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What is absence management?
Absence management is a program that is designed to control the absenteeism of employees in an organization. Employees of an organization stay absent from the work due to several reasons, such as emergency at home, illness, family functions, vacations, etc. There are also other illegitimate reasons due to which employees don’t come to work.
The examples of such reasons could be sexual harassment at work, boredom due to monotony of work, or partiality at work. No matter what is the reason that makes an employee stay absent from the work, it is crucial to manage and control the absence as it directly impacts the productivity of the organization.
It is not that difficult to understand this. The employees are one of the essential resources of an organization. Therefore, they are referred to as human resources. Every employee of an organization has an important role to play. If someday, any employee does not come to work, then the work done by that employee remains undone. It puts impacts on the jobs of other employees as the work of all employees is inter-related to one another. As a result of which the productivity of the organization reduces.
Let us understand this with the help of an example. Let us consider one small advertising organization there is one graphic designer. The whole work of design depends on him. The graphic designer does not come to work due to some unexpected health issues.
The entire practice of graphic designing comes to a halt because of the absence of the graphic designer, which directly impacts the productivity of the organization.
Moreover, an employee taking long breaks and spending more time chatting with other employees is as good as being absent from work. Because this employee is not only wasting his own time but is also wasting the time of other employees.
Therefore, the primary purpose of absence management is to minimize the absence of employees due to different reasons. In this article, you will learn about the definition of absence management, objectives of absence management and benefits of absence management.
Definition of absence management
Absence management can be defined as a branch of management whose role in the organization is to reduce the absenteeism of employees in the organization.
Objectives of Absence management
1. To reduce absenteeism
The main aim of absence management is to minimize the absence of employees in the organization. For this, managers determine the reasons which are causing the maximum number of absences in the organization and provide a solution to fix the reasons.
For example, if many employees are staying absent from work due to health issues, then the company can add regular health checkups to employees in the health policy of employees. This effort can help in determining the new health issues in employees and they can take treatment for them to avoid serious health problems later.
In addition to this, an organization can start an initiative of “half an hour of yoga class” or “half an hour of the gym”. This might look like as you are wasting time from the working hours that you are paying to your employees, but this will be beneficial for you in the long run.
2. To encourage employees to take fewer leaves
Another objective of absence management is to encourage employees to take lesser leaves. To do this, companies provide incentives to employees who make a minimum number of leaves in a month or spend more hours at work.
3. To increase productivity
To obtain the maximum productivity from each employee is the main objective of every organization. The maximum productivity can be achieved if employees stay present for work; otherwise, the productivity will be zero. Therefore, absence management makes the use of different strategies to minimize the absence of employees.
4. To determine the reason which causes maximum absenteeism
Another objective of absence management is to determine the reasons which are making employees stay away from work. After learning the reasons, they use different strategies to eliminates those reasons. The human resource manager should meet an employee personally who is being absent from work frequently and try to provide a solution to their problems.
5. Time management
Another objective of absence management is keeping a check on every day’s attendance of employees. Which means you keep a check on their arrival time and the length of breaks taken by them.
Benefits of Absence management
1. lower lost cost
Companies pay employees to work for them, and because of some government rules and regulations, companies are required to give paid leaves to employees. That means employees are getting paid when their productivity is completely zero.
This is the cost that has zero return on investment and is born by the company. Having an absence management policies which states company-wise policies and programs can help in reducing absence cost and will add to the productivity of the organisation.
2. Increased productivity
Productivity will be maximum if an employee will stay present for the work and do his job by putting his full efforts. Therefore, having proper absence management policies can result in enhanced productivity.
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