Sixty-Eight Minutes

Somebody calls in at twenty past six. The shift starts at half seven. In between there is a little over an hour, and that hour contains every decision that determines whether the day works.

The practical issue in “Sixty-Eight Minutes” is easier to manage when operational time records can be checked without treating activity as intent. For teams exploring employee monitoring software, employee monitoring software can add time and project context, provided collection is proportionate, employees can review inaccuracies and consequential decisions receive human review.

Almost none of the writing about absence management is about it. The literature is about policy, trigger scores, the conversation when somebody comes back, entitlement and pay — all of which happen days or weeks later, to a record rather than to a shift. The hour itself is handled by whoever happens to be awake, usually with no process, no list and no authority, and it is where the cost is.

For an independent benchmark relevant to “Sixty-Eight Minutes”, consult the ILO working-time resources. Use it to test scheduling, working-time limits, attendance records, employee rights and exception handling against the real operation rather than treating a software report as self-explanatory evidence.

What the hour has to produce

A decision about whether the work can be done with the people available. That is the whole of it, and it decomposes into three questions that have to be answered in order.

What is actually missing — not a person, a capability. The shift needs somebody who can administer medication, or drive that class of vehicle, or sign off the line. Losing the only person on shift who holds that is a different event from losing one of five people who do the same job, and the two are indistinguishable in any absence record.

Whether anybody can fill it, which means a list, phone numbers that work, and somebody with the authority to commit money. And if nobody can, what the day looks like with the gap in it: which tasks drop, who is told, what the consequence is.

Why it is nobody's job

The hour falls between departments. HR owns the absence record and is not awake. Operations owns the shift and finds out when the call is passed on. Finance owns the cost of agency cover and is consulted afterwards if at all.

So the person who handles it is a night supervisor, a duty manager, a team leader — somebody whose actual job is something else, who has no written authority to spend, and who is improvising against a list that may be three years out of date. They usually do it well, which conceals the fact that the organisation has no process at all.

What gets measured instead

The absence rate. The Bradford score. Days lost, by department, by quarter. Every one of these describes the record afterwards and none of them describes the hour.

The operational measures — how long it took to resolve, how many calls, whether the shift ran short, what it cost, what dropped — are not collected anywhere in most organisations. They exist only in the memory of the person who made the calls, and they leave with them. An organisation can know its absence rate to one decimal place and have no idea how many shifts ran short last month.

The three numbers worth having

Time to resolution: from the call being received to cover being confirmed or the shift starting short. This is the operational equivalent of an incident response time and it behaves like one.

Depth of the call-out: how many people had to be contacted. A list that routinely goes four or five deep is a list that is about to fail, and it gives warning months before it does.

Shifts run short: the count of shifts that started below the required number, with what was missing. This is the number that should go to a board and almost never does.

None of the three requires new software. All three can be written on a sheet by the person making the calls, and three months of sheets is enough to argue with.

How the hour divides

In the mornings that have been timed, the pattern is consistent. A few minutes on the call. Ten to twenty before anybody who can act has heard. Five to work out what is actually missing, where that is possible at all. Then the bulk of it on the phone, and a short tail on telling people.

The two expensive segments are the second and the fourth, and they have different remedies. The relay delay is a routing problem fixed once, in advance, by naming a destination that is always staffed. The phone time is a list problem, and no amount of urgency shortens it if the list is three names deep. Knowing which of the two is eating your hour decides where the effort goes, and the only way to know is to write down the times for a month.

What this collection is about

The hour, and everything that makes it easier or harder: how the call reaches you, what the rota left you to work with, who is on the list and whether they answer, who is allowed to say yes to an agency rate at ten to seven, and what gets written down once the day is saved.

It is not about entitlement, sick pay, trigger scores or what is said when somebody comes back. Those are well covered and they are a different subject with a different reader. This is for the person holding the phone.