Appears that the paging issue has come back - will fix shortly.

John

(Chris - I was using Occupancy in terms od Productivity, in context with the thread - most contact centres regardless of size use around 5% as sickness target)

Jim
>>>>Why would you not want HR to have a best practice target therefore on non-genuine absence?

The target for non-genuine sickness must be 0% - or is there an acceptable level? How do you define genuine vs. non genuine, and differentiate between the two?

In the workplace people must be treated as adults - if an employe tells you they are unfit to work, you should never enter the realms of disputing this - what if you are wrong? You risk serious liability if managers decide an employee is faking and must stay, and it turns out they are wrong. On what medical evidence & training is such a desicion based?
Therefore it comes down to managing sickness as an issue depending on the specific circumstance.

If you wish to target the managers, then again sickness is an unfair meassure as it is out of the hands of the managers. You cannot manage everything by metrics - effective management involves more than just hitting the desired KPI.

If you must choose a metric, then the most appropriate is cost p/c against target. This will account for productivity, attrition, planning, efficiency, resourcing etc; all of which are the products of management.

Certainly a target for sickness is very controversial however one should differentiate between this and absence targets. Absence targets are commonplace nowadays and are increasingly benchmarked throughout various industries.

The key to managing absence (not sickness) would appear to be in setting policies in this regard and managing interviews directly after the absence as the attached link from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development indicates ...Employee Ansence 2003, A survey of management policy and practice.

Hope this helps (although it doesnt refer to call centres one iota!!)

http://www.cipd.co.uk/NR/rdonlyres/3567D003-A014-46D2-ACEE-C3F4FE2A047B/0/employee_absence2003.pdf

BBC News Link

Very pertinent to this thread


Edited for HTML: DaveA 06-07-2004

Hi there i work in a call centre with round 130 inbound agents and 20 outbound agents. the sickness isn't measured by %. The Target they have set for eveyone is a max of 7 days in any rolling year. not including Sign off and Speicial leave. But the way they look at it differently in that they will review your sickness for patterns, such as calling in sick the day after you holiday ends the usual tricks agents like to use. If 7 days is used and an agent is to go over then a review is done and action is taken in a disiplinary way or 1-2-1 development.

There are two causes of "sick leave"

1) Genuine illness.

2) Management.

If people are ill they need to take the time off. I would hope that nobody would argue with that. And some people need to take more time than others. Just the way it goes.

If people are taking time off, saying they are ill when they are not, that is the fault of management for giving them boring, repetitive, unfulfilling work to do. Think of it the other way, if people had interesting, productive, useful work to do why would they want to skive off?

If the work is rubbish then it is management's responsibility to change things. Staff can't change their own work they need a bit of management insight to help them.

So if you have high turnover or high rates of sick leave (that you believe might not be genuine) and you are in a management position. Take a look at what you might do before you start implementing disciplinary interviews and reviews.

Hi,

I've always used the HR Budget Factor as a target for sick leave %.

ie, if your staff are allocated 10 days per year for sick leave, and there are 254 working days in a given year (no weekends or public holidays for our centre!), your target should be;

10 days / 254 working days = 3.9%


Cheers
Philip

Rob, I like your posts. In this case, as harsh and unfair as it may sound, there is a 3rd reason:

c) Bad people

Unfortunately, some people just take the proverbial. not just at work, but all over the world in all walks of life.

Having said that, nobody should be targetted to manage a % in this field. A target or forecast is perfectly acceptable as a way of understanding if you have any underlying Management problems certainly. It's also important from a planning perspective (as a Resource Planner I don't HAVE to know what the problems are, but I do need to know what may happen next week/month/year).

In terms of managing it, the principle of wanting to know if it is genuine or not should certainly be left to one side. Even accepting their are bad people, you have no way of knowing factually who they are, so it is only right you take Rob's approach and see what you can do to minimise the risk of it occuring.