While searching for something else I came across a 2004 NAO (National Audit Office) research paper on absence management*. I have always been a fan of NAO publications for the thoroughness and care that lie behind them and, above all, the crispness and clarity of the writing style. This one is no exception and could easily replace a very large number of HR textbook chapters. You would not expect it to come up with startling new insights but it provides a very well researched picture of all aspects of attendance management; identifying good, evidence-based, approaches, showing what does, and does not, work.
Some items that caught my attention included:
- Carrot and stick approaches to short-term sickness were often found to be ineffective or counter-productive. Carrots for good attendance can encourage the genuinely ill to come to work and infect everybody else whereas sticks such as no pay for the first two days, or insisting on a sick note for even single days of absence, can lead to people taking more time off than they otherwise would in order to prove they were genuinely ill.
- The need for good measurement and metrics is stressed but the report cautions that there are lots of different ways of measuring attendance or absence (one source noted more than 40) so be very careful if you are trying to benchmark your own company’s figures.
- The section on taking attendance into account at selection time might be a little dodgy under today’s anti-discrimination rules. But I don’t see why you cannot follow the practice of one police force that has firm rules that takes absence records into account when considering officers for promotion or other forms of internal preferment. They use a nice phrase that absence records must not display a pattern that would make managers ‘unwilling to depend on their regular attendance’.
* CURRENT THINKING ON MANAGING ATTENDANCE – A short guide for HR professionals
