During the summer months, many employees are looking to extend their weekends into vacations. Depending on how your organization sets up their leave buckets, the requests for time off can come through in many different ways. Different types of absences can impact the way your organization operates. For example, an employee who decides to not show up after a holiday may have a stronger affect on your organization as opposed to an employee who schedules their vacation far in advance with plenty of notice.
There are three types of employee absences:
- Planned Absence
This is an employee absence that is planned long in advance, and requested far ahead of time.
Due to the planned nature of this time off, your organization can better prepare for an employee absence and ensure it will have little to no affect on your day-to-day operations. Your organization can easily plan who will take over that employee’s tasks well in advance to make sure the organization runs smoothly in their absence.
- Unplanned, or Last Minute Absence
An employee requesting leave within a few days of the requested absence date identifies as an unplanned, or last minute absence.
This can impact your day-to-day operations, and though you may feel inclined to say, “no” immediately, the manager should first see if someone else can complete that employee’s tasks. If you can find appropriate coverage for the employee who has requested off, it is in your best interest to grant the leave request. If you do not approve the leave request, the chances are the employee will come in on the desired days off, checked out and not performing up to standards.
- Unexpected Absence
An unexpected absence is when an employee does not show up on the day they are supposed to be working and has not requested, or had time off, approved.
The best practice for dealing with this type of absence is making sure you document the absence. If possible, it’s recommended to wait until the employee is back in the office before seeing which leave bucket this absence should come from. The documentation is important, as it may come in handy to reference with discussion, performance reviews, or even termination. After you are through documenting, begin to figure out which employees can pick up the absent employee’s tasks to make sure your business operations are not impacted.
Dealing with employee absences can be a frustrating, time-consuming ordeal. Ensuring employees are requesting leave in a timely manner, keeping track of who has time off, and documenting all absences is crucial to running an efficient organization. Luckily, technology can ease this process for HR administrators, working as their sidekick to monitor leave requests and employee absences. HR technology allows you to classify and identify the different types of leaves all while keeping an electronic copy that is readily available and always on file for reference. Managers approve leave requests in advance and have visibility to see which employees are out to ensure that all bases are covered throughout the organization. Technology is here to help manage all aspects of your organization. Adopting new methods will lead to a highly effective and efficient organization filled with motivated employees.
This DATIS Blog was written by Carley Donovan, DATIS, on August 5th, 2015 and may not be re-posted without permission.