IMonitor Software Blog

Attendance is critical in many customer-facing jobs. Poor attendance saps employee morale, costs employers overtime expenses, and reduces employee engagement. Poor attendance takes supervisory time and attention and often results in disciplinary action.

You can manage employee attendance to reduce attendance problems. Here’s how to manage and encourage attendance. Use these steps to encourage employee attendance at work.

5 steps to Encourage Employee Attendance
First, you must have a way to track the time people take off from work so that the integrity of your Paid Time Off (PTO) policy, your sick leave policy, and / or your paid vacation policy is ensured. This also ensures that the time off rules are the same for everyone which is important for the sense of workplace fairness and justice.

This is especially important to manage unscheduled absences for which many workplaces have trouble with work coverage. Encouraging employee attendance is important for any customer facing workstation. Attendance is also critical when one employee’s work is dependent on the work of the prior employee in jobs such as manufacturing or assembling products.

Teachers, customer support specialists, technical support providers, health care professionals, and other direct service employees are examples of employees who have workstations that employees must staff on a daily basis.

Otherwise, employers are at a loss to schedule and find staff replacements to do their work.

Second, you need to manage absenteeism and encourage employee attendance. This means that the employee needs to call in directly to the supervisor who is trained to manage absenteeism.

This starts with the personal call and the supervisor telling the employee that he or she will be missed and describing the impact of their absence on the workplace.

Each absence ends with the supervisor personally welcoming the employee back to work, encouraging employee attendance in the future, and once again, emphasizing the impact of the employee’s absence on the workplace and their coworkers.

You are not holding this conversation in a blaming tone of voice – after all, many employee absences are legitimate – you are genuinely welcoming the employee back to work and reinforcing the impact of an unscheduled absence.

Third, if possible, allow flexibility with schedules in your workplace so that an employee with an early doctor’s appointment or a sick child, as examples, can work later or come earlier to make up the time.

Women, unfortunately, according to U.S. Department of Labor figures, experience more attendance problems related to family matters. Especially single moms, who have no safety net of family or a partner to help with child-care related issues, struggle with attendance, in my experience.
So, this workplace flexibility might also include the ability to share jobs, schedule flexible days or hours, and work from home, or telecommute, under guidelines. I’m not a huge fan of compensatory or comp time because I believe it encourages a clock-watching attitude. This is not in keeping with the mindset of accomplishing the whole job and goals that I look for in an exempt or salaried employee. But, exempt jobs are also the jobs that will most frequently allow flexibility for the employee and the employer.

Fourth, rewards and recognition for positive employee attendance can make a difference. While you don’t want people feeling as if their employer must pay them extra for doing their job, you do want them to know that you appreciate and respect their positive attendance.

In some cases, especially with non-exempt employees, and to reduce unscheduled absences, you may want to build actual monetary rewards into your employee attendance policy.

Too many attendance policies focus on the punishment side of the equation. More emphasis on rewards for positive attendance might give you more bang for your bucks. Nevertheless, an attendance policy must focus on both.

Finally, and probably most importantly, you need a management system which can help you tracking your employees attendance. You may have a large number of employees and that is very difficult to make sure every one will be tracked properly.  The tracking software like iMonitor WorkAuditor can help you a lot. The turn-on and turn-off of employees will be recorded as clock-in and clock-off information. The employees working idle time, active time can be recorded also.

iMonitor WorkAuditor is not only the tools that can help you tracking, further more, it’s a management software could control and supervise employees behavior without invasion of privacy.

Progressive discipline is critical, starting with coaching and feedback, and performing the steps in attendance management listed above. Your attending employees will thank you.

You can more effectively manage attendance if you follow these steps to reduce absenteeism