Making Absenteeism Absent from Your Organization

Employers naturally want to have a workforce they can count on, but excessive absenteeism—especially without merit—can be a big detriment to productivity. Business Consultant Bridget Miller has some ideas for keeping your employees in their seats.

While bearing in mind that there are, of course, many perfectly legitimate reasons why employees may be unable to come into work (and many legally-protected reasons as well), there are also many cases of abuse of absence allowances.

Tips: How to Improve Employee Attendance

What employers are striving to do is continue to allow legitimate and protected absences while discouraging absence policy abuse. This must be balanced with keeping employees mentally and physically healthy and avoiding burnout. It’s a delicate balance indeed, but there are a lot of tips that can help employers to ensure that unplanned absences are minimized and employees are productive. Here are a few tips to get you started:

• For starters, have a clear attendance policy that outlines expectations around working days and hours. It should also outline the repercussions of not meeting those expectations. Sometimes simply having a written policy can curb bad behavior before it begins.
  • Ensure the policy has clear designations of when an absence or lateness is an offense that warrants disciplinary action—and what that action will be. Be sure to consistently follow through with these consequences .
  • Communicate the rationale behind the policy. It helps employees to understand why the policy is in place rather than just expecting them to follow the rules blindly.
• If possible, consider offering flextime options to accommodate variance in employee schedules. This act alone can make it possible for some people to have a work schedule they can easily fit with their personal obligations (instead of having a continual clash, resulting in tardiness and absences). Flextime options might include varying work hours or even allowing work to be performed in a shortened workday or workweek.
• When practical, consider allowing telecommuting options as well. These can have the same benefits as or even more benefits than flextime options.
• Consider conducting employee surveys to better understand the root of attendance problems. For example, if a lot of employees are calling in “sick,” but really need more paid time off (PTO) for personal reasons, that could prompt a policy change that could better accommodate employees’ personal needs with less business disruption.
• Invest in improving the company culture. When the workplace is engaging and employees are motivated, they’re less likely to take frivolous absences. Conduct employee engagement surveys to benchmark engagement levels and create plans of action to improve morale. These are big picture items—ones that obviously won’t happen overnight—that can have long-term positive effects on absenteeism and productivity.
• Look into other work/life balance benefits to offer employees. There are many benefits an employer can offer that can allow employees to have better balance and reduce the need for absences. On-site child care is an example.
• Train managers to be good communicators and to work with employees on absences. Good management of necessary absences can make an employee less likely to abuse the system. (On the other hand, if an employee is made to feel shamed for even taking a necessary absence, this could lead to employees looking for other jobs!)
• Consider offering to assist in carpooling arrangements or offer discounted public transportation as an employee benefit. This can encourage alternative methods of getting to work, allowing workers to still arrive at work even when their normal means are unavailable.
• Don’t overlook investing in employee well-being. Wellness programs can help to improve the overall level of health of all participants, which can, in turn, reduce the number of illness and injury-related absences. The same is true of health insurance; enabling employees to seek preventive care can mean fewer illnesses and problems in the long term. Likewise, if food is offered on-site, ensure there are healthy, affordable options to encourage employee health and well-being.

In tomorrow’s Advisor, we will provide more information from Bridget Miller on improving employee attendance.