Sick on Monday; back by Friday – absence

Recent research by Mercer has found that 35% of all sick leave is taken on Mondays but only 3% on Fridays. Which must mean the vast majority of those away on Monday are back in by Friday (if not Tuesday).

Mercer suggest that Monday sickness and frequent short-term absences can be a symptom of low employee engagement and morale. More cynical readers might wonder whether this might better be credited to weekend excess and little fear of the consequences of staying away.

Cynicism apart, the real lesson of this survey is that the sophistication of many HRIS systems makes detailed analyses easier than ever. Mercer extend their own analysis to consider differences between men and women and between full- and part-time staff. But why stop there? Many investigations into absence fail to be useful because they aggregate too many different causes and situations. Modern HRIS systems enable you to avoid that pitfall and the consequent over-generalisations.

Perhaps you should code in all the additional stuff you know about your staff and work out what proportion of the Monday sickies had been playing soccer or rugby at the weekend? Or rock climbing? Or sky diving? You might improve your absence statistics at a stroke by sifting out all those application forms that proudly fill up the ‘other activities’ box with such high-risk pastimes. After all, few train-spotters or embroidery enthusiasts end up in A&E on a Sunday afternoon.

Work for idle hands

Surveys are a great source of topics for blogs. A recent set of statistics by HireScores, a recruitment-related website, claims that Brits waste a third of their working day ‘pretending’ to be busy. Is that surprising? We all have procrastination strategies to put off difficult tasks or to avoid starting ones we cannot finish today. But 2 hours 20 minutes per day? And that is only the average. A whopping 32 per cent admit to wasting an average of 3 hours 15 minutes every day talking to colleagues and feigning work. That is nearly half of a typical working day.

And that, of course, is not counting all the time that they spend on work-related activities that are not actually needed: over-long meetings; meetings where they are only there to watch; reading emails copied to everyone in sight.

So why does nobody notice? Is it a failure of supervision or even lack of leadership? Primarily it is a failure, in many areas, to specify roles and outputs clearly, often accompanied by soft staffing levels. On the plus side, however, the survey did find that 40 per cent of workers stayed late at least once a week in order to finish a task. But then they would need to, wouldn’t they?

HR by numbers – measuring workforce performance

The CIPD has announced the latest in its compendium of toolkits. This one is on Human Capital Management (HCM). Mostly I am very impressed with their toolkits. They provide a good deal of clarity and help people understand what the various topics involve (thankfully, without implying that it is so easy that they do not need professional help!). In this case I am not so sure.

It may just be that I have always reacted badly to HCM as a piece of jargon. ‘Human Resources’ as a replacement for ‘personnel’ was meant to imply a wider, less bureaucratic role but soon became just as easy a butt for jokes (and HR is easier to say than personnel) so some tried to achieve the same end by implying that Human Resource Management (HRM) was the ‘something else’ that could take HR to the centre of organisational life. That never found currency outside the HR bubble. Human Capital Management is a term mostly kept away from the workforce, which is just as well as it is meaningless in everyday life. However employee-centred your company’s approach, do you really want to be referred to as piece of ‘capital’ that has to be ‘managed’. So; putting that little rant aside there is a lot of good stuff in the toolkit. So what’s my problem?