The Hidden Cost of Manual Absence Management
Managing holiday and sickness absence records can become a bigger admin burden than you realise.
Absence management doesn’t usually feel like a major administrative burden, particularly when you only have a handful of employees. Someone emails to ask for a week off. A manager approves it. The spreadsheet gets updated. Someone phones in sick. Their manager makes a note. HR updates the records when they get a chance. Each individual task takes only a few minutes. But add them together across a growing workforce and absence management can quietly become one of those HR processes that takes far more time than anyone realises.
And the cost isn’t just administrative time. Manual processes can make it harder to know who is off, whether holiday records are accurate, whether sickness absence is becoming a concern and, sometimes, whether important HR processes have happened at all.
Manual Absence Management Usually Starts With A Spreadsheet
For a small business with a handful of employees, a spreadsheet can be perfectly adequate. You might have one person responsible for approving holidays, everyone works similar hours and there aren’t that many requests to deal with.
Then the business grows. You employ more people and some could be working different days or hours. More managers become involved. Employees start sending requests by email, text or WhatsApp. Someone creates another spreadsheet because they can’t access the original one. Before long, what was a simple system relies on several people remembering to do several things. That’s usually where the problems begin.
The Administration Nobody Counts
Think about what happens when an employee requests annual leave.
Employee sends the request.
Someone checks whether anyone else is already off.
The manager approves it.
Someone updates the holiday record.
The employee’s remaining entitlement may need updating.
Other managers may need to know about the absence.
And at some point the employee will probably ask: “How much holiday have I got left?”
None of those tasks is particularly onerous. But when you multiply them by 10, 20 or 50 employees over a year and the minutes soon start adding up.
Sickness absence creates even more administration. There may be notifications to record, medical certificates to obtain, return-to-work meetings to arrange and absence levels to monitor.
When those processes depend on individual managers remembering what needs to happen, things inevitably get missed.
The Real Cost Isn’t Just Time
The biggest problem with manual absence management is often the lack of visibility it creates.
Which record is correct?
The manager has one record. Payroll has another. There’s a team calendar somewhere and HR has the master spreadsheet.
Hopefully they all say the same thing. But do you know that they do?
Who’s actually off?
It shouldn’t take three emails and a look through another manager’s calendar to establish who is on holiday next Friday. Yet in businesses without a central absence system, that’s surprisingly easy to find yourself doing.
Are sickness absences being followed up?
An employee returns to work and everyone gets busy. The return-to-work meeting gets postponed until tomorrow. Then tomorrow becomes next week. Eventually it doesn’t happen at all.
If nobody is monitoring the process centrally, patterns of short-term absence can also be surprisingly easy to miss.
Are holiday entitlements accurate?
This becomes particularly important where employees work different hours, join or leave part-way through the holiday year, change their working pattern or have irregular hours. A simple holiday spreadsheet can suddenly become considerably less simple.
Five Signs Your Current System Is Starting to Struggle
You don’t necessarily need HR software simply because you employ a certain number of people.
But there are some useful warning signs:
-
✓
Managers are keeping their own holiday or sickness records. -
✓
Employees regularly ask someone to check their remaining holiday entitlement. -
✓
Leave requests arrive through several different channels. -
✓
You have to check more than one place to establish who is absent. -
✓
You’re not completely confident that the records are up to date.
If several of those sound familiar, the issue isn’t necessarily that your spreadsheet is badly designed. You may simply have reached the point where the business has outgrown it.
What Does a Better Absence Process Look Like?
The aim isn’t to introduce technology for the sake of it. It’s to remove unnecessary administration.
An employee should be able to request annual leave without sending emails backwards and forwards. The appropriate manager should be able to see the request, check who else is absent and approve or decline it.
The employee’s holiday balance should update without someone having to amend a spreadsheet.
Employees should be able to see their own entitlement without asking the MD.
Sickness absence should be recorded consistently, with managers able to see previous absence and identify patterns that may need attention. And, crucially, everyone should be working from the same information.
When Is It Time to Consider an HR System?
There’s no magic employee number.
We’ve seen relatively small businesses where a spreadsheet works perfectly well and others where complicated working patterns mean manual administration becomes difficult very quickly.
✔ The question is really:
How much time are you spending managing the process — and how confident are you that it’s working?
If absence administration is becoming increasingly time-consuming, records are being duplicated or you’re relying on managers remembering to update several different systems, it may be worth looking at an HR system.
Why Kea HR Uses Breathe HR
At Kea HR, we work predominantly with small and growing businesses, so we’re not interested in recommending an enormous HR system with hundreds of features you’ll never use. We use Breathe HR because it’s designed with SMEs in mind.
It provides one central place to manage annual leave, sickness and other absences alongside employee records, documents and other everyday HR information.
Employees can access their own information and holiday balances, managers can approve requests and the business has a much clearer overview of what’s happening.
But the software is only part of it. Setting up an HR system properly means thinking about how your business actually works: holiday years, working patterns, approval routes, absence types, employee entitlements and who should have access to what. That’s where we come in.
Thinking About Moving Away From Spreadsheets?
If your current absence system works, we’re not going to tell you to replace it simply because there’s software available. But if you’re spending more and more time updating records, answering holiday queries and checking whether information is accurate, it may be costing your business more than you realise. Kea HR can help you decide whether Breathe HR is right for your business, set it up correctly and support you once it’s up and running.
Need Help?
|
Still managing holiday and sickness absence manually? Book a free, no-obligation Breathe HR demonstration and we’ll show you how it works using the sorts of everyday absence situations you deal with in your business. |
Book Your Free Intro Call |
Get the Latest Legislation News and My Top Tips delivered straight to your inbox |
 |
