As the nights draw darker and the temperature drops colder, the dreaded winter illnesses pick-up. This can cause a spiralling effect on staff absence and cost of supply cover. Without effective staff absence management, your organisation could be spending thousands on supply cover across the winter periods each year.
Without a seamless absence management process and an unclear policy, staff may feel under supported. Can you accurately track who is off across your school, college or Multi-Academy Trust at any given time? Paper and email-based systems can cause delays and inaccuracies in absence monitoring and tracking.
Going digital with your absence management process can help to ease administration and provide real-time data at your fingertips. Leadership teams can quickly assess where cover is needed, which Return to Works are due and where intervention and support may be required. So, how can digital solutions, alongside other support, help your school, college or Trust this winter?
- Communicate the staff attendance policy accurately and often to staff. Our experience is that once the absence process is clear and being tracked with support offered, absence rates are reduced. Using a digital system means policies and updates can be sent directly to staff with a requirement for reading and signing that they have read it.
- Monitor absence and common illness trends. Our customers find that once they are able to see how absence is occurring across the school, they can address issues, make improvements and plan for peaks.
As well as policies and digital management, it can be useful to provide information, advice and support to staff about how to keep well this winter.
- Set up a flu clinic or encourage your staff to get their flu jab.
- Encourage staff to exercise regularly, drink plenty of water and keep up their vitamin C levels. Could you provide access to free drinking water stations and fruit for staff?
- Ensure a healthy work life balance for staff to ensure rest and recuperation is prioritised. Sleep is vital to keep healthy and revitalised, so enforce this with your staff and support healthy working guidelines.
- Offer Occupational Health services to your staff, maybe through an employee assistance programme. Our team at FusionHR can help with this.
Our SAM software can support the digital aspects of staff absence management in your school or Trust and our FusionHR team can help build wellbeing strategies and absence policies.
Clare Bourne, Communications and Data Manager at Furze Down School, uses SAM and commented,
“Using SAM has made a considerable difference to managing staff absence… We can easily carry out and monitor return to work meetings, giving informed feedback to staff and we can see the impact that this has on our absence rates. The system enables us to track, monitor and follow up absences effectively, using triggers that are in line with our policies. It enables us to identify issues quickly and easily and provide support where needed…”
Book a demo with SAM here to see our Staff Absence Management software in action. Speak to the team at FusionHR here to discuss wellbeing strategies and more.
