Why is it so hard for some people to show up to work?
It’s impossible to have a team of people without a Suzie Skipper or a Harold Hooky somewhere in the bunch. Attendance issues are the bane of any manager or supervisor’s existence. Whether it’s the 5am voicemail or the 8:10am call from the spouse, an unscheduled absence is never a welcome event.
To start with, you have to scramble to cover their work. Inevitably, it will be the day that you really needed that person at work. Just today, both of my back-up individuals for the receptionist’s lunch break called in. Since Tuesday is the only day of the week they have to do this, it’s par for the course that they’re both out sick today. So I’m stuck training someone to be the back-up for the back-up and the other back-up.
Then, you have to track their absence somehow. My company, like most, has an amazingly overcomplicated system of credits and occurrences that takes a master’s degree in HR idiocy to fully understand. Our system provides these credits twice a year – ensuring that the 1-2 months following allotment of the credits, there is a rampant spike in personal days and sick kids. We also have an elaborate spreadsheet to complete on each employee which is designed to track these occurrences for us. I don’t know anyone that uses it.
Finally, the only people that truly understand an attendance policy are the very people abusing it. If I have questions on whether something counts for the calendar year or a rolling year, I don’t call HR. I call Suzie Skipper. I swear they must spend countless hours poring over the employee manual and quizzing themselves on the policy. They practice test scenarios like 6th grade word problems: 4 tardies, 2 call-ins, and 1 early out for a bad headache = verbal warning. Safe!
I don’t know what the perfect answer is. I do know that within 3-4 months of hiring a new employee, I can tell you if they’re an attendance problem or not. There’s no gray area on this. It’s a yes or no check box. And I surely don’t need a spreadsheet or complicated credit/occurrence system to tell me so.
Mark Peterson
ManagementTrainingBook.com
