How to set staff working periods for accurate staff absence statistics

This article explains how to set staff working periods to accurately track staff absences. It details the process of adding working periods, the impact of these periods on absence statistics, and how to report on them. It also addresses common questions regarding bulk settings, contract variations, and lunch breaks.

To get an accurate picture of how many working hours are impacted due to staff absences recorded, you can set up working periods for your staff members to note where they are part time. Setting up a working period means that an absence will only count the hours that fall within a staff member's working period.

Please note that:

• If a staff member's working period spans half a day or less, each full day of absence will be counted as 0.5. This means that 2 days of absence would be counted as 8 hours on the Statistics page if the staff member works 8am-12pm.
• If an absence is recorded outside of their working hours, it will not be included in the hours lost calculation.

Permissions

You'll need the Staff Profile: Action: All Staff: Basic HR Administration permission. If you don't have permission, you'll need to ask your admin team to give you permission using these instructions.

Add working periods for staff

To add a working period for a staff member, go to their staff profile and scroll down to click +Add in the Working Periods section.

In the slide over, you can select when the working period applies and select the days of the week the working period applies, then click Save Changes.

In this example, you can see the staff member works a half-day on Thursdays.

Report on working periods

You can report on staff working periods in the Custom Report Writer.

1. Create a report following these instructions: Creating bespoke reports in the Custom Report Writer
2. Make sure to select that the report is about Staff.
3. When adding columns, in the Working Periods section you can select Working Days, Start Time, End Time and Weekly Working Hours.
4. You can see the working period information in the report, and filter to see staff without working periods set if needed.

Working periods FAQ

Can we set Working Periods in bulk?

It is not possible to add these in bulk for different staff members.

Can we set Working Periods for different contracts?

It is not possible to add different Working Periods for staff for different contracts. Their Working Periods should apply to all their roles in combination.

Why are the days lost half the expected amount?

Please see our guidance here: Why is a staff member's absence 0.5 days?

Why are the hours lost numbers incorrect?

You may see the hours on the Absence Statistics page to be not quite as expected. This can occur when Working Periods do not have effective dates and times. This causes the absence to be taken from the start of the school day.

To fix this, ensure all Working Periods have a start and end time, and a start date.

Do working periods factor in lunch breaks?

Working periods don't include lunch breaks, so a working period of 8am-5pm will be treated as a 9 hours of work. If you'd like to include lunch breaks or any other breaks in staff absence calculations, you'd need to set up multiple working periods.

In this example, the staff member works from 7 am-9 am, then 3 pm-5 pm so I have set up two working periods for them, one for the morning and one for the afternoon. Any absence recorded will then only take into account the hours specified within the working period, so for this example, a full day’s absence would count as 4 hours missed.

How do working periods work with Cover?

If you're assigning cover, the working periods you've added to a staff member's profile will determine whether they're marked as available for cover.

• If you're assigning the cover inside their working hours, and they're not already assigned to another event, they'll show as available.
• If you're assigning the cover outside their working hours, they'll show as unavailable.

Can we add different working periods for Week A and B?

It isn't possible to define different working periods for each week if your school operates on a two-week timetable. You would need to instead create an event for staff to mark them as unavailable for cover.