Attendance Management

Managing Employee Attendance

One basic ingredient to success in the workplace is to ensure that staff are consistently attending work. As an administrator, you can positively, proactively and consistently encourage this by communicating, keeping records to spot trends or trouble spots, and promoting health and wellness with your staff.

There are existing attendance management programs in place for CUPE 116 and CUPE 2950 staff, but there are common threads to both, and principles that can be applied to all staff, no matter the employment group.

For more information on the development of the attendance management program with regards to CUPE 116, please read the 2008 HR Memo on the CUPE 116 Attendance Management Program. If you manage CUPE 116 staff, please ensure that you review the CUPE 116 Attendance Management Guidelines, and the letter to CUPE 116 employees regarding the program.

Communicate

Share information with your staff about your standards for attendance and expectations about the employee’s responsibility regarding attendance and absenteeism. (Employee responsibilities include making sure they call their supervisor to report absences, attending to personal business outside of business hours, and scheduling medical and dental appointments outside of work hours, if possible.)

Increase their awareness of the importance of being at work regularly and consistently, and how their attendance relates to their contribution to the success of your team.

Acknowledge good attendance and coach employees who are having difficulty with attendance to find solutions.

Promote Wellness

One way to decrease the use of sick time and encourage attendance at work is to promote health, wellness and safety.

In some cases, absenteeism may be a symptom of something else going on in an employee’s life.

UBC has supports in place to promote wellness, both for individuals and organizations:

• HR’s Health Promotions Programs unit has a number of programs in place, including workplace safety and injury prevention, health promotion, and a graduated return to work program
• the Employee and Family Assistance Program (EFAP), provided by Human Solutions, is a confidential counseling service for employees and their families

If you need support with attendance management in your area, contact your HR Advisor.

Keep Records

Keep accurate records of your staff’s attendance. With good records, you will be able to see if there is excessive use of sick time, and be able to spot any patterns of absenteeism.

Reporting Sick Leave Statistics to Human Resources

UBC is committed to managing absenteeism and since 2001, has worked with many Administrators in the departments and faculties to collect data on paid sick leave taken by staff.

Currently, the University does not have the technical capability to report sick leave on an individual basis via PeopleSoft. Therefore, Human Resources must rely on departments and faculties to report their data (requested by employment group and month).

UBC HR compiles data on sick leave usage and uses it for the following purposes:

• included in the “Time Loss Management” report presented to the Executive and the Board of Governors, providing a snapshot of the health of our staff and faculty and including statistics on the usage of sick leave (staff only), Income Replacement Plan, Employee and Family Assistance Program and the Return to Work Program
• used by HR Advisory Services in conjunction with departments to benchmark data on sick leave and design attendance management programs (once implemented, the data is used to assess how effective the programs are in managing absenteeism)
• used as a tool for Deans, Directors, Department Heads and Administrators to benchmark sick leave in their department or faculty against the rest of the University

See UBC HR’s Attendance Management FAQs for more information on reporting sick leave statistics.