Managing Absenteeism: Challenges and Strategies

This is also one of the most important factors that the human resource department has to manage as there are a lot of absenteeism issues that are being faced in organizations; therefore attendance management helps the human resource department to control absenteeism as well as for time keeping. The issue of absenteeism is a serious one and a survey reveals that an average employee is absent usually for nine working days annually due to various causes some of which are professional while some are personal problems that employees face.

The professional problems might be the job scope i. e.

the employee has to continuously repeat doing what he has been doing and this causes job dissatisfaction. Moreover, stress is another important factor and estimations tell us that 40 million days annually are wasted in the UK due to the factor of stress. Stress occurs due to various factors such as working conditions, conflicts occurring in the organization, the climate of the organization, etc.

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Transferring the employees very frequently, the style of the management i. e. the way the supervisors treat the juniors and size of the work groups are also some other professional factors that cause absenteeism.

The personal factors however include the employee values, the age, gender and personality of an employee as the employees who are young are less prone to get absent at work when compared to those who are aged. Similarly, the females are expected more to be absent than the males as they usually get sick faster than men and some have it in their personality to get absent at work and this is also proved by studies that tell us that there are around ten percent of the people in the entire workforce who account for around half the total days in which employees are absent while some are rarely absent from work.

Other factors that might affect absenteeism can be the reward systems, sick pay schemes and the norms of the work group as an increase or decrease in the pay can decrease or increase the rate of absenteeism as well. (Schein, 1993). It is therefore essential for the human resource department to control the issue of absenteeism but it can be costly as well as disruptive for the organization. The organization should be committed to lesser the rate of absenteeism, they should place trust on the employees as trust makes them more committed and motivated that is good in the interest of the organization.

The human resource department should also maintain an attendance policy that is documented; moreover proper training should be provided for everyone especially the employees working on higher posts. Moreover, proper communication is also very necessary because if the message will not be appropriately conveyed to the other party, it would be useless. Counseling should be provided to employees as well as the whole employment process must be disciplined.