Nine ways to reduce absenteeism

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Does your business suffer from absenteeism?  Absenteeism weakens businesses and reduces profits.

The cost of absenteeism is difficult to quantify.  In the US, has been calculated the direct wage losses totalled more than $30 billion per year.  However, there are many other losses which are incurred directly as a result of absenteeism. 

Some of these losses include:

  • Regular wages, overtime wages, and company benefits.
  • Administration of recruitment, selection, induction, and training.
  • The potential loss of customers because of delays in delivery.

The less tangible costs are just as damaging to the business.  When a team member is absent the discretionary effort of the remainder of the team is diminished.  In turn, productivity falls, job stress rises, team spirit is reduced and there is additional administration and overheads.  All these contribute to the erosion of profits.

Two tactics that are commonly used and don't work.

  1. Shouting.  There is no point of shouting at a member of staff to change their attendance record.  This is like trying to steer your car using the horn!
  2. Punishment.  There are many ways of applying punishment to work.  Giving people unpopular jobs, reducing overtime, constant criticism, restricting the employee from doing popular jobs, ignoring them and giving them the last pick of weeks for holidays.  None of these work.

The silver bullet for dealing with the absenteeism problem.

There is no silver bullet!  In other words, there isn't one method of dealing with absenteeism and it works best for all businesses.  Strategies and tactics that work well for medical workers, may be totally ineffective for car assemblers.

Give Your Leaders the Right Tools for the Job.

There are some basic rules for designing your own effective absentee program.  It is all to do with giving people in leadership positions the right tools.  If they don't have the right tools they will have very little influence.

Basic Rules

  1. Let your staff know what level attendance is expected of them and what the consequences are if they meet the expectations and the consequences if they fail to meet the expectations.
  2. Measure and track absenteeism and record the performance in graph form which is posted in a public area.
  3. Give feedback on attendance by discussing absenteeism with the staff on a regular basis.
  4. Help employees maintain or improve their attendance records by discussing their reasons for not attending work and offering some solutions.
  5. Carefully match people to jobs.  Motivated members of staff normally have good attendance records.
  6. Recognise good attendance performance by having regular meetings with your staff and making sure that attendance is a regular agenda item.
  7. Let them know straight away when they are not meeting the agreed on attendance performance levels. 
  8. Train supervisors to support the absentee program and contribute to it.
  9. Make sure that there is a clear objective that is shared among all staff and that they agree it is achievable.
  10.  Fine‑tune the absentee program to meet operational needs so that it will evolve into a more valuable program that gives you watch you want.

Creating better attendance performance.

Here are some of the things that you can do to improve attendance records.  I have put them in the form of 9 questions which you can tick off if you are consistently applying them.

  • When staff call in absent, do they talk to you personally?
  • Do you counsel staff if their attendance record starts to worsen?
  • Do you make a note of every absence and graph it?
  • Do you have an attendance policy and do your staff sign it when they start work with you?
  • Do you apply your absenteeism strategies consistently?
  • Do you have a limit in your attendance policy after which you will ask for medical certificates for every subsequent absence?
  • Do you discuss attendance records and absences during your team talks with your staff?
  • Do you interview your staff after every single absence?
  • Do you give positive feedback for good attendance records?

If you are not applying these things consistently, it is suggested that you start and watch your attendance records improve.

Written by Peter L Mitchell