What to do with habitually absent workers
We have 3,170 workers in our factory operations with an annual absenteeism rate of about 7%. The trouble is that our Collective Bargaining Agreement with our employees’ union allows the workers to have a clean slate after one calendar year. This means that workers’ offenses are erased from the record resulting in many people escaping the penalty of either suspension from work or dismissal from employment. To address the situation, the company implemented a Perfect Attendance Award three years ago and qualifies people with no absences or tardiness to be a part of the Christmas Party raffle. Despite this, we have not reduced our annual absenteeism rate resulting in close to one million pesos per year of overtime pay and other related expenses. Is there a better way of reducing, if not eliminating absences? — Nearing Exhaustion.
There’s a story about a Manila-based law firm that sent flowers for the opening of a new law office in a far-away province established by a former partner-associate. The managing partner of the firm thinks it’s better to maintain good relations with former colleagues, in the hope of establishing professional ties in the near future.
However, through some mix-ups, the ribbon that bedecked the floral piece read — “Deepest sympathies.” When the florist was informed of his mistake, he let out a cry of alarm. “Good heavens,” he exclaimed, “then the flowers that went to the funeral must have carried the piece: “Congratulations on your new location!”
This same mix-up can happen in many organizations. We multiply unintended mistakes several times over. This happens if we allow ourselves to implement knee-jerk solutions that are based on the practices of other companies. If the practice of the Perfect Attendance Award becomes a trend in the industry, many organizations will tend to blindly copy it without seriously considering its validity and repercussions.
In the first place, why give awards to people who are required to come to work every day and on-time? Isn’t that absurd? Not only that, it’s also an administrative nightmare for the human resource department to issue individual certificates to those with perfect attendance, and file a copy in everyone’s personnel folder.
It’s also a potential issue with the employees’ union that may challenge the rationality of such an award that excludes habitually absent workers from the year-end raffle. You didn’t mention it though, but I’d like to believe that since you have a CBA, it only means that you’re giving more than the statutory five-day service incentive and may include liberal vacation and sick leave credits to people, allowing them to use it to log in more “emergency” absences or one or two “sick days” yearly.
I haven’t heard of any industry study in the Philippines on the correlation between job satisfaction and absenteeism. However, many people managers that I’ve talked to in the recent past, agree that satisfied employees have lower levels of absenteeism than dissatisfied people. Only those who are highly motivated who would try to avoid unscheduled absences as they want to complete certain tasks and at the same time avoid conflict with their bosses.
On the other hand, when employees are dissatisfied with their work, they will respond somehow by calling in sick, giving all imaginable reasons to justify their emergency absences. To correct this, there are three things that you can do right away to solve the high rate of workers’ absenteeism.
One, identify the sections, units, or departments where absenteeism is high. The HR department can summarize the corporate-wide record to isolate those groups with problem employees. You can cover the annual historical record, if not extend it to two or three years. With this, you can readily understand the pattern and identify which group has the most number of attendance issues.
Two, emphasize the role of the workers’ line executives in curbing the issue. No, it’s not the HR department which has the authority and responsibility to address high absenteeism rates. However, it can give advice to supervisors and managers on how to handle the problem but only to ensure consistent and uniform application. Remember the basic rule — those who have the last right to hire workers, have the first right to discipline them.
Three, seek the cooperation of the workers’ union in understanding the issue. One way to do this is by explaining the cost implications and exploring many ways on how they can assist management. However, management must be careful in doing this as there are some unions which may not be open to the idea and would rather put the blame on those concerned line executives with undesirable management styles.
If this happens, then you have another reason to go back to emphasizing the active role of line management if not assess whether they need to learn or unlearn what they know about supervising problem employees.