Improving employee attendance

Employee absenteeism can create an unhealthy business culture and burden your workplace with lost productivity and high replacement costs. It can become a sensitive issue for employers to deal with and when not managed properly can escalate into a chronic issue frustrating both employers and other staff members who do the right thing.

Here are some ways to tackle employee absenteeism in your business:

Highlight attendance expectations
To help eradicate attendance issues, employees first must be made aware of their attendance expectations and the consequences of their non-attendance on other staff members and productivity. A clear policy should be implemented with explanation of the procedures to follow when absent such as:

• Who the employee should inform of their absence, for example, their manager. It should be clear how they are expected to contact them, for example, a phone call rather than a text message.

• The employee should advise the contact person within a certain time frame of the nature of their illness and when they expect to return to work.

• If a medical certificate or statutory declaration is required, employers must keep up to date with employment laws regarding evidence requirements, as it may be considered unreasonable to request employees produce evidence in some circumstances.

Analyse records and identify trends
Keeping track of when employees are absent can help to identify patterns such as certain days of the week that employees are absent, or whether it is before or after a public holiday. Monitoring trends can assist in identifying whether there is a problem and if it is appropriate to discuss the issue.

Improve your communication
Communicating with employees is in a business’s best interest to better understand employee’s needs and situation. Effective communication can help identify root causes of excessive sick leave, such as family issues, not coping with workload, drug and alcohol problems and so forth.