How to Motivate Lazy Workers

The first thing every employer must recognise about employee absence is that it is inevitable. The only way of halting excessive employee absence is to foster an enjoyable working environment while acknowledging that employees have the capacity to leave for genuine reasons, and not just because of a hangover!

Your Absence Policy is too lenient

If your employees feel that arrival and departure times are even relatively flexible, they are unlikely to show up late with increasing regularity. As a result, if your policy for employee attendance, reporting sick days, or requesting leave is ambiguous or benign, your employees will invariably have a hard time knowing what you expect of them and when you expect it. It’s very important that you decide what you really want from your employee attendance policy, and not follow whatever you think suits everyone else.

Is a set arrival time imperative to your business process? Is a laissez faire attitude decreasing your overall productivity? When absences become a problem it’s important to not lash out initially but rather look inwards and focus on areas of your workplace that led to these happenings. Once you’ve cleared up the internal issues, you can start to implement this new strategy employees and new hires understand the policy, and that it’s consistently enforced.

Your attendance policy may be unreasonable

It is also possible that the inverse is true, and that your absence policy is unreasonable. In this case you have to look at the age profile of your workforce and consider whether starting later and finishing later may in fact be more conducive to productivity. For example, in the case that your employees are majority young school students, who rely on public transportation to get to work, your absence policy has to cater to the fact that certain public transport outlets are unreliable (LUAS), and odds are there will be late arrivals.

As an employer you must start investigating the goals of the job you’re providing, the skills of the employees you have and your company’s location. Do you need to adjust employee attendance policies to better reflect the realities of your business or staff? There may be a better way to track attendance than by arrival in an office, or there may be a better start time.

Employee Morale

Fostering an environment in which individuals actually enjoy their work is key to reducing absences across the board and ensuring that general productivity is high. When communal morale is high in any environment, individuals are encouraged as a result, and will actually enjoy being in work. Ask yourself the important questions like Is there a sense of teamwork? Is excellent performance rewarded? If there are issues with morale, rewards or workplace mood, you must address these before you tackle your employee attendance problems.

When employees feel appreciated and recognized attendance issues usually resolve quickly. It’s important that you engage your employees and show genuine concern in their wellbeing and morale, by doing this you will invariably promote a healthy working relationship which in turn leads to a more fulfilling work environment, and by extension less absences.

Pin-point individuals

Start by looking for repeat-offenders and unmotivated individuals. If any given individual is late, it is your prerogative to lambast them for their actions and make an example of them in front of your workforce. Equally if another person regularly calls in sick on Monday, the issue may be with the employee and not your attendance policies, make sure to be firm but interrogative, as you never know what reasons individuals have for disobedience. If you notice a pattern, don’t be afraid to schedule a time to talk with the employee privately.

The more employees see your firm side the better; and as a result, absences will plummet. The solutions may be as simple as changing your start time to accommodate the majority of your workforce. Equally, it could be a more considerate action, such as helping an employee find treatment for mental health or otherwise to deal with issues that may be inhibiting his performance in his working life.

Overall, steadily declining absenteeism is a major key for the modern business and it’s important that you structure your workplace to achieve this reality. If companies do not address these issues, they will inevitably come under increasing financial pressure, and will be forced to cut costs that are in their power to control, such as absenteeism.

While a well considered and developed policy on absence management is best practice, employers must take some simple steps that can have a significant impact. Handling absence is extremely tricky and invariably in many cases it is just a matter of taking some time to accurately record and report absence while being increasingly diligent in conducting screenings of employee habits.