27 Jan 2010

How does the Bradford Factor reduce absenteeism?

Webmaster

We announced yesterday that LeaveMaster now automatically calculates the ongoing Bradford Factor score for every employee in your organisation. But what is the Bradford Factor and how does it help you reduce absenteeism?

The Bradford Factor is a unique formula that helps you identify which employees are damaging your business by taking too many “sickies,” by giving a rating to each employee based on the number and length of their absences over a year.

The Bradford Factor formula is: E x E x D, with E the number of episodes of absence and D the total number of days absent over a rolling 52 week period.
By penalizing employees with many short leaves more than those with a small number of long-term absences, the Bradford Factor helps managers and HR departments identify staff who have been regularly feigning illness.
So for example, if an employee is off for 12 straight days on genuine long-term sick leave, but this is their only episode of absence in a year, their Bradford Factor will only be 12.
1 x 1 x 12 = 12.
But if another employee, who regularly claims to be ill on Mondays and Fridays, has also taken 12 sick days over the year, but has called in sick on 8 different occasions, their Bradford Factor will be 768
8 x 8 x 12 = 768
This high score would highlight the need for remedial action to be taken against the employee.
As well as providing managers and HR professionals with evidence of absenteeism, the Bradford Factor acts as a highly-effective deterrent. Knowing that it will give them a high Bradford Factor score, staff are discouraged from calling in sick if they are not really ill, especially if the organisation has a trigger system in place whereby mandatory action is taken against employees whose Bradford Factor score reaches a certain level.
To find out how you can use LeaveMaster to automatically calculate each employee’s Bradford Factor, click here.