How To Fight High Absenteeism Levels In Your Organization

6 steps to implement effective absence management

It is forecasted that workplace absences will cost businesses in the UK £21 billon in lost productivity by 2020. You can reduce the costs of absenteeism for your organization by implementing effective absence management. With the right tools and policies, you’ll have risks under control. At the same time, you’ll improve employee care and welfare. In this article, you’ll learn the basics about absence management and how you can make this model work for you.

 

Many organizations already have enabled processes to handle employee absences. While we can’t be prepared for life’s unexpected moments, we can find patterns to spot them. The right tools can help you predict trends more easily.

The most common cause of employee absences is due to minor illnesses. These include colds and flu, upset stomach, headaches. Other causes for absences are stress, injuries, mental health illnesses, medical conditions, child or elder care and even bullying and harassment.

High levels of absenteeism directly affect businesses financially. Costs such as paid time off, staff replacements and administrative costs must be incurred. Moreover, the cost of lost productivity or time lost to adjust unplanned absences should be considered in the formula.

Less obvious problems also arise from absenteeism, such as a drop in workplace morale or low quality work. Workers might feel like they are overtaking the unfinished work from those who are frequently absent and may feel used or taken advantage of. On the other hand, unfinished work from those absent might onward to customers. Failure to take action against this behavior will negatively affect your brand and potential clients in the long-run.

As previously mentioned, implementing effective absence management provides two immediate and clear benefits: cost reduction and improved employee welfare.

HR can improve policies and strategies through data. Data sets the ground for policies and lets the organization find ways to reduce costs. By tracking absences, HR may also discover trends and further improve absence programs and policies.

Absence management offers many solutions such as return-to-work interviews, assessment services, coordination and management as well as time off management system. All of these absence management solutions counterattack absenteeism before it becomes habitual. It also reduces costs while providing a better experience and a sense of well-being for employees.

How can you fight high absenteeism levels in your organization? Consider taking the following steps.
 
1. Offer Flexible Schedules or Remote Work
With flexible schedules, absenteeism will become less of a problem. Especially, when you offer remote work. The clearest benefits of remote working are increased employee retention, productivity, and reduced stress. Remote working can also reduce unscheduled absences, as they are often taken due to personal reasons rather than sick days. By offering remote work, you might take away the reason why people might take days off.

2. Return-to-Work Interview
A lot can change during an employee’s absence. By doing return to work interviews, you will get them back on track. During the talk, it is essential you show the organization cares for their well-being. It is also important you understand the reason for the absence, whether it’s simply asking or going over the fit note’s details and make arrangements to decrease it. For instance, if they are caring for an elderly familiar, offer remote working or ask if they have any other ideas and update their annual leave policy. In the case of chronical musculoskeletal pain, you can make the necessary work arrangements by providing a special chair or workplace setup. If attendance must be improved, let them know about the consequences of poor attendance while being sensitive about the situation. Using a time off management system will help you easily spot poor attendance.

3. Improve Employee and Workplace Well-being
Happy employees are engaged employees. An organization providing physical and mental health workshops often see an increment in employee engagement. Having engaged employees will automatically translate to fewer sick days and reasons for missing workdays. Remember, “Line managers are usually the first port of call on health and well-being issues within their team, and make day-to-day decisions about work allocation and staffing arrangements.” Dr. Jill Miller. With that in mind, it is essential to train and support line managers with tools to deal with absences such as time off records keeping system. The tool would keep managers updated with leave requests and they would be able to manage and make arrangements accordingly.

4. Incentivize Regular Attendance
Offering a reward program for regular attendance could incentivize staff to attend work regularly. By recognizing the good work and behavior, you will better reinforce the desired behavior across your company. This will also help improving employee satisfaction.

5. Set Disciplinary Procedures and Consequences
At the same time, your organization should either set trigger mechanisms to review attendance or have disciplinary procedures in place for poor attendance. The choice between the two is yours and might be subject to your operation and workforce. Trigger mechanisms should indicate managers when to take action. For instance, you can ask them to send sick notes after a set amount of unjustified absences is met. If the issues continue, then it might be necessary to define disciplinary procedures for unacceptable absence. Let them know repeated unjustified absence will be treated as a conduct issue and lead to disciplinary action and ultimately dismissal. You can also define all these procedures in your employee's handbook and share with your employees.

6. Get the Right Tools
Most companies track attendance and absences with excel spreadsheets, but did you know 88% of internal spreadsheets contain mistakes? Not to mention the amount of time wasted on the repetitive process. Spend less time on repetitive processes and focus on your people. After all, your job is to make the work-life balance for your employees better and not overload them with unnecessary manual processes. Time off management systems support HR managers and offer always current and accurate leave balances and helps them make data-driven decisions.

A business lacking absence management will struggle with operations. Excessive absence hurts the business drive and it’s the job of the HR manager to take action before it gets out of control.

Is absenteeism affecting productivity? Then it’s time to take action. Effective absence management includes a software solution to control absences. The tool also helps your HR go digital. By digitizing, you will already save the trouble arising from absenteeism.