Dealing With Unplanned Employee Absences

How often do you have employees taking time off? If you have a lot of employee absences, it can lead to a loss in productivity and it can really cause morale issues in the workplace. You need to learn how to manage employee absences and make it so that you are not having people call in daily and forcing your other employees to pick up the slack. When people use sick leave in the way it was intended, it is a good thing but it is the employees that use sick leave like it is vacation time that you need to worry about. You need to look for ways to reward the employees that use sick leave in the right way and to find ways to discourage your employees that abuse it.

Depending upon the type of company you have, you may experience a high amount of sick leave due to so many people working at the company. There is a higher risk of illness when you have a large staff as a head cold can spread through the workplace in no time. You also need to watch for the time of the year. At certain times of the year you will see that people are ill and are unable to come to work healthy all the time. Controlling the spread of germs in the office is vital so you do not end up dealing with sickness that does spread through the office.

You need to figure out how to track the right type of sick leave use. Some companies will end up asking their employees to come in with a doctors note to show that they did take time off for a legitimate reason. Other companies will track how often people use sick leave and also when they use it. If you have an employee that requested time off and you were unable to offer it to them but then they call in sick that day, you obviously need to worry about them lying. It is important to confront an employee that is dishonest like this and to make sure that you are holding them accountable for their actions.

When you have employees that are involved in unauthorized leave, you need to make sure that you are showing them discipline the next time that they do show up to work. You need to treat them for misconduct as they did lie and they did violate company policies. You need to listen to their explanation to see if it is worthwhile or not but in most cases if you had a heads up, you should prepare to take disciplinary action on the employee when they show up to work the next day.

Hand the company policies to the employee and clearly explain to them that you will not tolerate any type of behavior that is in violation of the policy. In the case of an employee that is abusing sick leave, you need to document the behavior and clearly show them what will happen now. Termination needs to be on this letter somewhere so they can see how close to the edge they are. You may even need to suspend them without pay in order to get the message across to them that you will not tolerate any type of behavior that is abusing the company.

When you have to discipline people for employee absences you need to rule with an iron fist. Do not feel bad as people will continue to press your boundaries to see what else they can get away with. When you catch them in a lie and call them out on it right away, it will greatly reduce the sick leave abuse that is occurring.