Managing Employee Absence The Right Way

While employee absence certainly isn’t the end of the world, if it’s not managed properly it can become a serious strain on the whole organization.

Absences, unless you’ve somehow managed to access this page from North Korea, are just a fact of running a business. Countless larger businesses have several a day, and still manage to turn massive profit margins. While employee absence certainly isn’t the end of the world, if it’s not managed properly it can become a serious strain on the whole organization. Here are some handy tips for managing yours.

Incentivise Good Attendance

Offering up rewards for employees who go for a given period without any time off, or prizes for the person in a certain department who takes the fewest sick days, can have a massive positive effect for a lot of small businesses. The prospect of a material reward can mean the difference for a lot of people phoning in sick and getting out of bed. Of course, you should put a few rules and safeguards in place, but cash rewards and extra days’ holiday can be great incentives to dangle in front of your workforce.

Have Clear Boundaries in Place

Like with many other things in business, if you don’t set clear rules and boundaries for absences, you’re pretty much asking for trouble. It’s important to have a good sickness absence policy in place, so make sure setting one out comes at the top of your to-do list. One thing that a lot of inexperienced business owners manage to neglect is having a policy for reporting. Make sure that everyone has to phone in sick – no emails or texts – and that the call is made at least an hour before they have to be at their desk. This will not only keep things more organized, but may even reduce the instances of sickies. The prospect of being grilled by HR makes a lot of people think twice about having duvet days.

Keep Records and Detect Trends

Do you have plans for keeping records of absences? If not, then you’re opening yourself up to all kinds of HR complications further down the line. If your office is too big to notice trends just by observation, then you need to be keeping accurate and regularly updated records of who’s taking what days off. Certain patterns in an individual’s habits could require you to intervene, possibly by taking disciplinary action. HR Online and similar tools are great for this.

Work on the Company Culture

Obviously, if you’ve signed a contract with a company, then you should make sure you’re coming into work as much as physically possible. Having said that, the office environment can have a huge impact on how many absences you experience at your business. If you take steps to make the workplace more pleasant and friendly, then workers will be much more inclined to show up. The formation of cliques, draconian conduct rules, and various other factors can all convince a worker to pull a sick day. However, if the company culture is open, lively and fun, they’ll stand a much better chance of getting in the shower!

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