 17 (+ 0 cover) = 133

Hours Actually Worked / Contracted Hours (*100) = Staff Availability %
133 / 150 *100 = 88.67%

Hope this helps?