How does the Bradford Factor work and can it be used successfully if only 3 days sick are paid at your work?
Answers:
The Bradford Factor does not work to determine how many days sick you should be paid and the number of days paid sick leave is irrelevant to using the Bradford Factor.
The purpose of the tool is to determine whether it is likely that an individual has been swinging the lead.
It works by: multiplying the square of the number of periods of absence an employee has had by the total number of days off that they have had.
So an employee with 10 individual sick days (i.e they have been off sick 10 times) has a Bradford Factor of 10 ^ 2 x10 = 1000
Whereas an employee who has been off sick for 10 concsecutive days has a Bradford Factor of 1 ^ 1 x 10 = 10
The numbers themselves are meaningless without a benchmark for your organisation, for example it may be that the nature of the work you do causes most people who do the job to take off 10 individual days of sickness a year and therefore a score of 1000 is normal for your organisation (I hope not - but it does happen).
Once you have a benchmark (usually by analysing existing absence data), you can then see if someone's score is much higher than the normal range for their job in your company. But the tool is only a guide to whether someone is "swinging the lead", it is entirely possible that other factors come into play and before any disciplinary action is taken it is sensible to ensure that an interview is conducted with the employee to determine the facts surrounding any "suspect" periods of absence.
And most importantly that any action taken - takes into account the Disabilities Discrimination Act, so you can't just discipline someone for a high Bradford Factor - nor can you reward for a low Bradford Factor.
Yeah it can be!! I had to create a load of reports that worked on the bradford factor for our HR department. But it is up to an individual company to set up the Bradford Score (ours is at 125). So its number of days off x number of days off x number of occurances (i think - am a bit rusty!!). Its based on the fact that 5 single days off over a year impacts harder on the business in revenue and costs more than if a person were off for one occurance for 5 days. so 5 x 5 x 5 = 125 where as 5 x 5 x 1 = 25. Does that make sense?
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