Rod Murrow recalls the associate whose secretary couldn’t get to work on time to save her job. Murrow’s associate tried persuading, cajoling, threatening, but nothing worked to inspire the assistant to arrive at her appointed starting time of 8 a.m. So the associate asked the secretary what time she wanted to start. They agreed to adjust her starting time to 9 a.m. to ensure prompt arrival and commencement of duties. And it worked.
For a while. Two weeks later, the secretary was back to her old habit of showing up late for work. The last straw broke when the associate arrived at his office after an early morning appointment to find his next appointment waiting outside a locked door in a darkened hallway. “We spend a lot of time gnashing our teeth trying to fix people,” says Murrow, a Kansas City, Mo. attorney who lectures on employment law for SkillPath Seminars. “And the cold, hard truth of it is, there are some people who cannot be fixed.”
Tardy and absent employees cost their employers enough in aggravation and lost productivity. They can also affect morale and work force cohesion when their behavior infects other employees or goes undisciplined by management.
“Companies that have concerns need to experiment and try to understand what works, rather than letting it go and not meeting their goals,” says Monica M. Griffith, vice president of human resources for The Human Equation Inc., a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based outsource of personnel department duties for small businesses. “Having a policy and not enforcing it … is like not having a policy at all.”
When it comes to absentee and tardiness policies, here are some things that work.
Consider a time bank. Managers “are astonished at how well this works,” Murrow says, “and the only way they can explain it is that there are some people who just enjoy abusing sick leave.” With a time bank, all paid leave-sick time, vacation, “mental health” days-are rolled into one sum from which employees may draw for any reason.
Time banks recognize employees as responsible adults, Griffith says, eliminating employees’s incentive to lie and managers’s reluctance to challenge the falsehoods. Habitual absentees hate time banks, Murrow says: “There’s no longer a reward there; there’s nothing to beat.”
Know the law. The 1990s have experienced a wave of new employee rights legislation, from the Family and Medical Leave Act to the Americans with Disabilities Act, observes Richard G. Vernon, director of the labor and employment law department at Lerch, Early & Brewer, in Bethesda, Md. But “the employer is the one who determines whether a leave is FMLA covered or not,” Vernon notes. “If someone is going to be out longer than three days, they should be sent a FMLA notice.”
Similarly, with ADA, “The [employer’s] obligation is to accommodate unless it creates an undue hardship.” But the employee still has to be able to show up on time and perform the job duties. Acquaintance with employers’s legal obligations can quickly clarify many absentee and tardiness policy questions.
Analyze the problem. Know where and when tardiness and absenteeism are a problem. Griffith suggests establishing a central authority-preferably one person-to which all instances are reported and approved. Review the figures broken down by employee, job title and department on a monthly or quarterly basis. Sometimes, simply looking over the numbers will reveal the cause of absenteeism; if numerous employees take repeated leaves from one department, perhaps the work there is overly stressful or poorly organized. Other times, just noting a problem to the absentee employee solves the problem, Griffith says.
Discipline promptly, consistently, progressively. “What we’ve found works best is the straight old progressive warning system,” Murrow says. That is, warn verbally on the first instance, warn in writing on the second, discipline on the third and consider termination thereafter. Of course, “Every case has to be examined on its own merits,” Vernon says.
Your policy should reflect your company’s underlying needs and culture. Yet the principal is the same-establish the rules, publish and publicize them, then live by them. And while acknowledging varying workplace attendance responsibilities, Murrow says, “Employers need to practice what they preach.”