How Can You Make Sure Your Employees Show Up For Work Every Day?

Workplace absenteeism and tardiness are major issues for any company.

In the end, business leaders and managers can’t ignore these metrics as they look at overall productivity and how well the business is working. Supervisors and managers are tasked with the difficult process of keeping absenteeism down and maintaining headcounts for business operations.

So how do you deal with absenteeism in a real way?

Some fundamental approaches will help make attendance and productivity more consistent and ensure that people are working together, rather than going off in their own directions.

Set Policy

Without a clear policy, it’s going to be much harder for any company to reduce absenteeism. Employees are just going to take off when they feel like it, because there’s no clear consequence. A policy should be clear and consistent, and it should also reflect acknowledgment that people have personal lives, and that they need accommodations for family medical emergencies and other kinds of serious situations.

Enforce Policy

Obviously, you have to also enforce the policy. A clear policy is nothing without enforcement. It starts with making employees aware that someone is tracking their attendance. In too many cases, people don’t know that anyone is watching, and they feel like they can get away with spotty attendance to work. Again, good enforcement should be consistent to everyone in the company, and should be able to deal efficiently with specific problems that someone might have with a particular employee.

Set Important Tasks Early

Beyond policy and enforcement, there are other things that business leaders can do to reduce absenteeism. One is scheduling important group tasks and key operations early in the day.

People who won’t respond to policy might respond to the idea that if they don’t get to work on time, they’ll miss something important. By contrast, think about the futility of asking people to show up at a certain time, just to put in time and stand around. Too many companies do not have key work activities scheduled at the top of the work day, and that drives greater absenteeism, because people feel like they have no reason to come into work on time, and they can always give an excuse.

Make Morning (Or Any Other Shift Start Time) Attractive

Another way to practically reduce absenteeism is to provide attractive incentives for people to come into work on time. This might grate against the sensibilities of certain kinds of managers who feel like policy and enforcement are enough, but others understand that you can often get further with incentives than you can with the stick. Companies can take a page from what religious institutions and other organizations have done to give people incentives to show up somewhere early in the morning — for example, serving refreshments, scheduling small group meetings, or providing some kind of informative presentation for workers.

These practical steps can help companies to really fight the problem of employees not showing up when they’re supposed to. In the majority of cases, high absenteeism will respond to these concrete and clear steps.