It is shocking that a metropolitan municipality with an R18bn budget still relies on a manual process to approve sick leave, requiring forms to be filled out by hand, then approved and later captured by its human resources department.
The Nelson Mandela Bay municipality has 8,206 workers, including temporary staff, and 6,490 submitted medical certificates from July 1 2019 to June 30 2024.
Officials took a total of 354,417 sick days in the past five years — and only 235,689 applications were supported by a medical certificate.
The metro uses a manual process that frequently results in delays in the approval and recording of leave, a recurring issue that has been flagged in multiple audits.
But a stupefying revelation was made at a corporate services and human resources committee meeting on Wednesday.
The city has had an automated leave application system — capable of approving or rejecting requests based on the information provided and ensuring improved monitoring of absenteeism — for years but it has never been activated.
Human resources director Chris Jamda said automation of the system would have an immediate positive effect on leave management and compliance.
He told the committee that officials would now investigate ways to implement the automated request and approval of leave.
“The personnel administration module makes a provision for the approval of the leave in the employee and manager self-services (ESS/MSS) platform.
“To date, this functionality has not been activated.”
So the city already has a system that can help reduce delays and inaccuracies that plague the manual process, making it easier to identify patterns of abuse.
Why then would it take so long to find a way to implement it despite the leave issue being raised in repeated audits?
The answer is anyone’s guess but no company with a similarly huge budget would allow such a troubling pattern of absenteeism while continuing to manually capture sick leave for thousands of employees.
This level of sick leave — if all of it is actually that — results in lost productivity and strikes at the heart of service delivery while the city is falling apart.
HeraldLIVE
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