How To Handle Absent Employees
Written by Roger Hunt on September 30th, 2009
To deal with the issue of absenteeism you need to look beneath the surface of it. Common excuses such as sickness, stress, car breakdowns and lack of daycare keep away from work only those employees who are not very motivated to be there anyway.
The first step is the training of |managers on the building of supportive, trusting relationships with employees so as to increase the likelihood of open communication. Then there must be a holding of regular individual meetings to gain an understanding of how employees regard their jobs and what is important to them. Such attention alone will create a good degree of loyalty.
Then, managers need to develop methods to increase levels of commitment. This includes the delegation of more responsibility, rotating tasks between employees, seeking their input and ideas and regularly praising their efforts. All such engagement must take place in regular individual and team meetings. Unscheduled attention will too easily drift into never.
Punitive measures are not likely to be successful because there is always a way around them. Even if they might seem to work with some, employees pressured to go to work are absent in spirit. It is a a losing strategy because such an approach create a negative environment which can make the workplace feel prison-like, thus even further motivating them to seek ways of escaping.
For maximum results, efforts should be focused where there is the greatest likelihood of a positive return on time, effort and money. Therefore, employees should be assigned to one of three categories, those with legitimate reasons to be absent, long standing problem employees and those who responded best to other changes in the past.
Employees showing themselves to be most responsive at the start of an anti-absenteeism drive should be given most attention. As for those who respond poorly, unless they are essential or very hard to replace, there may be no alternative but to recruit replacements who are more interested in making a commitment.
Tags: business, employees, Human Resources, management
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