What is the absenteeism rate?
The absence rate shows the proportion of hours an employee spends absent from work compared to their regular working hours in a given month. It is expressed as a percentage and helps you identify and compare absence patterns within your company.
The calculation formula
grape calculates the absenteeism rate according to the following principle:
Absence rate = (Absence hours / monthly target hours) × 100
What are the monthly target hours?
Since months have a different number of days, grape uses a standardized month for its calculations: Monthly target hours = Weekly hours × 52.14 / 12
This results in a month with an average of 4,345 weeks — regardless of whether the month has 28, 30, or 31 days. This ensures that all months are comparable.
Example (full-time): An employee works 40 hours per week and was absent due to illness for 10 hours. Monthly target hours: 40 × 52.14 / 12 = 173.8 hours. Absenteeism rate: (10 / 173.8) × 100 = 5.75%
Part-time employees
For part-time employees, the actual contracted hours are included in the calculation. grape does not multiply the workload factor a second time—it is already included in the weekly hours.
Example (50% workload): Weekly hours = 20, absences = 4 hours. Monthly target hours: 20 × 52.14 / 12 = 86.9 hours. Absence rate: (4 / 86.9) × 100 = 4.60%
Absences recorded as a percentage
Sometimes absences are recorded not in hours, but as a percentage of a workday (e.g., "50% of a day sick"). grape automatically converts these into hours:
Absence hours = (percent / 100) × weekly hours / working days per week
Example: 50% of a day, weekly hours = 40, working days = 5 (50 / 100) × 40 / 5 = 4 hours
Which types of absence are taken into account?
The standard views on the platform automatically take into account all absence types that grape receives. Depending on the company, these can include, for example, illness, accident, vacation, maternity, family care, and others.
In Analytics, you can specifically restrict the view to individual absence types and thus, for example, view the sickness rate separately from the accident rate.
Absenteeism rate for groups and departments
The analyses do not display the absence rate per person, but rather for entire teams or departments. The hours of all affected employees are added together – employees with more contracted hours are weighted more heavily.
Group quota = (Total absence hours / Total required hours) × 100
Example: Three employees in January:
- Alice: 10 hours of absence, 40 hours per week
- Bob: 3 hours of absence, 20 hours per week
- Carol: 0 hours absent, 32 hours per week
Total hours of absence: 13
Total monthly target hours: 92 × 52.14 / 12 ≈ 399.7
Group rate: (13 / 399.7) × 100 = 3.25%