How to Improve Employee Attendance Effectively

The productivity and efficiency of a company hinge highly on employee attendance. But employees remain absent from the office occasionally for multiple reasons.

Taking sick leaves, casual leaves, marriage leaves, paternity & maternity leaves, and earned leaves keep them away from appearing in the office.

As an HR manager, you tend to improve employee attendance to beef up your company’s health and success. To do so, you have to adopt a number of actionable employee attendance improvement strategies, right from communicating with employees to implementing HR software at your organization.

Let’s take a look at how to improve employee attendance effectively at your office, resulting in increased productivity.

Common Factors Leading to Absenteeism

Before diving into how to improve employee attendance, let’s learn what causes employees to remain absent from their offices —

Personal Health Condition: 

Sickness is a common happening that causes occasional employee absence from the workplace. Regardless of the severity of health conditions, employees tend to miss showing up at the office. The health condition encompasses both physical health and mental well-being.

Difficulty in Work-Life Balance: 

Work and personal life alike are crucial to maintain but some employees find it challenging to carry out. At times, they face the circumstance of taking on huge family responsibilities, keeping them away from the workplace.

Lacking Engagement or Job Satisfaction: 

Employees disengaged or displeased with their jobs are more likely to have higher absenteeism rates. This disengagement can arise from a number of factors, including no reward scopes, limited growth opportunities, or mismatch with the company’s values.

Excessive Office Stress and Burnout: 

Many employees get team leads or bosses who make them overwork. Excessive workload overstresses them, leading to burnout and sometimes long-term illness. Consequently, they get forced to take time off to recover from the illness.

Transportation and Commuting Drawbacks: 

Regardless of the location, transport unavailability often induces employee attendance issues. Employees from distant locations find it difficult to commute regularly which despairs them and causes undue absence from work.

How to Improve Employee Attendance

Automating Leave Requests

If you are still using the manual method of managing your leave request, get rid of it now. It’s time to make use of a more streamlined method, that is, automated leave requests. And automating leave requests is as easy as pie. With an HR solution, you can effortlessly do it.

With HR solutions, your employees can access the centralized platform quickly and submit their leave requests without moving from table to table. Also, HR managers receive instant notifications through the same user-friendly system. No hassle of paperwork, no elongated waiting periods – just a smooth interaction.

HR solutions ensure that every step, from leave request to approval, is spot-on. No chance of lost forms or ignored requests; the centralized platform acts as a bankable checkpoint.

HR software not only automates your company’s leave requests but also slashes the absenteeism rate.

Track Your Employee Leave

Systematically recording your employees’ leave data is key to improving employee attendance. You can keep the record through a basic spreadsheet and HR software. But I recommend leveraging an HR attendance management solution to track leave data perfectly.

And with precise data, you can justify or dismiss any hunches you may have. Automated tracking of leave may not directly improve employee attendance, but it’s a great starting point to merge with other modifications and processes.

Integration with Attendance Systems

Manually recording employee working hours and absences is time-consuming and prone to human error. But an HR solution allows for syncing everything perfectly with the power of automation.

With integrated HR solutions and a punch machine, the clock-in and clock-out moments get seamless. It records your time accurately and syncs into the digital system. The attendance system and HR solutions perform a synchronized routine, capturing data consistently and accurately.

With the punch-in and punch-out process, your employee absence management becomes automated, eliminating the risks associated with manual data entry. So, you get a more reliable and efficient absence management system that hinders attendance manipulation.

Employee Self-Service Portals

An HR system allows your employees to enjoy self-service to manage their leave requests, access crucial information, and take charge of their work-life balance – that’s the reality HR solutions with self-service portals offer.

Also, your HR team can automatically get burden-free of managing employee absence with decreased workloads. It also fosters a sense of responsibility among employees. Hence, it automatically impacts in employee attendance improvement.  

Other Crucial Approaches for Employee Attendance Improvement

Spread the Awareness:

Make sure that all workers understand the rules and standards for attendance. This can be done through sharing employee handbooks, conducting orientations, and regular meetings.

Offer Flexible Work Schedules:

Make your workplace more flexible by giving workers choices of multiple work modes like working from home, shuffling their schedules, or reducing their workweeks to handle their personal and professional lives better or ensuring work-life balance

Cultivate accountability and cooperation:

Encourage peer support and tell people on your team to help and encourage each other to keep up their good attendance. Peer responsibility is a strong way to get people to show up to work every day.

Utilize HR Solutions to Improve Employee Attendance

Employee absence is a normal affair and it’s likely to happen in every workplace due to various factors I discussed above. But some absences occur due to employee negligence, callousness, and lack of team engagement.

This is what HR software or HR attendance management software can solve to a great extent if utilized properly. The best part of this type of software is it shows all attendance data transparently & precisely in front of employees which contributes to attendance improvement indirectly.