Utilizing Different Absence Features in Silverbucket
Choosing the best approach for your absence projects depends highly on whether or not you wish to track the capacity situation in Silverbucket.
- If you wish that the overall capacity levels stay the same during an absence you can use absence projects to your advantage
- If you wish that the overall capacity diminishes over the course of an absence, you can use the admin panel's absences.
Absence Project
There are two approaches on how to use the absence projects:
1) Creating multiple absence projects in Silverbucket for different absences. You can create multiple projects marked as absence for different absence scenarios. For example:
- Absence project named "Holidays"
- Absence project named "Part-time work"
- Absence project named "Sick leaves"
- etc.
When you resource the person for these projects the absences will be shown as allocations for those people. These allocations will be indicated with dashed / bolded borders in Silverbucket's views.
2) Creating one absence project with multiple different tasks for certain absences. Different absence types in this project could be:
- Annual leave
- Doctor's appointments
- Unpaid leave
- etc
Projects marked as Absence do not automatically mitigate the overall capacity. By allocating to an absence project the free capacity is diminished.
You should register actual hours for absence projects as well. This way Silverbucket's reports clearly state that the absence happened and simultaneously the hour balance remains stable through times.
Absence Set by an Admin
If the absence should decrease the overall capacity of a person for a certain period you should use the admin panel's absences. This is a great example for longer absences, such as
- student leave
- maternity / paternity leave
- etc
As the person comes back from a longer leave, our support can even their hour balance in the Timesheet view if necessary - support@silverbucket.com
Part-time Employees & Changing the Workday Length
For part-time employees we suggest adjusting the workday length to match their weekly capacity to keep the Timesheet hour balance intact.
Adjusting the workday length takes immediate effect in Silverbucket views; if the person was resourced based on the previous value before the change, you might see some underload (green) or overload (red) situations which should be addressed by re-allocating the person.
Example: A Finnish employee works full-time on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Tuesdays and Thursdays are agreed with his supervisor to be days off to advance studies for the next 6 months.
A regular workday in Finland is 7,5 hours. So, one week regularly consist of 37,5 hours of work for a Finnish employee. However, due to the special agreement to advance studies, the company can only expect a 22,5 hour workload from this person during weekdays.
We can further divide this 22,5 hours by 5 to calculate the average workday length between these 5 days, which would be 22,5 / 5 = 4,5 hours.
As we adjust the person's workday length to 4,5 hours, the system will expect 22,5 hours in a week from the person as actual hours. As the person works 7,5 hours on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays, we accumulate a total of 22,5 (3*7,5h) hours in one week.