Attendance Insights FAQs

The percentages shown on Attendance Insights are TeamSense's absence rate, and are calculated as follows:

(sum of absent days) / (sum of daily headcount)

where 

• ‘Sum of absent days’ is the total days of absences in a given time period
• ‘Sum of daily headcount’ is the total workforce headcount each day summed across the given time period. This is often simplified as:
  (average # of employees in time period) * (count of days in time period)

For example: If your organization had 1,000 one-day absences in the month of March and over the month of March you had an average headcount of 2,000 employees, we would calculate your absence rate as:

(1,000 absences in March) / (2,000 employees per day * 30 days in March) = 0.0167 = 1.7%

Note that this calculation is slightly different from a traditional absenteeism calculation, which only counts scheduled employee workdays in a period (rather than all days). The traditional definition for absenteeism rate is as follows:

(sum of absent days) / (sum of available workdays)

where 

• ‘Sum of absent days’ is the total days of absences in a given time period
• ‘Sum of available workdays’ is the total number of scheduled workdays during the time period summed across all employees

For example: If your organization had 1,000 absent days in the month of March and over the month of March you had an average headcount of 2,000 employees, and each employee was scheduled to work 21 days in the month of March, your traditional absenteeism rate would be:

(1,000 absent days) / (~2k employees * 21 days in March) = 0.0238 = 2.4% absenteeism rate

In general, you can expect TeamSense's absence rate to be lower than a traditional absenteeism rate, since TeamSense will typically have more employee-days in its denominator than a traditional absenteeism calculation.

Interpreting data is both an art and a science, and should always be done with thoughtfulness and care. Here are some factors to keep in mind when interpreting your TeamSense Insights data:

• Absence rate: The absence rate calculation relies on the accuracy of the number of employees in your organization's TeamSense account. If that data is fluctuating for any reason, it can skew your absence rate.
  
  For example, consider an organization with 3,000 employees in TeamSense that adds another site with 1,000 employees into TeamSense, but doesn't roll it out to the new site for another month. In that case, the 1,000 employees from the new site are in TeamSense, but their absences are not, causing the absence rate to temporarily decline.
  
  
• Perfect Attendance: For an employee to be eligible for inclusion on the Perfect Attendance Report, they must be an active employee in TeamSense for the entirety of the selected period. This ensures that individuals who have only been with the organization for say, a week, aren't awarded "Perfect Attendance" for having no absences in the last 12 months.
  
  Note, however, that this means if an employee is even accidentally deactivated and then reactivated within a period, they will be disqualified from Perfect Attendance for that period. In our experience, organizations with HRIS integrations may be more susceptible to sudden changes in employee state, so we particularly caution customers with integrations to apply care to avoid accidentally missing an employee who deserves recognition for Perfect Attendance.
  
  
• Employees with the Most Absences: For an employee to be included on the list of Employees with the Most Absences, they must currently be active. Similar to our observation above for Perfect Attendance, there are times when employees may be inadvertently inactive in TeamSense records, particularly where data syncs play a role in managing employee state. We encourage organizations to be thoughtful in case such factors cause an employee to be missing from the report of Employees with the Most Absences.
  
  

Does the absence rate calculation include all absences - including partial absences and absences scheduled in advance?

Does the absence rate calculation include all days, including weekends?