Every once in a while, people need to miss a day or two at work. This can be for a variety of reasons, like doctor’s appointments, errands, and other personal responsibilities. But, when someone is absent for no reason, it can be a part of a bigger problem: employee absenteeism.

In this article, we’ll explore the concept of employee absenteeism—starting with the basics. We’ll also cover how you can detect and manage it using time tracking software.

What is employee absenteeism?

To start off, let’s explore the meaning of employee absenteeism. It simply refers to when someone is absent from work for no reason—just because they didn’t feel like working on a given day. Absenteeism also typically involves no notices, not even last-minute ones. People affected by it generally don’t care about any deadlines or other work responsibilities they might have. As a result, absenteeism can affect your business quite significantly—especially if it happens at the wrong time.

Common causes of employee absenteeism

While a lack of reason is a key factor in absenteeism, there are a few underlying causes for the phenomenon. These can be divided into two main categories:

• Work-related factors
• Personal factors

Let’s now explore the reasons why employee absenteeism happens, starting with a couple of work-related factors.

Work-related factors

As hinted by the name, these are directly related to an absentee’s work environment.

Lack of job satisfaction and professional engagement

People who aren’t committed to their work are less likely to do everything they can to not miss it. This issue can stem from a variety of sources, like a lack of clear targets or subpar career growth opportunities. Professional growth in particular can play a major role in how motivated your staff are at work. This will then influence employee absenteeism at your firm quite a lot—highlighting the importance of career development prospects.

Stress and overworking

Overworked and stressed-out professionals will eventually get burnt out. They will be exhausted from work and looking for any opportunity to miss it. Moreover, if your staff are highly stressed, they’ll be more likely to get sick. According to ColumbiaDoctors’ “Chronic Stress Can Hurt Your Overall Health”, stress increases the likelihood of a variety of illnesses. As you might imagine, these will further contribute to employee absenteeism—even if an absence from illness is not absenteeism itself.

Personal factors

Unlike work-related ones, these factors take place in an absentee’s personal time. These negative events can spread into the work of professionals, causing employee absenteeism.

Family-related issues

Family-related troubles can cause employees to sacrifice their work to catch a break from stress. In this sense, this factor is quite similar to overworking. But, its root cause is something you can’t control. The best you can do to deal with absenteeism due to family issues is to talk with your team and provide them with support.

Lack of workplace flexibility

A lack of flexibility can cause some people to miss work in favor of personal tasks that can’t be rescheduled. This is typically combined with a varying degree of low professional engagement. If your staff are highly committed to their jobs, they’re more likely to reschedule personal commitments—even if they don’t have much flexibility at work.

Fortunately, dealing with this is pretty straightforward. Simply offering flexible working hours to your team will help them complete both work tasks and those outside of it. Doing so is pretty easy with a popular productivity tool: time tracking software. Such apps will also help you in our next point of discussion—detecting absenteeism.

Detecting employee absenteeism with a time tracker

Detecting absenteeism is the first step to addressing it. Time tracking apps can help in this quite a lot—especially ones with many tracking features. Let’s explore what steps you could take to detect the phenomenon in your team.

Manage leave

The first thing you should do to combat absenteeism is to start using a robust leave management system. This will help you track when each of your team members is going to be on leave. Your staff will be able to request leave through high-quality time trackers, making it easy to track attendance.

Track attendance

Lots of high-quality time tracking apps offer attendance-monitoring functionality. Through this, you’ll be able to see which of your employees came to work, are on leave, or are absent on a given day. If someone is absent without having given a notice, it might be a sign of absenteeism.

Preventing absenteeism with time tracking apps

While you can detect employee absenteeism with time tracking apps, you can also prevent it with them. A few steps you could take to do this are:

• Enhance work-life balance
• Reward your team for their efforts
• Improve employee engagement

Let’s explore these in-depth, starting with work-life balance.

Enhance work-life balance

Time tracking apps can help you manage your team’s workloads to ensure nobody’s got work overload. This can help prevent absenteeism from overworking and stress. At the same time, a healthy work-life balance will help your staff go through tougher periods in their personal lives without affecting their work. A key factor in this is a flexible working schedule, which is a place where time tracking apps can help as well.

Reward your team for their efforts

Ensuring your staff are rewarded for their work appropriately is key to maintaining job commitment. The data collected by high-quality time trackers will be invaluable in this, as you’ll easily be able to see who’s performing well. Productivity and performance data can also help you calculate raises more accurately—rewarding each team member proportionally to their work.

Improve employee engagement

Improving professional engagement will ensure your staff are more likely to prioritize work over other things. Fortunately, doing so is easy with a high-quality time tracker. The two points we discussed previously contribute to this greatly, but—there’s more you can do. A good example of this is offering various benefits based on performance.

Closing thoughts

Employee absenteeism can be a sizable problem for various businesses. It mainly affects professionals who aren’t engaged in their jobs—leading to them caring less about their tasks. Fortunately, managing employee absenteeism is pretty straightforward with a time tracker. You can ensure your staff are committed to their work, prioritizing it correctly. This will also help you improve employee accountability at your firm, helping it grow in a variety of ways.