Your employees are the lifeblood of your business. From back-end operations to dealing directly with your customers, you simply wouldn’t be able to get by without them. While businesses must provide paid vacation and sick days to their employees, there is no denying that unscheduled absences and chronic absenteeism can cause significant harm to your business. While you can prevent unscheduled absences with an absence management software, putting the harm of these absences in context will provide extra motivation to make this a priority.
Added Stress For Other Employees
Illness or a family emergency could keep someone from being able to come in to work their normal shift. To make up for this, other employees are generally required to take on the absent individual’s responsibilities for the day, or someone might be asked to work an additional shift.
Unfortunately, taking over for someone else’s work often means that the coworker who is “covering” for the absent employee has to put their own responsibilities on hold. This means that overall productivity declines, especially if the “covering” employee isn’t fully familiar with their coworker’s responsibilities.
Frequent absences can also increase stress and lower for morale for other employees. They may begin to feel overworked or even resentful because of the extra responsibilities they have to take on. This can even cause them to get sick, resulting in even more unscheduled absences.
Overlooked Financial Costs
Aside from lost productivity, recurring absenteeism can have significant costs for the business. Covering for the absent employee can directly increase expenses if you have to pay another employee overtime to take the shift. Hiring extra employees to address the frequent absences results in additional on-boarding and training costs — and you will be paying more wages overall.
If you don’t have a sound absence management platform in place, you could end up providing paid sick days to employees, even after they have already used up their allotment of paid leave. Even if the costs are relatively small at first, they will eventually have a big impact on your bottom line, especially if more employees begin to abuse the lax “paid sick days” system.
Conclusion
Over time, unscheduled absences can create significant problems for your business, especially if you do not adequately track paid sick and vacation days. By using absence management software to track such incidents, you will be better equipped to supervise how your team spends its time and minimize the challenges created by unexpected absences.
