Budgeting for Employee Absences

HPW Ideas Worth Sharing:

When an employee has to take time away from work for illness, there is still typically work that needs to get done in their absence, and it is often left to managers of individual departments in universities to figure out how this will be accomplished. Depending on the type of leave arrangement, the employee will continue to be paid, and this can limit options to replace the employee even temporarily if managers do not have access to extra funds to pay a replacement.

Given that it is inevitable that employees will experience illness, it would seem prudent for universities to have a separate salary fund that can be accessed by departments to cover the costs of replacing a sick employee. Although this may not seem practical in the context of shrinking budgets and fiscal restraints, the long-term effects and resulting costs of increasing the workload of coworkers of the employee on leave should not be underestimated.