As well as recording holidays, The Holiday Tracker can be used to track other types of absence, most notably sickness. Sickness absence can be added to an employee’s calendar by their manager, or an admin.
As you add sickness to a calendar we automatically calculate The Bradford Factor and Sick Days Heat Maps for that individual:
If you’ve never heard of the Bradford Factor before, it’s a simple calculation devised by the Bradford University School of Management and is used in HR to measure employee sickness. As short, frequent, and unplanned absences are more disruptive and harder for an organisation to cover, the Bradford Factor gives more weight to these compared to single longer absences.
This is best shown with a couple of examples. Jamie below had broken his leg, and was unable to make it into work for 3 weeks. This was his only period of sickness, so the Bradford Factor is low:
Jessica, on the other hand, had a habit of calling in sick on a Monday. Despite having only five days sick, because they’re separate instances, her Bradford Factor is much higher:
Also notice that Jessica’s Sick Days Heat Map clearly identifies that there is a pattern here with Mondays:
It’s important to be aware that The Bradford Factor and Sick Days Heat Maps are calculated on a rolling 12-month basis. So any sickness you add to an employee more than 12 months ago, or in the future will not be included in the calculation.
Reports
We have a range of reports available to admins from the Reports page, most of which can help you get a good view of the sickness in your company. The Annual or Date Range reports both contain a Sickness column that show you, for each employee, how many days sickness they’ve taken in that time period:
Our Absence Detail report allows you to filter by Absence Type, so you can specify that you’re only interested in Sickness. This report will then contain each sickness entry in the date range specified:
And our Sickness report contains the Bradford Factor and Sick Days Heat Map for all of your employees. It’s ordered by Bradford Factor, so those employees with the worst score sit at the top:
Awareness
While the Bradford Factor and Sick Days Heat Map are only visible to managers and admins, we do show your employees how much sick leave they’ve taken:
There is a phenomenon known as Reactivity that occurs when individuals alter their performance or behaviour due to the awareness that they are being observed. So by showing this information to your employees every time they login, it can cause some of them to change their behaviour.
In fact, 83% of our customers have reported a reduction in sick leave in their first year with us.
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