Hi, happy 2022 Sezer - I'm sure others will be along to help you with your question soon. Here at the CIPD we use a portal where we can enter sickness, reasons for it etc and it also logs leave and all sorts of other HR admin matters. Very handy for all members of staff not just the people team.

As ever (and I promise I have no link to the provider other than being a happy customer!), I recommend the HRIS we use, which is BreatheHR. Absences can be recorded, Bradford Factors are calculated automatically on a rolling 12 month period. A few reports can be pulled from the data (percentages of absences on certain days of the week, reasons for absences etc). All very simple and user friendly. As you say, there are many bits of of software that do broadly the same thing, so it’s down to doing some demos and seeing which works best for your needs.

In reply to Maya:

Why do I shudder every time I hear the term: "Bradford Factor"?

Oh, yes, I remember: It's because it was originally determined as an arbitrary analytic tool, not a practical measure of absence! Thus, as an arbitrary number it bears no relation to the significance of any "real" illness or circumstance of illness and should therefore never be considered as a (sole) arbiter of "acceptable and unacceptable" levels of absence, or indeed of the necessity of sickness review or intervention.

I am not being pedantic here (honest), and I know that most of the analytic systems using it, or similar benchmarks, are not referenced in isolation by colleagues , but in the interests of good employee welfare just let me ring the small warning bell that no matter how good the software, it cannot set aside the vital necessity for treating all absence as also relating to a "Human Factor", which makes one person's cause of a single day off another's (legitimate) cause for three, or yet another's "workaholic" determination to come in while suffering from a streaming cold (note I'm avoiding Covid) and passing it round their whole department! ....Good for the BF, but not good for the welfare of those who catch it (and maybe then have to take time off) or general productivity as everyone snuffles and sneezes through their week's work.

P :-)

In reply to Peter:

Agreed :) We don't use the Bradford Factor in our absence management, and as a small company we are able to use 'human analysis' of any sickness absence. I guess having the option to look at automatically created analytics offers us the option to offset any personal assumptions/subjectiveness - for example I might blithely assume that our sickness is spread across the working week, but the data could quickly tell me otherwise.

There are many, many digital solutions on the market to choose from. The first factor to take into account is how large your organisation is. If you only have six employees, then a spreadsheet is probably as complicated as you need to make it. But if you have 60, an off-the-shelf software system is probably going to make life a lot easier (which one will mostly depend on the complexity of your workforce and the budget you've been given to solve the problem). If you have 600, then a bespoke system (probably one based on Cascade or similar) is going to be a more viable option.