ATTENDANCE MANAGEMENT

SFU is committed to fostering a culture of regular and consistent attendance at work and promoting health and wellness among our employees. The proper and timely management of absence from work will contribute to a healthier workplace; the effective management of sick leave costs; and ensuring that all employees are devoted to delivering better services. For this purpose we have developed the Attendance Management Guidelines (AMG) as part of your management toolbox to help employees reduce high absenteeism. Please click here for an electronic copy of the Attendance Management Guidelines.

The objectives of the Attendance Management Guidelines are to provide management with the necessary tools to manage employees that may have unusually high levels of sick leave absences. Therefore the goals of these guidelines are to promote regular attendance at work, evaluate and understand absence problems and most importantly to manage non-culpable absenteeism consistently across the University.

Sick Leave Record Review

Online sick leave information is available to any supervisor of record in the Human Resources/Payroll system myInfo (https://myinfo.sfu.ca). This sick leave information is critical in helping manage absenteeism.

The sick leave report contains sick leave information for each of your continuing employees who directly report to you. It contains the year the absence occurred, the employee’s ID, the employee’s name and total employee sick leave hours. For APSA and Excluded staff, a breakdown between casual illness (sick 21 hours or less[1]) and sick leave (more than 21 hours) is shown. Although temporary staff is not included in this report, they should be considered for non-culpable absence management. For CUPE staff after November 4, 2019, only the total sick leave hours will be shown.  

For absence management purposes, some employees will be marked with an asterisk [*] in the sick leave report. This signifies that your APSA and Excluded employees have used sick leave equal to or greater than twice the University average. For your CUPE staff, it signifies that employees have reached the threshold of 4 occurrences and 14 days (98 hours). This is one of several important variables to determine when to engage an employee in an absence management discussion.

Supervisors of these employees should carefully consider the individual circumstances of each case and based on those considerations determine if any action should be taken.

There will be times when a review of the record with Wellness & Recovery staff indicates that a discussion with the employee is not required as there is a reasonable explanation for the rate of absenteeism, even though the employee is over the threshold. For instance, where an absence was caused by an isolated illness or injury (such as a planned treatment or surgery, or a motor vehicle accident) and there are no other problems with the attendance record.

Sick leave information is presented in two tables:

a)    The first table contains sick leave information for each of your reports.  It contains the year the absence occurred, the employee’s ID, the employee’s name, total employee sick leave hours, a breakdown between casual illness (sick 21 hours or less) and sick leave (sick more than 21 hours), and a link to Details.

Some employees may be marked with an asterisk [*]. This signifies that the employee has taken sick leave hours equal to or greater than twice the University’s sick leave average for that particular year or for CUPE staff after November 4, 2019 that they have reached the threshold of 4 occurances and 14 days as indicated above. If your employee has been flagged with an asterisk two or more consecutive years, please contact the Wellness & Recovery (W&R) office or HR Advisor on ways to best handle each of these cases individually.

NOTE: If an employee has no sick time recorded then he/she will not show up on the list.

The Sick leave information table looks like this:

If you click on the Details link on the far right column, myInfo will list every single day the employee was sick in that specific year.  It will also provide you with details about the absence - less than, equal to or more than 21 hours[1], the number of hours and the day of the week the absence occurred.  This information is valuable to identify absenteeism patterns.

NOTE: This page only allows you to view one employee’s one-year sick leave information at a time.  For example, Mickey Mouse for 2010.

You can download this data to Excel using the Download button

[1] For APSA and Excluded employees, casual illness is equal to or less than 21.6 hours and sick leave more than 21.6 hours.

a)    The second table, at the bottom of the Review Sick Leave screen, is the Sick Leave University Average Table. This table illustrates the average sick leave hours for all CUPE, APSA, Excluded, Poly Party and Senior Management University employees for the last 7 years, and provides a breakdown of average casual illness and average sick leave hours. As mentioned earlier, CUPE staff will no longer be counted in the average casual <21 and extended >21 after November 4, 2019.