Absence policies

Absence Policies are the group of different rules that you can assign to a contract. You can have as many different policies as you like and assign them to any contract. This allows you to have different policies for different types of employment and also adjust policies over time while maintaining your older policies for staff employed at that time.

Why do we need seperate Absence Policies?

You might need to have different policies for different types of staff. For example, you might have  permanent staff who receive occupational sick pay (OSP)/maternity pay etc, and they would need a policy to encompass all of that. Then, you would need a separate policy for your casual staff who only receive statutory sick pay (SSP) and don't have the same benefits of OSP as permanent staff.
Having Absence Policies, allows you to separate this out in your contracts, so casual contracts can have an absence policy that only includes SSP, and permanent contracts can have the more typical full policy that also includes entries for maternity, paternity, compassionate etc.

You can manage your policies under System > Absence and Breaks > Manage Absence Policies. Add a new policy under the Actions menu.

Each policy holds Policy Entries for different types of absence. So you can have a set of rules for Sickness and a different set for Maternity under a single policy.

Create a policy set

First you will need to create a policy set, which will contain all the policies you will use for a contract. The policy set will need a name and to know whether it should use the Bradford Factor calculation. Once you have named your new policy set, you can start adding policies. You can add all the policy entries that will be required under the contracts you are wanting them to be tied to. Remember that each absence reason (i.e. sickness, training, maternity) can have its own policy configured. 

(Additional absence reasons can be added at the top of the Absence Policies list. This will allow you to add any custom reasons you wish to your policies. You can then expand these custom reasons with detailed policies.) 

Adding a policy entry 

You will see a list of policies running down the page that all relate to a different absence reason. Click add policy to get started.

Each Policy Entry will have the same structure. There will be at least one entitlement level. 

Entitlements can be categorised by duration and the permitted rollover period for absences. You may choose to calculate entitlements as a rolling total from the previous 12, 24, 36, or 48 months, or within the standard holiday year.

You can also separate entitlements based on length of service. The system can offer different amounts of paid absence depending on how long the staff member has worked at the company at the time of their absence. This is based on their Continuous Employment Start Date. The specific benefits an employee receives may depend on their length of time within the company. For example, in accordance with government guidelines, maternity pay eligibility often requires 26 weeks of continuous service. You may wish to configure this by establishing two distinct entitlement levels: one for staff with under 26 weeks of service and another for those exceeding this threshold.

Then, within each entitlement you can add phases which are defined by the duration of the absence and the renumeration the staff member will receive during periods of an absence. An example of this structure is shown below. We will now go into more detail on how to create and manage phases.

Phases

Under each policy entry (e.g. sickness) you then have phases. Phases dictate how the policy works, for example, a sickness policy might be made up of three phases. The first unpaid, the second paid a full amount and the third paid a smaller amount ect. When you create a new phase you will need to set what duration this applies to, this could be days, weeks or months. You will also want to specify if you are including all days or only a staff member's working days.

You will then need to set whether this phase of absence will be paid or not. If it is paid there are several options on how you can do this. This can be a percentage of a staff member's normal wage or you can create a pay element of exactly how much the staff member will be paid. If you want to set this up for Statutory Sick Pay (SSP), check out our step by step guide here.

You can have as many phases as required and each phase can have different durations and pay items. The pay items instruct the system to add one of those pay items into the payroll system on those eligible days. For example, there is a SSP pay item that will pay a full-day of SSP when someone is absent and eligible.

The screenshot below shows how a policy entry might look once created in StaffSavvy.

We can also export the information stored here to your payroll system; please contact StaffSavvy support so we can discuss how best to provide this information.

Once saved, the system will then automatically calculate payment for these phases when someone is absent. You can then continue to add more policy entries to your policy set. Once you are happy with this you can go to Pay > Contracts > Manage Contracts > Edit a Contract. Then under the absences tab you can select a policy set.

You can also configure here if you want absences to be confirmed by a manager.

It is important to remember that absence policies will take into account your max working days for fixed holiday. For example, if you have set the max working days to 5 days a week, any absence will be limited to include only 5 days in that week.

Absence Reasons

When using absence policies you will also need to have already created some absence reasons. These absence reasons will need to cover the main reasons staff take absences. However, you are also able to add your own custom absence reasons by creating a new absence reason. 

Under your absence type you can set whether it relates to a holiday or an absence. If it relates to an absence you will be able to add it to your absence policy. You can also decide whether this type of absence can be overwritten by other requests.

Additionally, you can make this type of absence only requestable by managers. If this option is enabled staff members will not be able to submit requests. This will only go into effect once you disable the allow self requests option under each relevant reason.

Remember, you are able to edit your own absence reasons at any time but you cannot edit system reasons.

Absence Reason Categories

In addition to the absence reasons, you can add different categories within that absence reason to further break down all reasons for absence. For example, you might have different medical reasons for Sickness.

These categories can be set for a period of absence and can be used in reports for more detailed analysis. You can also enable the ability to make absence reason categories required. This means that an absence must have a category set or you will not be able to add the absence. To do this go to Global Settings > Staff & Contracts > Scroll down to the Absences tab and enable the Require categories to be set if they are available option.

Then, to create a category, simply view the absence policies and use the Manage Absence Reasons, in the Actions menu to view all absence reasons. Then use the Edit Reporting Categories to manage the categories for each absence reason.

You can also decide if you want to add to set it up, so that the system automatically creates and absence record and/or a sickness time entry when that absence reason is used. Under the absence reasons