For decades, attendance management has been understood as increasing employees’ presence time at the workplace and reducing absence time. But today, attendance management is focused on maintaining the right balance: its aspects include not only planning leave schedules, handling unscheduled absences and fighting absenteeism, but also getting employees to use their paid vacation and preventing the so called presenteeism at the workplace.
This makes attendance management process more complicated than ever before. Many factors need to be taken into account for developing and implementing an attendance management policy that would ensure predictability of teams’ capacities and healthy work environment.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the components of an efficient attendance management strategy and explain how to implement it the right way with the help of high-quality tools. So, read on to get your questions answered! 🙌
5 Key Rules for Effective Attendance Management
1. Encourage employees’ presence at the workplace
Verbal recognition is an efficient way to express appreciation of employees’ attendance. People who feel appreciated are more productive and engaged at work, and more prone to the rewarded behavior. The key here is stressing the importance of good attendance for the team and the company’s goals: reliability, ability to stick to the plans, and general productivity.
In some cases, monetary rewarding can be an efficient method of increasing presence at the workplace. For example, this can work for non-exempt employees in order to reduce unscheduled absences. This method needs to be included in the attendance management policy that should define the number of days over which attendance is rewarded. 💰
2. Commit to defeat presenteeism
The hidden costs of presenteeism are no longer a secret. That’s why preventing presenteeism is one of the most important trends in today’s attendance management.
Developing regulations that prescribe staying home when not being able to work properly is the first step that an employer needs to take against presenteeism. Giving guidance to the employees and letting them know that it is okay to stay home and not to turn up for work in case of an illness or an emergency is also a must.
Organizing an easy way to inform coworkers on last-minute schedule changes is also important here. For many employees, the problem of communication with the employer and team members in case of an emergency is what makes them turn up for work. You can easily prevent this by implementing an absence management system that allows to send quick absence notes or request sick leaves from a mobile device. 📱
3. Make workplace as flexible as possible
Flexible schedules not only allow people to get their work done at their earliest convenience, but also reduces stress caused by the combination of health or family issues and the obligation to show up at work at a specific time.
Remote work is another flexibility option that helps reduce unscheduled absences. Anyone knows the struggle of being too sick to show up in the office but being perfectly capable of performing the work itself. The ability to work from home eliminates the need to go to the office in order to get things done — so many employers provide ways to connect remotely to the workplaces or take work home. 🏡
4. Implement disciplinary actions for absenteeism
Relying on negative motivation is depicted as an unproductive management approach, but in some cases it is the only thing that works. Severe disciplinary issues, low morale and poor attitude are not uncommon at workplace, so attendance management policy should provide a straightforward way to manage absenteeism.
The common recommendation here is not to start with punitive measures right away. Progressive discipline is what works best, starting with coaching and clarification of attendance policy provisions. Often, constructive feedback given on early stages of a problem provides the solution: explaining attendance expectations and overseeing employees’ work after the given feedback is usually the only disciplinary action that needs to be taken. 🚫👮♀️
5. Keep a record of absences
Knowledge is power — this applies to attendance management, too. Having detailed records on employees’ planned absences helps plan work for the future periods, distribute workloads, and plan out resources. Many companies use special software tools for creating visual charts, reviewing all necessary details, and getting the most value out of absence data.
Keeping historical records is also important, and not only to calculate leave time balances. Having the data on unscheduled absences at hand allows managers to reveal attendance trends, predict possible staff shortages, and prevent workflow problems caused by poor attendance. 💥
Take Attendance Management to the Next Level with High-Quality Software
There’s no better way to make attendance management as streamlined and efficient as can be than by adopting a modern software solution that automates team management processes and lets you plan resources without a hitch.
actiPLANS is an excellent example of such a solution. It allows businesses and their teams to build accurate attendance schedules, collect informative data for better workload planning and save a lot of time on people management thanks to handy automation and a multitude of other productivity-boosting features.
Moreover, actiPLANS is super-easy to implement! Here’s how you may improve employee attendance with its help:
- Add bespoke leave types 🌴 and work types 🔨 to your account — The former will help you track staff absences, while the latter can be applied to schedule employee attendance and working time.
- Manage team absences via the Leave Scheduling interface 📅 — It features a visual timeline that allows employees to quickly check their current or future PTO balances, decide on vacation dates, and create leave requests in just a couple of clicks. And using this interface as a manager, you can easily review your team’s planned absences and approve / reject the submitted leave requests in bulk or individually.
- Manage team attendance via the Work Scheduling interface 🕗 — It’s designed for allocating your custom work types to employees using an intuitive visual chart. This chart displays the scheduled team absences and lets you build accurate attendance schedules around them. And once the schedules are created, your employees will simply need to open their actiPLANS accounts to see when they are supposed to be present at work.
- Don’t forget to switch on automatic notifications 🔔 — They will keep everyone on the team updated about the newest schedule changes and incoming leave requests.
- Run reports to understand how resources are used 📊 — Time off reports will provide an in-depth insight into your team’s absence trends, while the Work Types report will show you how the working time is allocated across employees and which types of work are the most time-consuming.
- Use actiPLANS Mobile to manage attendance wherever you are ⛺ — This mobile attendance app offers a convenient way to quickly inform your colleagues about lateness or early departures from work and check who is absent for any given day.
Altogether, these actiPLANS features improve attendance management by helping you control employees’ work schedules and providing a wealth of valuable data on the use of resources. Sign up for a free 30-day trial to see them in action yourself!
