When the pollsters at CareerBuilder.com asked 3,000 hiring managers and HR pros late last year to name the lamest excuses they had ever heard for missing work, they collected some doozies. Who knew America's work force was so fragileor creative? Here are the dreadful dozen:
1. Wrong side of the bed: One guy said he missed work because he was crabby.
2. One of those mornings: A woman said she got whiplash from brushing her hair.
3. Voices from beyond: An employee said her psychic told her to stay home or something awful would happen to her.
4. Priorities: Another said he wasn't feeling well and wanted to rest up for the company's holiday party that night.
5. Unforeseen perils: A worker couldn't come in because her chickens' feet were frozen to the driveway.
6. Basking in the glow: A worker claimed to have met a movie star and was spending the day with him.
7. More grooming trouble: An employee was injured while getting a haircut.
8. Veterinary detective: One compassionate employee's dog was not feeling well, so he tasted the dog's food, which made the man sick.
9. Nothing to wear: An employee's roommate locked all his clothes in a shed out of spite.
10. Unforeseen perils II: A groundhog bit an employee's car tire, causing it to go flat.
11. Grieving: A woman said she had been up all night because her favorite "American Idol contestant had been voted off the show.
12. Rough weekend: At her sister's wedding, an employee chipped her tooth on a mint julep, bent over to spit it out, hit her head on a keg and was knocked unconscious with a mild concussion.
5 things supervisors can do to reduce absenteeism
So, what can your organization do to stem the tide of absenteeism? Your probably have an absenteeism policy already, but employees are still missing too much work. It may be time to get your managers and supervisors together to plan a strategy to stem the tide of absenteeism. According to a report by TheHRSpecialist.com, here's what others have done in similar situations:
Provide outlets for dissent: Not all absenteeism is capricious. When people don't have outlets for their job pressures, they tend to run from them. Make dissent possible by encouraging people to speak up, hearing them out and, where feasible, acting on what you hear. Employees may learn they don't have to escape from the workplace to let off steam.
Cut the drag of boring work: You can't eliminate boring work, but you can reduce the need to flee from it. Here are two suggestions to consider:
" Expand boring jobs so employees can see their tasks through to a worthwhile result. Giving a job a beginning, middle and end increases at least threefold the satisfaction to be gained from it.
" Break down boring jobs into smaller pieces to distribute dull tasks among more people. Diversifying each person's job makes the work a little more interesting.
Use incentives: Extra pay for showing up is not a radical idea, and it's relatively cheap. The concept of "well pay instead of sick pay has proved itself and is easy to adopt. For each paid sick day unused by year's end, an employee gets paid for a day and a half. Or let employees bank sick time to use in case of future disability. These kinds of arrangements can be a magnet to the workplace.
Try gimmicks: They're only good for the short term, but they're also reusable from time to time. Try a departmental contestfor example, the person with the fewest absences in a three-month period wins an oversized turkey. Use gimmicks sparingly, but play them up when you do. And make them fun, not work: Don't ask people to do anything except come to work on time.
Explain how absenteeism affects everyone: When people feel easily replaceable, they think they won't be missed. If you tell them why they're needed, they won't want to stay away. Each employee is in some way a specialist; taking the time to point this out makes each one feel skilled, valued and needed.
Source: TheHRSpecialist.com
