Dealing with absenteeism in the workplace

If you work in tight quarters with other people you likely know the frustration of the office bug. Once one person has a head cold, it will spread around the office until everyone on the team has dealt with the illness. This is really frustrating because you usually have to deal with a lot of absenteeism along with lost productivity. Dealing with workplace absenteeism is something that is hard to combat. While you need your staff to take the time off to get better you are left with other people that have to pick up the slack of the missing employee or you can choose to hire a temporary worker to come in but this is costly and involves training.

When a person takes time off for an illness that is real, you don't need to be worried but when you see a trend of illnesses occurring or you see people abusing their sick leave and taking off too much time, you have a concern. There are some people that really just don't want to work or you have employees that are suffering from burnout. Here are some of the common reasons why you may be dealing with higher amounts of absenteeism:

• Low morale - many times when the attitude of the staff is low, you start to see people not showing up for work. This is a big indicator that there is an issue and that you need to address it quickly. You need to talk to your employees that are taking off too much time to find out what their issue is and to see if you can solve it or if you will need to look into other company policies to try and fix the problem.


• Age - when you have a bright sunny day, you will likely have younger employees call in sick because they want to play. The younger generation is restless and they want to go boating and do other activities than work. This type of lack of responsibility is a detriment to your company and you do need to address it with the employee. It can be grounds for firing if it does happen often. The same is true in reverse with your older employees. We are talking about the employees that have seniority and tend to feel that it is their right to take off time as they please.


• Stress - when you have people taking time off because they are dealing with stress you need to do what you can to adjust their workload. Some employees may be dealing with a lot of personal stress so there is not much you can do about this but you will have other employees that are struggling with stress because you have piled too much work on their plate.


• Dissatisfaction with their job - some people take off time because they are not happy with their job. This can arise because they do not feel like they are challenged enough. Employee evaluations will help you get to the bottom of this and it can easily provide you with an avenue in order to figure out how you can motivate your employees and to make them feel part of the company.

Give your employees a warning so they know when they have abused company policies and then you can have grounds for firing them if it continues to happen in the future. Open communication with your staff is another way to prevent absenteeism as you will have a close relationship with your staff and you will know what to do when you see morale is starting to go down.