What should you communicate to your supervisors to help them understand the negative impact that absenteeism and lateness can have on your organization? You should convey the following to them:

Absenteeism and lateness affect your department and the whole organization in many important ways.

• First, there are missed deadlines when workers are not on the job.
Often one missed deadline causes other missed deadlines down the line.
• Resentment grows among co-workers who have to step in to make up work for an absent employee. As a result, morale is negatively affected.
• Overtime is often needed to make up for the work the absent employees should have been doing.
• Departmental productivity drops when employees are absent from work, and quality often suffers as well because co-workers who must pick up the slack may be rushed and develop a negative attitude about having to do extra work.
• Customer service is hurt when phones go unanswered or there aren’t enough people on hand to adequately meet customer needs.
• Employees with good attendance records may start coming in late or take days off in reaction to excessive absenteeism and lateness on the part of their co-workers. The snowball effect of such a situation can have a serious negative impact on attendance and morale in your department.

The above information comes from BLR’s presentation “Attendance Management: What Supervisors Need to Know.” For more information on all the training courses BLR has to offer, go to our Employee and Manager Training page.