Content area
Full Text
Workshop
At certain times of the year, do you find that your employees are missing in action more frequently? Unscheduled worker absences are increasing, and according to various surveys, government agencies have the largest amounts of absences.
According to CCH, Inc., a company that produces electronic and print products for the tax, legal, securities, insurance, human resources, health care, and small-business markets, unscheduled absenteeism can cost up to an average of $602 per employee per year, not including such indirect costs as overtime pay for other employees, hiring of temps, missed deadlines, lost sales, sinking morale, and lower productivity. Indirect costs can add up to 25 percent to the direct costs, according to Employee Benefit News (December 1999) and HR News (November 1999).
In a survey of 11 U.S.-based telecommunications organizations, published in the July 2000 issue of Business Insurance, 72 cents of every dollar of costs related to employee absences stem from lost productivity, rather than from hard costs like health care and disability benefits.
Sick leave is a necessary benefit for all employees. If employers didn't offer sick leave, they would accelerate health problems and the spread of illness, thereby lowering productivity and morale. Despite the pressure for perfect attendance to improve customer service and efficiency, employees need equitable sick leave programs for security and for overall high performance. Yet some organizations suffer from sick leave abuse, and abuse translates into lost dollars.
A pattern of abuse of sick leave typically appears among employees who, over a period of time, have violated the organization's attendance policy on numerous occasions. To confidently discipline employees with attendance problems, legal experts say the best bet is to set out a clearly written policy that specifies the organization's standards and employee requirements. Be sure to specify that discipline-including termination-may result. Keep the policy flexible, as it is virtually impossible to list every single potential offense.
Examples of attendance policy violations are:
* Inordinately high number of absences, number of times coming in late, and number of early departures, all of which exceed the attendance policy allotment.
* Failure to get permission for leaving early or coming in late.
* Failure to give advance notice of an absence when possible.
* Failure to report an absence properly.
*...