January absence is not always a sickness story

Every year someone forwards an absence chart with a red January. In Georgia that month holds New Year, Orthodox Christmas, and the days people take because the office is already half empty. If the leave system codes those days as unpaid or as “other”, they land in the same bucket as flu.

We print the public holiday calendar on the month axis. It is unglamorous and it prevents a meeting about morale that should have been a meeting about coding. May and Easter weeks deserve the same mark; a plant that ran through a weekend will show overtime beside a polite absence rate, which is a different operations story.

Repeated short absences versus a few long ones also belong on separate pages. Combining them into one “absence rate” helps nobody who has to roster a warehouse.

If you want this drawn for your sites, the Absence and Hours Pattern Study is the commission that exists for it. Bring the leave codes, not a theory about January.