Organizations are increasingly recognizing the significant costs associated with high levels of employee absence.
At the same time, managers are often unsure about the level and nature of the problems they may be facing, or about how these problems are most effectively addressed.
Normally we can classify absences into two types, namely short-term and long-term.
The success of an organization lies in the effective management of the resources and their employee's leave rate.
An organization can adopt a number of methods to manage absence effectively.
Some of them include the effective and accurate monitoring of leaves, defining targets for level of absence and providing a clear and concise absence policy document for employees.
Absence Management policy While dealing with policies, especially for employees, an organization should take care of many things.
The policy should be clear so that every employee can understand the underlying rules.
It should also contain information such as the person to whom they consult immediately if they need a leave, at what time they must contact the manager, and where should the worker go to get further support.
A good absence management policy should contain a clearly defined rule for sickness leave.
Sickness leave plays an important role in absence management, since in most organizations employees are misusing the sickness leave option.
Managing absenteeism and sick leave To tackle absenteeism effectively, an organization must have an absence management policy that allows the organization to detect and address the situation early to avoid short-term absenteeism becoming long-term absenteeism.
We can manage absences only if we can find the real cause behind it.
Research has indicated many of the strategies for overcoming excessive absenteeism tend to have short-term effects only.
We can reduce the number of single day sickness leave by requiring a valid medical certificate.
Another way to manage absence is by ensuring the employee is aware of the organization's policy on absenteeism.
The employee should be contacted periodically and in turn should maintain regular contact with the employer.
Benefits of outsourcing absence management Since the absence of employees in an organization adversely affects its profit, companies come up with new technologies to tackle and manage absenteeism.
Outsourcing of absence management has become a widely accepted method for managing the employees and their leaves.
Need for an absence management tool in an organization is directly related to the current absence management techniques followed by an organization.
Current techniques used for handling long-term absence, short-term absence and their impacts will be the effective inputs for better control of absence.
Using these tools, an organization can easily track and manage their employee's leaves and in turn improve the efficiency and productivity of the organization.
Hence in an organization, it is essential to have a well-defined and well-structured policy for better efficiency and growth.