Absence Management in a Modern World

  

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Did you know that on average 3% - 10% of your organization’s employees are absent every day?  

When an employee is absent from work, productivity declines, causing a waterfall affect on other’s productivity- potentially impacting the bottom line. Managers are tasked with finding resources to fill vacant positions as quickly as possible. In traditional methods, this may mean that the manager has to ask other departments for resources, call in employees on alternate shifts, or hire contract workers to fill these positions.  All of these tasks could lead to an increase in overtime and force management’s attention away from core tasks.
In recognizing this, organizations are turning to automated processes to identify open shifts as soon as possible and getting the right resource to fill those shifts at the lowest cost. Using the right workforce management tool, absences can be identified before they occur by allowing the employee to call in via an automated IVR (interactive voice response) system to record an absence. Identifying an absence prior to the start of shift provides management extra time to fill the shift before commencing.

There are several approaches to filling an open shift.  This includes offering the shift to a defined employee(s), allowing employees to bid on the shift, or selecting the most qualified resource using automated lists based on qualifications, skills, minimizing overtime, or seniority.

Shift Offer (aka Overtime Equalization) is a means of filling an open shift that has been put in practice by organizations for decades. This is the process of offering overtime shifts in a fair and equitable manner. Traditionally, this process has been a very painstaking process where the list of employees needs to be manually updated to reflect who the offer should be made to next. The calculation of ‘who’s next’ can be based on many qualifiers including seniority, wage, grade, last offer, overtime worked, or any other arbitrary calculation. Today, automation offers a more expedient way of calculating ‘who’s next’ and displaying a list based on customer-defined requirements. Ranking methods can be specified to list employees in the right order, the first time – all within seconds. Managers can make decisions of the awarded shift, or employees can accept or reject an offered shift electronically. If the qualified resource(s) is not available to fill the open shift, the list can be escalated to include additional resources in the organization that are qualified to perform the job; allowing for many shifts to be filled before the shift even begins.

Shift Auction (aka Shift Bid) draws on the same concept as Shift Offer in a more employee-led approach. Employees may bid on the open shift electronically and at the close of the auction, the winner of the shift is automatically determined based on the highest rank.
In an organization where Shift Offer or Shift Auction is not a requirement or a solely manager-led approach is desired, automation can provide the most qualified list of resources, called call-lists, for the manager to select who should be placed into the shift. Using simple drag-and-drop technology, assignments can be made in seconds. Automated notifications of newly assigned shifts or schedule changes can be sent directly to the employee to notify them of a schedule change.
 
The fact does not change that every day your organization will have to manage absences and how it adversely affects your bottom line; however automation can significantly reduce the cost of absences and provide efficiencies to your process so your managers can get back to business

Loralee Bodo - Director of Product Strategy

Mrs. Bodo joined TimeLink in July of 2007 as a Pre-Sales Solution Consultant responsible for the TimeLink Enterprise Edition product. Throughout her tenure with TimeLink, she has become an expert in the TimeLink offerings and has greatly contributed to the product direction and feature set. Loralee is now responsible for setting the strategic direction for TimeLink's Enterprise product suite and a contributor to the company's overall product strategy. Loralee holds a Bachelor of Science in Management Information Systems and Finance from The University at Albany.