Technology is helping people in various ways. From connecting people to curing diseases like cancer, technology is at the forefront of everything. But tech also does some less-glamorous tasks like helping companies control employee absenteeism.
For companies suffering from employee absenteeism, it’s a serious problem that can affect their productivity and revenue. Here, learn how your business can use technology like https://clockineasy.com/ to tackle the workers’ absenteeism problem.
What is Employee Absenteeism and How it Affects Companies?
In simple words, employee absenteeism is defined as the act of an employee staying absent from his work regularly. This type of absence excludes the authorized leaves or paid time off. Depending on the reasons cited by the employees, it may not be counted under the emergency or health absent policies as well.
While one or two days is not considered as absenteeism, but frequent instances that extend multiple days and into weeks.
It becomes a severe concern for the company and HR managers. As per the Bureau of Labor Statistics report released in 2017, at least 3% of the US workforce is absent on any single given day. Another report claims that unscheduled leaves cost companies around $3,600 a year for each hourly employee and around $2,500 a year for every regular salaried employee.
In the subsequent sections, learn how technology can help your company handle the absenteeism problem.
Start Tracking Attendance
If you haven’t already, you should start tracking attendance. This is a really important component of reducing worker absenteeism. Tracking attendance is the first step to learning what days a particular employee is skipping workdays without notice.
When it comes to tracking attendance, you should adopt the modern approach where you do so electronically. So instead of maintaining a register, you have your workers log into manual timesheet software.
Whenever they start working at the office, their work gets recorded from that time onwards. So if they came to the office at 10 AM but started working at 10:20 AM, you’ll keep a record of it. More importantly, it will help you predict if the worker is struggling with something and likely to skip work in the future.
Electronic timesheets also save you time for managing the paper timesheets. Moreover, analyzing paper records is a time-consuming task. So even if you’re tracking attendance but in paper format, consider switching to electronic timesheet format for better results.
Share Reports about the Unauthorized Absences
To improve employee absenteeism, you need to let employees know about the days they’ve been absent. They’d know that they were missing on those days. But the purpose is to let them know that the HR department is keeping an eye on their absent behavior.
You can send them the reports on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis. It should contain the days they’ve worked on, the days they’ve skilled, hours they’ve worked per day, and the reason they’ve cited for the absent days. The briefer the report, the better it will be.
Electronic timesheets allow you to prepare reports instantly. The cloud-based software maintains the timesheet every day. And at the end of the week or month, you can download the report, review it, and share it with the employees. You get the option of downloading it in PDF or CSV format.
This is way better than manually going through the physical attendance sheet and preparing reports.
Make Policies More Flexible
To reduce absenteeism, you may consider making your company policy more flexible. Usually, employees skip work because they face an unavoidable issue. In such cases, you may encourage them to communicate the same. Even better, you can make timings flexible for such employees so they can come in and contribute when it is convenient to them.
While technology won’t help you create such policies, it can help inform and communicate the changes made to the employees.
For example, you can update the policy and send messages to all the employees. You can share links to these updates on all of the technology-based tools. They can quickly access the rules and check if they comply with the updated corporate policies.
Technology has made our lives so much better, and it’s going to keep on improving. It depends on humans how they can utilize it effectively.
With the rise of remote workers and the gig economy, more people are working from home. Tracking their absenteeism is even more challenging since they’re not physically present. To track their working hours, you must use web-based time tracking software. They can keep your remote workforce functioning effectively and hold them accountable for their unauthorized absence.
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