Top 10 tips for Managing Absenteeism in the Summer

Absenteeism can increase in the summer for many reasons. Respiratory infections such as asthma may force employees to stay at home. Some may have parental responsibilities that become even more obvious when children are off from school for the summer break. Others may just find the lure of the warmer weather and brighter days enough of an excuse to pull a sickie or take a long weekend.

So what can you do to reduce absenteeism in your workplace this summer? Here are some suggestions:

1.  Ensure employees take their allocated annual leave. Holidays are very important when it comes to job performance. Those who take annual leave come back rested, refreshed and stress free.

2.  Make sure that employees working in the office when colleagues go on holidays are not over burdened with double jobbing, which can cause stress related illness and absenteeism. Encourage them to prioritise and spend less time on the not so important aspects of their jobs.

3.  Use an automated time and attendance system, like ClockWise, to manage the holiday requests and balances of employees. This will help to reduce the administrative tasks associated with holiday planning and reduce incidences where too many employees are on holiday at the same time.

4.  Provide employees with comfortable working environments. Scientific studies show that when employees are satisfied with their environmental conditions, they will be more productive. So evaluate your air conditioning, temperatures, lighting and general office ergonomics to keep employees at work rather than out “sick”.

5.  For those employees that work outside, have a clear policy in relation to summer time health and safety issues e.g. drink plenty of water, wear sunscreen etc.

6.  Introduce flexible working practices e.g. flexitime, e-working, part-time work, job sharing, term-time, annualised hours etc. to help give employees control over their work-life balance. Conduct a survey to find out which solutions would work best for your employees.

7.  Try to find out the real reasons why employees are not turning up for work. Use your T&A system to monitor reasons for absence and put steps in place to make amendments as necessary.

8.  Devolve responsibility for absence management to middle managers or supervisors. If they have responsibility for attendance of their teams, they are more likely to pay attention to regularly offending employees and put measures in place to deal with the situation.

9.  Employees who take sickies may not find it so easy to take random days if they have to report to a nurse rather than their manager. In the , companies are using nurses from a firm called Active Health Partners to screen calls from employees. The idea is that the nurse asks them in detail about their ailments in order to advise them what steps they should take e.g. stay in bed, go to the doctor etc. But, it also has the benefit of helping to weed out the not so genuine callers who may feel under pressure due to the wide variety of questions asked by the nurses. Apparently, measures like this have worked well in the to reduce unnecessary absenteeism.

10.  Introduce an awards scheme for those employees with perfect attendance as an incentive to turn up for work e.g. those who never miss a day during the summer will be entered into a draw for a weekend away, a trip to a beauty spa, a dinner for two etc. An idea like this can, of course, can be used on an annual basis rather than just for the summer.