The Bradford Factor

Short-term absences are often more disruptive than the long term. Use our Bradford Factor Calculator to know their effects on your business.

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· Measure the Impact of Short Absences
· Objectively Track Employee Absences

· Increase Efficiency and Reduce Costs
· Improve Fairness and Transparency

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What is the Bradford Factor?

The Bradford Factor is a formula used to measure employee absenteeism. It measures the number of absence incidents and the duration of each incident to calculate the Bradford Factor score for each employee.

The higher the score, the more disruption the employee’s absence is causing an organisation.

Companies measure employee absence in several ways, including and excluding various types of absence. As a result, one company may have a higher absence rate than another because it includes more non-sickness variables when measuring.

Many companies fail to distinguish clearly between short-term and long-term absences, which can have profound implications for attendance management.

Bradford Factor Formula

S² x D

S = number of instances of absence of an individual over a given period
D = total number of days of absence of the individual over the same period

EXAMPLE

For employees with 10 days of absence in one year, differently distributed, the score can vary enormously:

1 instance and a total of 10 days: 1 x 1 x 10 = 10

5 instances and a total of 10 days: 5 x 5 x 10 = 250

10 instances and a total of 10 days: 10 x 10 x 10 = 1000

Using the traditional percentage method would result in the same percentage. Using this formula better shows the effects of employee absence on the organisation.

Bradford Factor and Softworks

Most time and attendance systems simply track absenteeism, while Softworks goes deeper by focusing on the frequency of absences, enabling organisations to take proactive measures and improve attendance.

In many cases, the cost and disruption of persistent, short spells of absence are greater than occasional, longer absence periods.

To address this problem, Softworks has developed a formula based on the Bradford factor, which measures the Number of Incidences and the Duration of each incidence to compute an absence score for each employee.

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What We Do – The Softworks Story…

From Time and Attendance Tracking to a complete Workforce Management Solution…

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What we have gained is better rostering, better control, comprehensive records, better reports and functionality to make changes or to test if proposed changes would work.
Bon Secours Health System

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The automatic and to the minute Flexitime calculations and the automatic holiday calculations for employees have significantly reduced administration and manual tasks.
Jewelcast

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The System allows us to operate at multiple sites with the data being transferred to a central server.
Newbrook Nursing Home

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Softworks has had a tremendous impact on the organization’s ability to be more efficient with time tracking, reporting, legislative compliance around confidentiality and privacy, and have better business outcomes.
Aids Committee of Toronto

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Team leaders appreciate the fact that they can now plan more easily and that it’s much simpler to manage holidays and flexitime for their teams.
Fusion Antibodies

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Employees find Softworks very user-friendly, they like the fact it’s easy to navigate and it’s updated in real-time, being able to check their clock cards and track actual time worked and bank time in lieu.
Aran Biomedical

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Overall we are very happy with Softworks as it provides a much quicker and more accurate way of controlling everything from clock-in to wages payout and storing personnel information.
Dortek