Reducing employee absenteeism

Sick leave doesn't cost an employer a lot of money when you look at how much money you could lose if one sick employee came into work and infected 10 other employees. Staff absence directly related to sickness does provide a problem for employers, especially if you are being forced to cover for this person when they are out of the office. Another bad aspect of employee absenteeism is that a lot of people take advantage of it and don't use it for its intended purpose.

Employers lose about $19 billion each year on employee absenteeism. Normally the main reason why people use their sick leave is because they truly don't feel well. Having access to sick leave is a selling point for a lot of businesses when they are trying to recruit new staff members. It provides employees with a sense of job security and they are happier and more satisfied with their job if they know they have the option to take off time if they need to.

A lot of employees are using their sick leave due to mental health problems. Roughly 13 million days of sick leave are used for employees that suffer from anxiety, stress, and depression. Stress has been uncovered as one of the biggest problems for employers, costing them to lose around $300 million in lost production and health care costs.

Even though employers are unable to control all the different aspects of their employee's lives, they can help them reduce stress while they are at work. Here are a few things you can do to reduce stress in the office:

1. Recognize when the office is unhealthy. It is easy to spot signs of burn-out and stress in the office. If you have staff members that are regularly calling-in to take their sick leave, they are probably under a great deal of stress. If you start to see employees disinterested in their work and they tend to fall behind on work responsibilities, they are under stress. There are some other things that foster an unhealthy work environment like poor leadership, poor organization, bad customer service, low productivity, and high levels of absenteeism.
2. Offer flexible working schedules. If you really want to help your staff reduce their stress load, you need to give them a reason to come to work. You need to build their trust in the company by offering some things like paid time off and flexible hours. Getting up at 6:00 in the morning may not be the easiest thing for some of your employees and they may have a hard time getting into the office on time. What about your staff members that try to run to the gym in the morning to get in a nice workout? If you can offer flexible work hours, you will reduce the amount of stress and pressure on your employees. Flexible work hours also help the employees that get stuck in traffic or have unexpected family emergencies.
3. Offer counseling services. One of the best things you can do to remove stress from the office is to give your employees someone to talk to. A good counselor will be able to help them work through stressful times and can help them cope with personal matters that may be impacting their work performance. Counseling is great for any job and it can really help an employee get back on track before their employer is forced to use some type of disciplinary action. Counseling can help teach employees how to handle their daily stresses and they will even teach them deep breathing and other exercises they can do at their desk to reduce their stress.