The Time is NOW!
Every customer-facing job depends on attendance as a critical thing. Poor attendance can sap the morale of employees, can cost employers overtime expenses and will reduce employee engagement. Also, having a poor attendance takes a lot of supervisory time and attention, often resulting in disciplinary action.
In times when more than 90% of job seekers think it’s important to work for a company which embraces transparency . . .
The best way to manage employee attendance is through a solid strategy which takes many things into account. Below, we are showing you why now is the right time to start encouraging your employee attendance – and how to do that effectively in 2020.
But First, What Is an Attendance Policy?
An attendance policy is a document in written form which provides all the guidelines and expectations for employee attendance at work. It can be defined, written, disseminated and implemented by an organization.
Nowadays, attendance policies exist for hourly or non-exempt employees for whom an organization must generally track hours and pay for overtime which exceeds 40 hours a week.
The Best Ways to Encourage Employee Attendance in Your Company
First of all, you must discover a way to track the time people take off from work which aligns to your paid vacation policy, Paid Time Off (PTO) policy, your sick leave, and/or your paid vacation policy.
When you manage your employees across departments, you need to ensure that everyone expects the same policy. Employees notice when they are treated differently and this can become a serious issue, creating problems with motivation and engagement.
Your attendance policy should also collect absence data consistently and make sure that all employees are following the agreed procedure. This is the data that will allow you to track the absence issues in your organization and the one which will empower your managers in making decisions on how to handle their absences in the right way. If you don’t have good data, you won’t be able to assess what your staff attendance is like.
Committing to managing absenteeism is perhaps the most important part in this story. Aside from just managing it, you should encourage employee attendance and create a process in which every employee is aware that they will be missed and knows about the impact of their absence on the workplace.
Enabling Workplace Flexibility and Creating A Rewards/Recognition Program for Employees
By allowing flexibility with schedules in your workplace, you can allow your employees to work later or come earlier to make up the time. Women, unfortunately, tend to experience more attendance problems because of family matters – especially single moms who don’t have a partner to help with child care related issues, struggle with attendance and other things.
Rewards and recognition for positive employee attendance is another way to make a difference. This is a great way to show your employees that you appreciate and respect their positive attendance.
In some cases, you may want to build actual monetary rewards in your attendance policy which emphasize rewarding attendance over a certain time frame. In times when too, many attendance policies focus on punishments, you should create one which has rewards for positive attendance and focus on it with your full attention.
Tracking Your Employee’s Attendance Is Important to Your Company’s Bottom Line
As you probably know, attendance is defined as simple as the process of showing up for work. And if you don’t think that there are effective ways to track it, you should know that they are.
Even though attendance seems like a daunting task, managing it in your workplace is quite simple if you implement a well-defined policy and a tracking system.
At Employee Hotlines, we pride ourselves on our attendance hotline which ensures compliance, accuracy and real-time reporting for employee absences such as call-offs, tardies and FMLA updates.
