Partner Article

The admin nightmare of absence tracking

How paper and spreadsheets could be a problem for businesses returning to work

*With employees, managers and HR personnel working from home or off sick, paper and spreadsheet sickness forms and holiday requests are piling up. This backlog of admin is not only creating a significant time burden - it is also causing confusion around staff resource and wellness issues at a time when leadership teams need maximum clarity.

What are the problems presented by paper-based systems, and how can businesses adapt in order to make day to day working life and the return to ‘normal’ work more seamless?*

Steve Arnold, CEO, e-days.com

Approving holiday request forms and filing sickness paperwork can be a thankless task for the person who administers them. All too often, employees are asked to fill in paper forms which need to be sent to several different people before they can be approved. This can require a round of emails as well, to ensure everything has been agreed. Overall, it might be a process that is inefficient and time-consuming, but still, a stunning 40% of organisations and departments have stuck to the trustworthy spreadsheet and paper trail out of tradition and habit as their main tracking mechanism (Source: Fosway Group).

What was already a complex manual process to manage, suddenly has a new dimension added to it in the form of the coronavirus pandemic. With workforces based remotely, businesses that rely on paper-based systems are finding processing staff absence requests a struggle. The potential fallout of this affects both employer and employee, with resource management being key, and annual leave being the second most important benefit an employee can obtain from work. What can businesses do to make absence tracking less of a nightmare?

Avoiding holiday disappointment

Since lockdown, there has been a push of encouragement by many organisations to ensure their staff are still taking annual leave during these turbulent times. For many this is less than ideal: many employees still have hope of a sunny getaway in the latter half of the year once the pandemic restrictions loosen.

Businesses are looking for new ways to track and maintain balance with annual leave requests to prevent a situation where all staff are away at the end of the calendar year. Companies using paper-based systems to request and agree on time off will be finding it even more difficult to manage and track annual leave, and to analyse patterns in leave booking requests. What is also becoming clear is that many employees may put in holiday requests for the same period, and this could lead to friction.

Organisations using web-based software, that can be used on a mobile phone to track absence and leave have found it to be 100% accurate. They have also found that leave requests are easier to maintain and less likely to be misplaced, which in the past has led to confusion in the number of days of leave remaining. The benefits of introducing these systems to manage leave is clear in costs saved. It aligns the business under the same platform, making it easier for managers approving leave, and employee’s clarity on their entitlement.

Keeping connected with your workforce

Using paper, or using static spreadsheets sent around as attachments to account for holiday leave can lead to a disparate workforce. A potential problem from manual processes like these is a lack of time to prepare the wider team for an individual’s absence, and therefore their handover.

As we are forced to work from home, we no longer have the luxury of face to face interactions with colleagues. Creating a centralised digital location, where organisations can keep track of requests and approve them, means that this information is not only visible to all, but can be accessed with ease. This also removes the possibility that team members taking on a larger workload are ill-prepared and instead better equipped to pick up extra work as and when they need to.

Requesting time back

The question of how to claim holiday back when you have been sick during your time off is often complex. Big businesses have processes that need to be followed. One issue arises with communicating this to all parties involved, not to mention the individual who controls the annual leave spreadsheet. But another issue comes with logging this return of holiday, to keep on file for future reference. Since the nation has been forced to work from home, paper-based systems have proved tricky to manage. Sending a spreadsheet around teams to input annual leave has also proved ineffective, as incorporating details related to annual leave that may have been returned to an employee due to them being sick whilst on holiday is hard to capture and note.

Implementing new digital solutions surrounding annual leave will help us to prepare for the ‘new norm’ – a world where we have returned to work, and where the lockdown has eased. Regardless of where we are working, we should be able to track who has been sick, who is sick, who has not had time out, and who is owed time out. All these factors will affect a business’ ability to function effectively post-COVID crisis.

The new normal need not be a chaotic, and this is a good time for companies to introduce new operational efficiencies. With centralised, digital leave tracking, we will be well on our way to balancing the workforce and reducing needless admin, making the most of our business days as we navigate a new working order.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Steve Arnold .