Worker absenteeism or employees taking sickness leave can have a significant impact on a business’s bottom line. Researches shows that almost half of the employees fake the sickness leave policy, ie, unscheduled absence that are not due to actual illness are more in the recent past. A survey conducted among the employees in the recent past brings out the fact that about 50% of the sick leaves are used for purposes other than their own illness. Each employee was taking two to three days non genuine sick leave per year. This alone is a good reason from
Absence Management and a reason to indeed
Manage absence.
Causes of Sickness Leave
So, it is important to discuss why do employees take sickness leave? Stress, anxiety and depression, back pain, major or minor illnesses are some of the reasons for a genuine sickness leave. But some of the main reasons for non-genuine sickness leave are discussed below.
Job Satisfaction
An employee’s level of job satisfaction will affect the rate of absenteeism in an organization. If any of the factors such as relations with co-workers, role stresses, scope and level of the job, opportunities for advancement in the workplace is unfavorable, it will affect the employee’s motivation to attend work. Because of greater task specification, the sickness leave rate is high in the larger work groups as compared to smaller work groups.
Home/Family problems
Family problems such as, looking after children is a major reason for sickness leave. If both the parents are working it is quite natural that one parent often take off in the form of sickness leave to care for children.
Employee expectation and Managerial attitudes
If an employee’s expectations regarding the job are not met, they feel uneasiness in the workplace and this will result in the use of sickness leave to escape shortly from this crisis. Managerial policies and attitudes are also plays a significant role on the rate of absenteeism.
How to reduce absenteeism
Even though there is no option for a complete elimination of absenteeism from the organization, there may be some effective strategies to reduce the sickness leave. Some of them are mentioned below.
Incentive schemes
A variety of incentive and bonus schemes aimed at reducing sickness leave rate will be an effective way to reduce the cropping up absenteeism rates. We can restrict employees not to take non-genuine sick leave by cashing in accrued sickness leave at the end of the year or upon termination.
Flexible leave arrangements
Flexible leave arrangements such as paid leave banks, pooled leave will assist employees in accommodating family responsibilities. Consolidation of different types of leaves such as sickness, family, study, annual and other leaves into a single form of flexible leave is also effective.
Feedback sessions
Feedback sessions are one another effective method to reduce absenteeism. Feedback sessions will help the employees to interact with the employer regarding the work related issues they are facing and can resolve the same. Another way to motivate attendance is to make it as a key business indicator. Employer can create weekly or monthly wise absence report using simple graphs and can shown to the employees. The feedback sends employees a clear message that attendance is a valued behaviour. This will also helpful to inform employees of the cost of fluctuations in attendance and sickness leave payments to directly illustrate how unnecessary absenteeism takes away from the bottom line.
