Employee absences are an unavoidable aspect of running a company. While employees rate vacation time, sick leave, and paid time off, these absences have direct and indirect costs. Businesses need to account for these costs when planning their budget, but absence-related expenses can be difficult to calculate.

Corporates must have a dedicated and committed workforce to deliver their best output to achieve organizational success. In this case, many obstacles come into view to obstruct the pathway to success. These can be employee health, loss of productivity, competency, and also, employee absenteeism.

Absenteeism is a huge challenge to a company's success quotient. In this regard, proper absence management must be in place to keep this discrepancy in check.

In this article, HRavailable is explaining to you what is the practice of absenteeism and how it can be managed by an organization.

What is Absence Management?

‍Absence Management is primarily a program to control absences due to urgency, illness, or injury by administering uninformed, unplanned, or excessive absenteeism. Absence management is actually a very crucial factor relevant to the productivity of the workforce.

Why is absence management important?

Unscheduled absenteeism costs a huge for the employer. The costs can be attributed to many factors, including wages, payment to replacement workers, and administrative costs.

The total annual cost of lost productivity due to unscheduled absenteeism differs for different industries.

It is quite evident that unplanned absenteeism has significant operational and financial implications. Besides creating financial problems, absenteeism also creates additional work, such as shift rescheduling, workload rearrangement, and more. More often than not, other workers need to pick up the slack for the absent worker. Putting in this extra effort could decrease productivity, efficiency, employee engagement, and burnout. Absence management could prevent all these and also minimize the financial implications of employees missing work.

What are the best strategies for absence management?

Managing different kinds of absences can be a challenge. However, as per HRavailable, with an effective absence management system, you can efficiently manage your company’s schedule. You can give employees the necessary time off without affecting their productivity levels.

For effective absence management, you need the following:

1. A well-defined absence management policy

Your absence management policy should make it clear to your employees how absences would be managed. A well-defined policy must provide the following information:

– When and how do you need to inform your supervisor.

– How your absence is processed from a scheduling and administrative perspective.

– What are the payment arrangements in case of an absence.

– Disciplinary actions that may be taken in case of unplanned absences.

Your absence management policy should also offer options such as “work from home” or “flexi-work” to reduce absences. It should also inform employees how an absence is recorded and how the data is used. The policy should also help employees to re-engage in work, especially after a long absence.

2. Allow remote work and flexible hours

Having a robust “remote work” and “flexible hours” policy can also significantly reduce how often your employees miss work. Many times, employees take a day off because their babysitter did not turn up or because they had an important errand to run. By allowing employees to work flexible hours or to work from home, they can easily take care of their personal and professional responsibilities together.

Of course, the possibility of remote work or flexible hours depends on the industry you work in. In jobs where the employee needs to be physically present, such an arrangement may not be possible. However, for other jobs, this could be a good way to reduce absenteeism.

3. Using absence management software

An absence management software can make absence management a lot easier. It can track and manage all kinds of leaves, including annual leave and other holiday/s. You can use it to define what an absence looks like and keep track of all requests and approvals.

Besides recording absences, it can also help you understand the cause of these absences and analyze the data for any patterns or trends. Say, you want to check which department has the highest number of absences. Your absence management software can get that information for you in just a few seconds.

Implementing an absence management software also allows accurate payroll processing and rescheduling work more efficiently. You will be able to deal with unauthorized absences more easily, increasing productivity and driving engagement among your employees.

You are paying your employees for their work. So, it is important to know who’s coming to work and who’s not. HRavailable strongly suggests you to streamline this initiative with the right policies, procedures, and tools in place.

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