Having problems with employee attendance? Here is a quick list of solutions—both proactive and reactive—that can help minimize employee absences from work.
- Compressed workweek or flextime. Whether participating in flextime or a compressed workweek situation, the time off allows employees to schedule appointments with doctors, run errands, and take care of personal business on their own time instead of asking for time off and creating scheduling or coverage problems.
- Job sharing. Two or more employees might share a single job. Some employers require core hours that must be shared by both employees and require both employees to attend team, department, and company meetings.
- Rewards. Attendance bonuses are one way to reward employees for good attendance.
- Telecommuting. Telecommuting allows individuals to work at home some of the time, communicating with the workplace through modems and computers.
- Discipline. If the above proactive solutions don’t do the trick to improve an employee’s attendance, you may need to consider discipline. For any possible discipline or discharge resulting from an attendance problem to be effective, the policy must be made known to all employees and consistently applied, spelling out how many absences, and within what time period, will call for disciplinary action—although be sure to consider whether an absence is legally protected such as under family and medical leave laws, disability bias laws, or California’s kincare law.
- Termination. Extremely poor attendance or excessive lateness may be cause for dismissal. The facts or circumstances of each case, however, should be carefully weighed. Be sure to consider the duration and frequency of the attendance problem, the reasons for these problems, whether they were communicated properly, the kind of work done by the employee, comparison of the employee’s record with those of similar employees, whether the policy was clearly made known to employees and applied in a fair and consistent manner, and whether the employee was warned about possible consequences if the problem did not improve.
Join us this fall in San Francisco for the California Employment Law Update conference, a 3-day event that will teach you everything you need to know about new laws and regulations, and your compliance obligations, for the year ahead—it’s one-stop shopping at its best.
Additional Resources:
Absenteeism: Unscheduled Absences on the Rise; Practical Strategies for Boosting Attendance