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Strategic Labor & Human Resources, LLC

It is important to understand the various distinctions around absenteeism in the areas of scheduled and unscheduled, controllable and uncontrollable, excused and unexcused, and full day and partial day absenteeism.

Author: Helennelson

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Understanding the distinctions can help organizations to identify the essential or most important category of problems causing absenteeism and therefore apply solutions that reduce absenteeism. In the absence of a clear definition, employers and unions will be less effective at implementing effective solutions, and worse, creating unintended additional absenteeism problems.
Employers' processes ensure some level of success by the skillful use of pre-planning the use of resources, including human resources.

Therefore, employers' are not only concerned about reducing absenteeism but also being able to manage around absenteeism. To that extent employers and unions attempt to reduce the adverse impact of unscheduled and controllable absenteeism. Employers and unions, likewise, distinguish between excused and unexcused absenteeism in order to reduce the impact on business, but also to ensure fairness to employees.

Although each area of absenteeism has common aspects across most organizations, each organizations should refine the definitions to specifically address its firm level concerns.
The policy approaches as well as definition of absenteeism categories may exist in employer policies, collective bargaining agreements, and by statute. The definitions that policies may include are:

• Tardy/Leave Early - absence for a part of a scheduled work day at either the beginning or end of the work shift
• Leave of Absence - an approved and schedule absence
• Absence - any time away from work
• Scheduled Time - normal working hours assigned to an employee for which an employer has an expectation for attendance
• Controllable Absences - absences for which an employee had a choice in scheduling
• Progressive Discipline - a process for dealing with job-related behavior that does not meet expected and communicated performance standards by using multiple steps of increasingly severe discipline
• Excused absence - an absence for which an employee has an entitlement or approval

1. Measurement and Tracking
Though most larger employers measure and track absenteeism, not all use it effectively to reduce absenteeism. Many small to mid size employers do not measure and track absenteeism and therefore never even start to realize the improvements. Measurement and tracking absenteeism by itself will reduce absenteeism simply because awareness leads to the self improvement of the individual.

Beyond the benefit of simple awareness, measurement and tracking help employers identify the root causes of absenteeism in a way that allows them to refine solutions that produce the greatest improvement possible in the areas of increase profits, reduced costs, improved productivity and fairness.
It is also important to measure and track in a way that it becomes a planning tools and not, what in too many cases is a mindless recording of statistics.

A good labor and management tool for focusing on the common interests is an approach that measures the cost of the problem, the possible solutions, a timeline for implementing the solutions, the cost of the solution, the benefit of the solution, and the cost/benefit ratio. It might look something like this:

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