This month’s expert: Simon Macpherson

Simon Macpherson has worked for Kronos for more years than he’s prepared to admit to. One thing that continues to amaze him is how many large organisations out there are still not getting to grips with costly workforce management issues such as absence. Aside from teaching people to sail in his spare time, he loves nothing better than a good old fashioned debate about absence management…

Here are some of the questions that have recently come up whilst he has been advising organisations on workforce management issues.

Like most companies we have an issue with absence, but can a monitoring system really help reduce the level of absence we have?

Generally our customers find that once an organisation starts to demonstrate that it is taking absence seriously by monitoring attendance in real-time, dealing with poor attendance in a consistent manner and perhaps rewarding good attendance, that absence levels fall. There’s no hiding place for absent staff once a Kronos system is in place – which always has a positive effect on absence levels!

We find it difficult to report on the types of absence in our organisation. Can a Kronos system log different types of absence and how many different absence types could we log?

There’s really no limit to the number of types of absence you can record – the system allows you to categorise each type of absence. In addition comments, including free format comments can be added for further detail – many of our customers record absence at a very granular level such as jury service, bad back, sick child, unauthorised day off, head cold etc. Managers can then create numerous different reports to analyse the types of absence either for the entire company, a small team or down to each individual and indeed compare best practice amongst departments.