Employee absences can be a big a big annoyance to companies, especially in scenarios where employees have very specific or specialised skills, as it makes it difficult for another employee to take on their role.
Every business has a process that they rely on to ensure that everything runs smoothly with as few problems as possible. When employees are absent, anything from sales volume to customer satisfaction can be impacted. Here are 6 tips to help you and your company reduce the number of employee absences.
1. Teach them about your attendance expectations
The vast portion of employee absenteeism has to do with employees who feel that there aren’t many standards and expectations with regards to their attendance. They need to be told that they’re expected to work their contracted hours, be on time and ready to get stuck into their role. Tell them that your company is a team of employees that depend on each other and when employees don’t show up, it affects the team as a whole.
2. Provide rewards to employees with stellar attendance
Why not provide some sort of benefits program to employees who meet a certain level of attendance? Perhaps you can provide a quarterly bonus or monthly bonus to those who have never been absent. This will not only reward them, but it will provide others with an incentive to work.
3. Purchase absence management software to track employee absences
Absence management software is one of the most effective tools that you can have at your disposal to track and manage your employees. This will allow you to identify trends in reasons for your employees’ absences. You can see what the common reasons are to try to determine how to reduce them.
4. Provide support for your employees
It is important to provide support for your employees because you never know what your absent employees have going on in their lives until you ask them. Some cases may be more serious than others, but one way to help reduce these absences is to have some kind of trained professional at hand in case your employees are going through issues that they need to talk to someone about.
5. Create a schedule that works well for the employee
This may not be possible for all companies, but if possible, it would be a great idea to have a more flexible schedule for an employee who cannot make it to the standard daily hours of your business operation. This would especially be a viable option if the employee is highly skilled and cannot easily be replaced by another employee who can meet the regular work hours.
6. Share attendance statistics with everyone in the company
There’s a name for something like this. It’s called gamification. This is where you can turn attendance into a game where you create a leaderboard that ranks employees based upon their attendance statistics. These statistics can then be shared with your entire company to see who is doing well and who is doing poorly in relation to others. You can provide rewards for the employees who are “winning” or ranking higher than everyone else.
Some employee absences are unavoidable and out of your control, for example when they have a legitimate illness or personal problem. However, a large portion of absences can be prevented. So, don’t let it cost your business and start putting some of the above tips in place.
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