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Tips for Reducing Employee Absenteeism for Small Businesses
Absenteeism is a costly problem for small businesses because it creates a loss of productivity, costs overtime when other employees must fill in, causes a possible loss of business, dissatisfied customers and problems with employee morale.
In larger organizations, if one employee doesn’t show up, their contribution or lack of contribution can go unnoticed for a day or two. However, if a small business owner has five employees and one calls out for the day, 20% of the workforce is missing. The inability to plan for these unexpected absences can sometimes mean burn out for your staff and yourself.
While the majority of employees have legitimate reasons for their absence, there are always a few bad apples. Even when using the best recruiting and interviewing techniques, it is possible to hire an abuser. At some point, every business has experienced an employee who regularly has unexplained and unexpected absences. Before you hand that employee a pink slip, consider establishing an absenteeism policy. Commit this policy to writing in an employee handbook that requires an acknowledgment page. Your absenteeism policy should cover what is considered an excused or unexcused absence, how many occurrences are permitted before corrective action is administered, and how many corrective action disciplinary reports (write-ups) will result in termination.
What can you do to change absenteeism trends at your workplace?
The responsibility for ending a pattern of poor attendance often rests with an organization’s leave program and policy. Traditional leave programs include a separate vacation bank, sick leave bank, and perhaps a day or two for personal leave or a floating holiday. A better option is to apply a paid time off (PTO) policy, which provides an aggregate of vacation leave accrual, sick leave accrual, and personal days and holidays thus creating one leave bank. This policy offers several advantages over the traditional leave policy in that employees are more likely to save their time to use for vacation. Employees are also not suffering from a “use it or lose it” mentality, wanting to use their number of sick days just because they are available. PTO programs also afford employees more privacy about the reasons for their taking a day off. The only drawback for employers is the possibility of having to pay out unused paid time off when employees resign. One way to address this problem is to lower the cap on how much unused paid leave carries over from year to year.
Tips for Reducing Employee Absenteeism
Once an Absenteeism, Corrective Action, and PTO policy has been established and communicated, the next step is to devise tracking systems. To track absenteeism, keep an accurate count of individual employee absences; tabulate company-wide absenteeism totals; uncover periods when absences are particularly high, and differentiate between various types of absences. Keep written discipline reports in the employee’s personnel file with a notation of the date and occurrence of absences on the outside of the folder for easy tracking. An accurate tally of PTO accrued, used, and remaining is essential and is commonly included in the reporting tools of many payroll software packages. If using an outsourced payroll administrator, ask for these reports and for a tally to appear on employee pay stubs.
Hureco Maverick can help you with all of your policy development and documentation and small business HR consulting needs, call us today!
About the author
Tamsin is a senior manager at Hureco Maverick; she is also a coffee lover, cruciverbalist, altruist, and advocate for corporate social responsibility and volunteerism.