I was reading the July/August copy of newsbriefs from ISCEBS and noticed a survey on absence management.
The results stated (could not find a web link to this) that only 12% of companies track the cost of absenteeism and an average cost of $260 per day of employee absneteesim.
The complete integration of absenteeism is quite difficult. Benefits, staffing, HR and payroll must share data well in order to understand the true costs. Most organizations are so lacking in this area, that absenteeism is often unknown for all associates. For example, exempt employees self manage their vacation and sick time, and their supervisors don't always monitor the accuracy of time taken. It's even worse when you have employees who work at home often and you can't manage the time actually worked.
Then take into account the vacation/sick time which is easily (I didn't say well) managed through an automated time and labor system like Kronos. Add to that disability management that Benefits is doing. Add to that the temporary and contract labor force that the staffing department is handling. And of course leaves of absence that are often tracked by HR somehow. Now it's possible that your organization has centralized the processing and tracking of each of these missed work days, but more often than not, I see a complete lack of integration when I visit organizations.
More and more, HRO vendors are trying to bundle "leaves management," absence tracking and staffing into their package of functionality. At this time however, I simply don't see any good solutions on the market, and unless you have an integrated ERP or data warehouse, its difficult to retrieve this data. This would be the ideal model considering the HR silo'd nature of absenteeism. A data warehouse and a few cognos cubes run the metrics which are them presented on the Manager Self Service portal in some sort of a metrics dashboard. Hmmm... how many of you have SAP? Perhaps Oracle Fusion will get us there as well?
