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How to track staff absences?


How to best track staff absences?
Schools generally have elaborate processes to track student absences and lateness.  In fact, our Student Information System (Rediker) began as a computerized method for tracking attendance, then expanded to gradebook and report cards, etc.
Tracking staff absence is an after-thought in many schools, especially when starting up.

What is the purpose of tracking faculty absences (and lateness):
  1. Payroll office needs confirmation of workdays and sickdays, to properly track contract fulfillment and adjust salary accordingly;
  2. Principals need to plan substitution schedules, and counsel staff regarding any issues;
  3. Colleagues need to adjust collaboration plans (with both teachers and other classrooms);
  4. Community members aid others who are sick or bereaving;
  5. Social groups want to know about members of the group, particularly that they are fulfilling their obligations to the group;
  6. Parents want to know when their child’s teacher is absent, particularly for long periods, as this affects both learning and behavior;
  7. Group members get a sense of the (literal) health of the institution, by seeing how many are absent on a given day, for what purpose;

We do not pay overtime, so HR and Payroll do not care to track specific hours, nor do they track work outside normal business days.  Thus our new fingerprint-recording system’s main database only tracks a single In/Out sequence, and only on weekdays.   (Other data is however available in underlying files.)

As we are a G-Suite for Education site, we use Google-Calendar for our official calendaring system.  My predecessor set up a secondary google-calendar called Teacher Absences, that is viewable by any staff member.  Different AdminAssistants write an all-day entry into that calendar for each staff member absent, or they add a timed event for some part-day events.  The event name is the staff member’s name, plus a code to explain the absence: S, PD, PL, etc.   This result is helpful for the staff, but quite unwieldy when lots of people are absent, because the entries fill the screen, blocking the view of normal calendar entries.   This is only for colleague purposes, not for official HR records.

There should be a better way that displays the absent names, but does not overwhelm the screen:
  1. Maintain a single item that would be updated with names in the Description field?  This would require a click-through in order to see any names.
  2. Maintain a single item for each AdminAssistant to fill with the names of her absent staff members?  If more than 1 or 2, the viewer would naturally click to drill down to view the full list.  If none, then that AdminAssistant would have no entry.
Neither of the above solutions answers the need for multi-day planned entries such as surgery or childbirth or PD or Bereavement or Personal Leave.  My answer to that is either:
1- start with the single-day absences, and let the multi-day continue as is;
2- keep one entry every day, thus the AdminAssistant would need to repeat those multi-day names in each day’s entry (a bit more work, but more organized).

We also must track absences officially, for HR and payroll purposes. Our Rediker information system can be adapted to track staff absences, but before we spend time on that, I wonder if others can suggest efficient and effective ways that their school is tackling this knotty issue?

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