Managing Employee Absenteeism

The article entitled How to Deal with Employee Absenteeism on the Employer-Employee.com website, discusses employee absenteeism as one of the most costly problems facing global organizations.  There are many reasons why people are absent including personal reasons, stress, or because they have difficulties with their boss.  Absenteeism is worse in organizations that have more than 500 employees.

When employees are absent, the organization suffers not only from the loss of the absent worker but from the ill effects on employees that are at work including employee burnout, turnover, poor morale, and workplace negativism.

Part of the problem may be a poorly documented or enforced absenteeism policy. In addition, many businesses do not have a good way to report, capture or measure absenteeism.  In order to manage absenteeism, organizations need to know who is off and why they are off.  Once you know this, you can plan more effectively.  

Organizations can address the problems of absenteeism by implementing an incentive program that discourages bogus absences.  Some examples of program incentives include the ability to ash-in unused sick days, bonus pay for every month of perfect attendance, free lunches, certificates of achievement, or scratch-off cards concealing prizes.

The incentive program should be appropriate for your company.   The article indicates that the duration of the reward program should be defined based on the company but that younger workers should be rewarded more frequently but based on the difficulty of the job.  Regardless of the details of the program, one way of getting buy-in from employees is to include them in the development of the incentive program.

http://www.employer-employee.com/absent.html