People Inc. Features

Absence Management – Employees who work away

Introduction

People Inc. has comprehensive absence management tools to manage all aspects of absence whether it be managing holiday requests and providing current holiday balances via the Employee Self Service to managing Shared Parental Leave and key Maternity dates and tracking sickness via reports such as our Bradford Factor or Monday Absences reports.

People Inc. is also extremely flexible and provides a facility for managing other forms of employee ‘absence’. A recent example of this is where a customer needed to be able to record and manage when their employees were working away on business.

Identifying customer requirements

The customer needed Managers to be able to record these ‘working away’ periods and then to be able to view this information along with other absence types such as sickness and holidays on a ‘calendar viewer’ therefore being able to monitor their teams’ availability.

There were a number of ways of doing this but we wanted to configure something that was quick to deploy and easy to use, without the need for additional costs. We decided to make use of the standard functionality within People Inc. the customer could make these changes themselves with some minor guidance rather than require additional consultancy to set this up for them.

Absence Management – Working Away Absence ‘Rule’

We soon established the most effective way of doing this was to create a new absence rule within the Absence Rules Configuration screen to create a new absence rule “Working Away”. This means periods of absence can be assigned to this rule so it could be monitored fully alongside other types of absence or hidden on other areas such as Holiday and Sickness reports.

Managers record ‘Working Away’ via ESS

This was then configured People Inc. so that Managers can add “Working Away” periods for their team members via the Employee Self Service Module (ESS). This is the same process used for managers to record sickness for their team within the ESS. The Absence screen allows the Manager to record the details of this in the notes box.

Absence Rules configuration screen

Viewing absence via ESS

As managers add records to the system via the ESS they can view this along with other absence types on an Individual Absence Calendar for each employee. This is also available to Employees when they log in to the ESS but obviously they only see their own absence calendar

Individual Absence Calendar

Monitoring availability via ESS

Managers and Employees can then check availability for their team via the Group Absence Viewer. This shows who is off, when and why within their team and can be configured so it only shows specific absence rule. Sickness can be hidden for example.

Group absence Viewer

Other potential absence types

We could also use a similar method for other types of absence management for example:

• Days spent on Training
• Non-Working days (for Part Timers)
• Term time Hours (for Academies/Schools)

To find out more about absence management using People Inc. to record employees working away contact us on 01242 663974