When employees call sick, there are several implications on the project at hand. For starters unless specified within the contract, they still have to be paid in form of sick leave. This means that money has to be taken from the budget to pay someone else to do their job. Apart from this, the task at hand will also be delayed for several reasons. For starters, other team members have to be appointed to take over their task which might not be always easy since those who called in sick might be working on a daunting task. Another factor is the fact that the appointed team members have to work with what the sick employees left, that is, should they have no documentation at all, the new team members will waste time trying to decipher what the previous employees did. This will have a negative effect on the scheduling of the project. Another factor that has to be taken into consideration is who called in sick. A painter calling in sick does not have the same effect as the systems administrator calling in sick. Therefore, a policy has to be put in place to avoid such an occurrence from putting the project at risk.
First and foremost, the most important rule that is beneficial to implement is the concept of documenting everything that has to do with the project clearly. All the actions, ideas and processes have to be logged. This way one can easily hand over the task to other employees and little time will be wasted trying to figure out what their team mates where working on and what process they were using. Also, since some of the work is being subcontracted, I would recommend putting a rule in the contract that any sick members within the subcontracted teams must be replaced as soon as possible as failure to do so will incur charges that have to be paid by the contractors. This policy will make sure that the project from the contractor's part is not delayed.
On the other hand, from the internal part of human resources, a much more complex process has to be implemented. First and foremost, it is important to identify which team member has called in sick. People at lower levels who call in sick such as the network apprentices etc, can have their work taken over by the higher levels, that is, network administrator, system administration etc. This is why it would be beneficial for these positions to have the qualifications mentioned at an earlier stage in this document. To try and minimize the negative effects on scheduling, one could lengthen a shift from 8 hours to 12 hours by implementing an overtime pay that pays the assigned team a pro-rata salary. This will encourage the appointed team to do the overtime hours and also motivate them to produce high quality work since they are being paid more.
People who call in sick from higher levels are a different case altogether. Since these will be more qualified than those at a lower levels and generally have more experience at their task then their peers at the lower ranks, the jobs they carry out cannot just be re-assigned to anyone. It is therefore important that these people leave documentations of the scheduling of their tasks, how there are to be split between the team members and what is planned in the near future. These documentations must be communicated with the project manager so that in the event of people calling in sick, then the project manager can take over the team and guide them to their work. As with the above, overtime hours will be applied so that the workers are motivated and the problem of being late on schedule is mitigated as much as possible.