Tips to Reduce Absenteeism into Minimum

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By fianita



Practical Guideline for Controlling Unauthorized Absence

There are many theories to explain of absence causes. And it make us realize, we can not solve causal absence problem and control absenteeism as minimum as we could, with simply method. We need comprehensive approach to reducing absenteeism issue. Here some practical method explained :

1. Make your absences policy work out. You have to apply other system to make sure your absenteeism rule and regulation implemented well to all employee. Such as :

  • Put absenteeism rate as a standard objective to work towards. Its not enough if you just make a statement such as, "reducing absence into minimum". Put them as part of the performance appraisal system and give a target with number. Of course, you still have to give tolerance for them for getting sick, having babies or in crisis situation. With those consideration, you can give absence rate such as 3.5%
  • Train managers about cost of absenteeism, how to control it and how to conducting counseling session with their subordinate.
  • Make additional regulation to reduce pay on their absence day and communicate to them how much that they have lost money. It will prevent them to extend their absence any longer that necessary. But you have to check the local legal regulation and policy before apply this method.
  • Make system to records the employee absence. Someday you will need it to find absence pattern, unreasonable absence excuse or anything else as strong facts for give consequences or legal actions.
  • Give appreciation to the attendance. You can make simple celebration just to pronounce who the best employee in attendance. Let all member of the team to choose the winner.
  • Create social punishment to the absenteeism. You can make it by giving reward for team who has excellent member attendance. It will make other member give pressure to employee who has bad attendance record.
  • Make absence policy align with other policy, especially for policy related to the employee benefit. Such as you can make regulation to do not give loan for anyone with poor attendance.

2. Make sure your recruitment and selection procedure consider absence issue, such as :

  • The recruiter should put medical and health condition of candidate as one of priority.
  • Make sure that candidate has positive attitude about attendance importance
  • Its very important to count not only competency fit, but you have to consider job fit. Its include the compatibility of candidate interest and personality with nature of the job. If there is no chemistry, there is no motivation also. Employee with low motivation to work tend to high in absenteeism rate.

3. Since some absenteeism are related to the job problem, you can use some method to identify the core problem as I describe in my former writing about How to Handle Poor Performer, before you apply some solutions. But here some additional guideline to be considered :

  • Make flexible working time arrangement. Such as, if employee can not go on Monday for domestic demands, they can replace them with Saturday. Or if he/she attend half day, he/she can substitute it with additional working hours tomorrow
  • Make job interesting. You can enlarge responsibility, enhance the nature of job or make it challenging to your subordinate. Don't forget to give additional support such as training and coaching.

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Karen Ellis profile image

Karen Ellis  says:
17 months ago

Some very good ideas. Thanks.

misterpm profile image

misterpm  says:
17 months ago

I like your thoughts on this issue! I wrote some words about the more general aspects of absenteeism and this article gives me more insight in the actual improvement of absence situations. Thanks. Good job!

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