Tag: absence management blog

5 Ways Employee Absences Cost Businesses Money

Posted on

February 2nd, 2021

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Employee absences are an unavoidable aspect of running a company. While employees rate vacation time, sick leave, and paid time off (PTO), these absences have direct and indirect costs. Businesses need to account for these costs when planning their budget, but absence-related expenses can be difficult to calculate. The following breaks down the most common costs associated with employee absences:

  1. Payroll. When employees take time off for vacation, illness, bereavement, and so on, they still pull a paycheck. While employers calculate their employees’ salaries into their budget, they may not account for the loss of work while employees use their paid leave.
  2. Overtime. When employees take time off, particularly if there is little notice, other employees may have to work overtime to bridge the labor gap. For non-exempt employees, businesses pay time and a half the employee’s hourly rate for every hour worked over 40 hours.
  3. Temporary workers. When businesses want to avoid overworking existing employees and the associated cost of overtime, they may use temporary workers to cover absent employee’s duties. These part-time temp workers may cost less than paying overtime, but it’s an expense that affects a business’s bottom line.
  4. Loss of productivity. Whether a business opts to pay existing employees overtime or rely on temporary workers, productivity often decreases. Coworkers aren’t as familiar with the absent employee’s job, which typically means it takes longer to complete. It also stresses employees who have to take on the additional work on top of their existing job, which can lead to burnout. While temporary workers don’t have the burden of juggling two jobs, they’re unlikely to know the minutiae of the work. Their unfamiliarity slows productivity.
  5. Unplanned absences. While some leave is easy to plan for, such as vacation time, emergencies and life situations can force employees to take leave with little notice. The hidden costs of repetitive unplanned absences are numerous. They can hurt morale, stress the remaining staff, lower work quality, disrupt projects, and more.

While some employee absences are unavoidable, businesses need to know the associated costs. Without a robust absence management system, it’s easy to miss attendance problems and absenteeism. Contact the experts at Actec to learn how our absence tracking mobile app can improve absence reporting and management for your business.

4 Measurable Benefits of Absence Management Technology

Posted on

December 14th, 2020

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HR needs modern solutions to improve the accuracy of attendance tracking. Upgrading outmoded systems such as manual record-keeping or physical timecards saves money and improves productivity. Antiquated legacy systems for attendance will always fail to meet expectations. Businesses that invest in modern attendance software can reap the following benefits:

  1. Improve accuracy and compliance. The risk of clerical errors is high for manual or low-tech attendance systems. Even a small margin of error can result in significant fiscal mistakes. Overpaying or underpaying employees hurts the organization’s bottom line and can lead to compliance issues. Investing in absence management software can eliminate clerical errors for accurate timekeeping, payroll, and complying with Department of Labor regulations.
  2. Curtail time theft. Time theft is one of the biggest knocks against manual timekeeping systems. Employees can alter their hours worked to conceal if they arrive to work late or leave early. These outdated systems also allow for buddy punching, which occurs when one employee clocks another in or out to hide attendance infractions. While 10 minutes here or there may not seem like much, the American Payroll Association reported that buddy punching costs organizations $373 million every year. Efficient time tracking software can help curtail these issues.
  3. Improve productivity. Robust attendance tracking systems do more than simple attendance keeping. Many include features like submitting PTO requests so employees can request time off without a convoluted chain of emails. This reduces the amount of time managers spend on HR tasks, which allows them to focus on more relevant projects.
  4. Actionable insights. Absence management software provides businesses with attendance data and trends. This information can pinpoint departments with chronic tardiness or isolate individual employees trending toward absenteeism. Knowing where to focus improvement efforts yields better results than issuing a company-wide generic message about attendance.

Antiquated absence tracking methods can hurt profits, cause compliance headaches, and lack data to identify attendance problems. Actec’s absence tracking mobile app is a self-service tool that captures all your employees’ absence data, ensures compliance with labor laws, and more. Contact us to learn more about modernizing your absence management system

5 Ways to Foster Better Wellness through the Workplace

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May 6th, 2019

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Straight from cold and flu season to allergy season, most workplaces are seeing an increase in requests for time off due to illness. While these sick days are understandable, they still have a negative effect on productivity and put additional stress on the remaining employees. Taking the following steps can help prevent the spread of illness in the office:

  1. Eat nutritious foods. Eating a balanced, healthy diet can boost immune health. Providing employees with nutritional guides, apps, or even food during the day can help to adjust unhealthy habits and improve immune system function.
  2. Use appropriate hand washing techniques. Many people don’t wash their hands correctly. Giving a cursory rinse won’t do much to rid them of germs. Employees should aim to wash their hands with soap and warm water for one minute or longer. Employees should make it a habit to wash their hands regularly, especially before eating, and proper dispensers and cleaning agents should be used.
  3. Sanitize desks and high-traffic areas. Any surfaces that employees interact with regularly are breeding grounds for germs. The flu virus can live for an extended period of time without a host, so it’s easy to spread it around the office. Further, pollen, pet dander, and other contaminants get tracked in from outside and can aggravate allergies and sensitivities among colleagues. Using a sanitizer on surfaces and objects employees touch regularly can help reduce the spread of inflammation, disease, and other stressors.
  4. Encourage sick employees to stay home. Many employees feel compelled to return to work before they are fully recovered. This is a two-fold problem. For one, the employee may relapse from pushing too hard too soon, causing an even longer delay in their return. Another issue is that they may still be contagious and infect other employees. Ensure that you provide your employees with an adequate amount of sick time, that processes are in place in each team for such occasions, and that working from home during recovery is as easy as possible but not compulsory.
  5. Review sick leave policies. Employees need to understand their paid time off for sick leave and their options should they use it all. Employers also need to remain cognizant of protected leave such as time off that falls under the ADA or FMLA. Employers should also consider allowing employees to work from home following an illness. The CDC recommends employees stay home for a full 24 hours after they are fever-free without the assistance of medicine. While they may feel well enough to work, they could still be contagious.

Taking steps to ensure employees stay healthy is a great way to prevent absences due to illnesses. To learn more about absence management, contact the experts at Actec.

Absence Management Fundamentals

Posted on

June 12th, 2015

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Absence Management Article Published

Posted on

January 31st, 2013

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Actec recently published an absence management article to one of the most highly regarded online journal/article repositories in the world. Here’s an excerpt:

According to many leading industry organizations, Absence Management Programs are implemented to help control absences due to illness or injury. The goal is to target and mitigate unexplained, unscheduled or excessive absenteeism. Some of these management programs cover a broad array of absences, often referred to as “Total Absence Management”, while others focus on rapid response for a narrower scope of absences, often called “Day One Absence Management”. Casual absence management (dealing with brief illness and non-illness related absences) also plays an important role in both types of programs.

To read more, use this link: http://EzineArticles.com/7466659. For more info, contact us.

Top Absence Management Blogs

Posted on

January 24th, 2013

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We’ve been blogging a lot lately about absence management. It represents a crucial component of efficiently and accurately managing large-scale organizations in which untracked absences can cause devastating effects on the bottom line. Here some popular recent blog articles on absence management principles and solutions: