Employee Absenteeism
Employee Absenteeism
Absenteeism is a habitual practice of being absent from work for no valid reason. Basically it is considered as absent when there is no prior approval from management or not report to work without prior information. High employee absenteeism has many negative impact to an organization and every organization doing their best to control absenteeism within 3%. Absenteeism is considered as one of the key performance indicators of the organization.
The causes of absenteeism
According to (Fogler, 2021) unexpected employee absenteeism can be occurred for many reasons. It can be due to employee personal reasons or the organizational environmental reasons.
1) Harassment by fellow employees
Workplace harassment can be either verbally, physically or mentally. An employee can be harassed for his/her race, religion, gender, social back ground. Mental stability is one of the key factors which stimulate employee to present to work daily with moral. When the moral is lost, high tensity is there for employees to absent from work
2) Stress Level
Over loaded , lack of appreciation, prologue meeting with blames, lack of support lead employee to be away from work. Overloaded work beyond capacity of the position make employee stressed thereby mentally unfit to attend to work. It is common expectation of any employee to be appreciated for what they do.
3) Family care (children and elderly care)
Everyone has commitments for the family. There are occasions where employees have alternatives to selects whether to take care family or to attend to work. When a family have little kids or sick elders which are need to be specially cared and no body to care them, employees always tend to be absent. This can be valid reason if employees communicated with management in prior
4) Employer and employee disengagement.
Mutual understanding between employer and employee always make pleasant environment for employees to work on. Break this relationship lead employees to be absent merely because no self satisfactions to continue work.
Impact of absenteeism
1) Productivity
When an employee is absent it directly impact on individual or team productivity. In production process every second is considered have a value. According to (celayix, 2022) "co-workers are 29.5% less productive when covering for absent employees". Production processes are set to run effectively base on the skill of the employee. When the employee or employees are absent this rhythm is broken and lead for production loses.
2) Employee safety
Every operation or job function has it own operational safety concerns which need to be followed to safe themselves, fellow employees as well the company. Employees who attend the work everyday well aware about these safety concerns and thereby avoid facing accidents. There is element of risk when covering employee is replaced since they are not very much familiar with safety concerns of replacing operation.
3) Profitability
Absent of direct work force directly affect for the company profitability as well as individual earning of employees. When employees are absent, productivity goes down and parallelly the earnings. Although the employees is absent, the absent employee cost is added in. thereby profit is decline.
How to reduce Absenteeism
The organization can launch several activities in order to reduce absenteeism. Reduce absenteeism is benefitted the organization in numerus ways.
1) Introduce reward program to encourage daily attendance
2) Create fair and pleasant working culture
3) Organize events to reduce stressful working environment
4) Implement employees society to support employees in their personal needs
5) Create JD and WI base on individual positions
Conclusion
The word absenteeism can create impact on the business and controlling the same brings great value to the organization. Therefore it is important that management take all possible steps to control absenteeism and bring employees to work continuously.
Fogler (2) the causes and costs of absenteeism. investopedia.com[online]. Available at https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/070513/causes-and-costs-absenteeism.asp#:~:text=Some%20of%20the%20main%20reasons,in%20a%20drop%20in%20morale. Accessed on 16th Aug 2023
Celayix (2022) the effect of absenteeism in workplace. celayix.com[online]. Available at https://www.celayix.com/blog/the-effects-of-absenteeism-on-the-workplace/. Accessed on 16th Aug 2023
Absenteeism costs businesses money in terms of missed production, pay, low-quality products or services, and extra managerial time. Furthermore, other staff members will have to cover for absent employees' obligations and responsibilities, which might lead to dissatisfaction.
ReplyDeleteabsenteeism if not properly managed may fail the organisation to attain its goals and objectives. Management needs to understand the consequences of absenteeism and the reasons beyond absenteeism. good post
ReplyDeleteBusinesses can address absenteeism by implementing a fair employee attendance policy, consistently enforcing it, keeping complete records of absences, addressing unscheduled absences and no-shows immediately, trying to understand the underlying causes of absences, and rewarding good attendance.
ReplyDeleteStress is indeed an important factor contributing to absenteeism. I am not sure organising events alone is the best way to address absenteeism caused by stress. There are definitely more things that organisations could do to manage stress at workplace like role clarity, providing flexible work options, encouraging a supportive culture, and promoting a safe working environment (Wickremasinghe, 2023).
ReplyDeleteReferences
Wickremasinghe, N., 2023. Stress Management in HRM. [Online]
Available at: https://hr-journal-of-nimantha.blogspot.com/2023/08/stress-management-in-hrm.html
[Accessed 18 August 2023].
Employees absent there are few reasons impact and all the facts in this blogs covered and good to see.
ReplyDelete