December 2008 - Sickness absence

Sickness absence leaves Irish organisations feeling poorly

Softworks is first to market with a new product to help companies track social welfare cheques and payments

A staggering sum of 1,029,990,000 euro was paid out by the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs with respect to illness, disability and caring benefits in 2002. While there are no figures to illustrate if beneficiaries were employed or unemployed, time consuming calculations with respect to sick leave mean many businesses are out of pocket due to unclaimed or unreturned social welfare cheques. This leads to the bizarre situation that an employee may actually benefit from pay from two sources while out sick.

To help companies minimise the negative effects and expense of sick leave while at the same time simplifying the process for calculating and reclaiming sick pay, Softworks will be launching AbsenceWise, the first commercially available social welfare tracking and "leave" calculation tool, at the CIPD Annual Conference, 22nd & 23rd May 2003.

A module of the BusinessWise suite of solutions, AbsenceWise has been developed due to customer demand for a product that will reduce the administrative and time-consuming process of reclaiming employee sick pay and assist with the drive to reduce absence incidences. Although there is no entitlement in Irish Law for an employee to be paid while off sick from work, many companies do have a sick scheme policy in place where employees are entitled to pay when out sick."

"Support from the Department of Welfare presents employees with an opportunity to claim back a certain amount of pay but challenges arise for organisations when it becomes necessary to track and calculate certified and uncertified sick balances as well as track whether cheques have been received or not, along with complications that arise from other types of leave such as Parental, Carer's Leave, Force Majeure and more recently Adoptive Leave policies," comments Andrew Ferguson, Managing Director of Softworks.

There are many difficulties faced by HR and Payroll when it comes to estimating the amount of sick pay due to employees. According to Ferguson, those responsible for monitoring sick leave need to know how many sick days have been taken by each employee to date, how many sick days individual employees are entitled to, if any employees have taken more than their entitlement and who is not entitled to sick leave. They also need to ensure the correct balances are applied to each employee and that sick leave payment or cheques have been signed over to the organisation or deducted from the pay packet. All of this is made more complicated by the fact that there are different types of rolling years/periods eg. tax year, calendar year, 12 months from first absence etc. With regards to other types of leave, it is necessary in the case of parental / adoptive leave to know with respect to which child the leave is taken, the age of the child etc. to ensure entitlements are not exceeded.

AbsenceWise will ease the process by linking with a company's existing payroll package to provide the payroll department with the ability to automatically process calculations in relation to payment of sick and other types of leave. AbsenceWise integrates with the ClockWise Time & Attendance / Flexitime solution as well as other third-party applications i.e. HR & payroll and T&A systems or implemented as a stand-alone product. Softworks will be exhibiting at Stand 31 at the CIPD Exhibition, Great Southern Hotel, Killarney on Thursday 22nd & Friday 23rd May 2003.