6 Ways to Improve Employee Attendance

When employees don’t show up to work, it can cause problems for everyone else who does. After all, their work has to fall on someone (and it’s usually the co-workers). Employees who are frequently absent can even slow down the productivity of the entire company. If you’re an employer, what can you do? Several things, actually.

From having a clear policy in place to offering incentives like access to earned wages, there are quite a few different ways to improve the attendance of your employees. Here are six of them:

• Have a clear attendance policy in place.

If you don’t have an attendance policy in place, you shouldn’t really be surprised that employees don’t know what you expect of them. They’re bound to frustrate you because there aren’t any official “rules” for attendance. Here are some crucial components of any attendance policy:

1. Who the employee contacts when they’re sick or going to miss work.
2. When they’re expected to contact them (e.g. 12-24  hours ahead of time).
3. Why they need to document the reason for their absence.

• Reward or recognize employees with great attendance.

If you aren’t already analyzing or monitoring attendance records, start doing it (or hire someone else to do it). Identify employees who have stellar attendance records and give them rewards or recognition for being a great employee. This could be money, public praise, extra time off or something else. When others see the rewards for good attendance, it motivates them.

• Have consequences for employees with poor attendance.

Likewise, you need to address employees who have less-than-stellar attendance records. While you don’t want to publicly shame them, you might want to discipline them in some way. Consider escalating penalties, starting with something like a write-up and ending with something like time off without pay.

• Speak to employees and get to know them.

Ideally, you want to get to the root of the problem when it comes to employees with poor attendance. You can’t solve most issues by simply addressing the symptoms. If you have employees who struggle with attendance, sit them down and try to understand why. It could be because of health issues. Or, it could be family circumstances. It could even be hidden causes (drug/alcohol problems, issues with co-workers, marital circumstances, etc.). Once you figure it out, you’ll be in a better position to help them and improve their attendance.

• Make your office more appealing.

Did you know that 38 percent of employees have called into work sick when actually feeling well, according to a survey by CareerBuilder? One reason for this is that they might not like being in the office. Take a hard look at your culture, management styles, and workloads, as well as physical aspects of the office (e.g. are your chairs causing back pain?).

• Give access to earned wages.

Also known as pay access, giving employees access to earned wages gives them lots of motivation to have good attendance. With Spentra’s pay access solution, for example, employees can access up to 50% of their net wages at the time of request at no cost to the employer. That means employees have immediate access to funds and can see the payoffs of their hard work in real-time. This could potentially fix some hidden causes for poor attendance as well. It’s no cost for employers, either, so it really is a no-brainer.

These are just a few ways to improve employee attendance. To get started on the last one, contact us today to learn more about Spentra.