Unplanned employee absence costs U.S. employers a collective total of $225.8 billion every year, which amounts to around $1,685 per employee. Businesses of any size suffer a loss of productivity due to employee absenteeism, but smaller businesses with fewer resources and smaller staffing levels can be the hardest hit.
Reducing absenteeism is essential if you want to maximize your productivity and profitability. To learn how, take a look at these three ways to reduce employee absence:
1. Provide a Safe Working Environment
Accidents and injuries account for a significant proportion of employee absences but creating a safe working environment can help to prevent this. Not only will you be fulfilling your duties as an employer and meeting health and safety regulations, but you’ll also be safeguarding your workforce and therefore your company’s resources.
Cultivating a safe working environment can mean providing the right equipment, ensuring employees are well-trained and insisting that employees take regular breaks. However, conducting bespoke risk assessments will allow you to identify and address any health and safety hazards in your workplace.
2. Implement Infection Control
When employees become unwell, they naturally need to take time off work to recover. Although this is perfectly understandable, it does have an impact on your business. Furthermore, infectious illnesses can spread rapidly through a workplace, which may mean that numerous members of staff are absent at one time.
Implementing infection control can be an effective way to combat this. Increased cleaning, access to antibacterial and anti-viral hand sanitizers and providing free face masks are just some of the ways you can stop the spread of infections in your workplace. To learn more about using PPE in an office environment, take a look at this informative blog post by Sneeze Guard EZ.
3. Improve Employee Morale
Even when employees aren’t injured or unwell, they may miss a substantial amount of work. In some cases, this can be due to low morale amongst staff or low employee loyalty. A demotivated or disillusioned workforce is likely to have lower productivity levels anyway, so the impact of absenteeism on top of this can have a major impact on your business performance.
By improving employee morale, however, you can ensure that your staff actually enjoy coming to work and perform to the best of their ability at all times. Increasing employee morale can be as simple as ensuring management staff recognize the hard work that employees put in, rewarding staff for their achievements and providing employees with access to the resources they need in the workplace. When your staff feel appreciated and valued, it can have a transformative effect on their morale and, consequently, their productivity and efficiency.
Combating Absenteeism in the Workplace
There are times when employees will legitimately need to take time off, which means absenteeism is something which affects every business. However, reducing employee absence can save firms money and increase outputs. Due to this, it’s essential to take a proactive approach to absenteeism in the workplace if you want to maximize your commercial success.