by Deborah Wijesiriwardena

Created on: December 22, 2008

The concern of management is to run a company profitably and maximise on profits. They are primarily product and profit oriented. The fact that they sustain financial losses owing to absence arising from problems their workers have, is generally not taken cognizance of. Management personnel sometimes lose sight of the fact that even though unauthorised absence is without pay and the establishment incurs no direct loss, a number of indirect losses are sustained.

The problems of workers which get surfaced on the factory floor, in the classroom or in an office, have their linaks with the family while some will be work-related. If the management is to come to grips with this problem of excessive absence and absenteeism, the causes have to be analysed in detail.

Having analysed the causes, it will be found that not necessarily will the cause be attributed to one, but to a cluster of them. For example it could be a recruitment policy, where no work related aptitude test has been given prior to the recruitment, be it a factory worker, a junior executive or even a senior executive at Management level.

Any company's control of absence and reduction of absence methods should be to level out such causative factors.

To take another simple example, if an organisation has not taken into account the place of residence of an employee as an important criteria for recruitment, it will be seen that if the employee as a result of recruitment, finds himself boarded closer to the place of work, will also find him getting absence often on a Friday or Monday : moreover on a Monday. In this instance distance is the causative factor of the employee's absence from work.

Efforts to control or reduce excessive absenteeism will therefore be twofold, namely, remedial to meet the existing situation and preventive or as a stimulus for better attendance.

There are two types of attendance to be controlled, (1) the "stay aways" without obtaining prior approval of leave and (2) those taking too much leave even though entitled. Efforts to reduce unsatisfactory attendance of either category have to be two pronged. On the one hand they will be remedial steps, and on the other hand, they will be stimuli measures. Remedial steps would be employee counselling or employee counselling cum a reprimanding system for correctional purposes by using such personnel tools as deferment or stoppage of increments, pay cuts for "stay aways" temporary withdrawal of fringe benefits. The stimuli measures would be those that motivate employees to come work. Examples would be, encashment of leave, bonus payment for full attendance for a month.

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