managing absenteeism in the workplace: proactive planning and long-term solutions.

Absenteeism in the workplace is a familiar and unavoidable challenge. Employees will always need to take time off, mostly because of occasional illness, injuries and medical appointments. Other factors include stress, family caring commitments, chronic health conditions and dissatisfaction with their job.

As an employer, you need to take a well-planned and carefully considered approach to this issue if you want to prevent it from having a serious impact on your business and your customers.

Fortunately, there are various steps you can take and strategies you can employ to manage absenteeism. Among the most effective measures are a proactive mindset, which will help you deal with the effects of staff shortages by planning ahead and a long-term focus on identifying and addressing why people take unscheduled time off.

costs and causes of absenteeism

The effect on your business could be severe when absenteeism escalates to above-average levels.

Repercussions might include:

• Missed deadlines and work interruption
• Unhappy customers
• Reductions in employee productivity if people have to be redeployed to cover staff shortages due to absent employees
• Lower morale among staff who have to deal with heavy or unpredictable workloads

According to data from Statistics Canada, the private sector lost 9.5 days per worker in 2023 due to absenteeism. This is slightly higher than the 9.1 days per worker seen in 2019 before the pandemic — showing that most employers still don’t know how to tackle this long-term issue.

Physical illness is just one reason why people might be unable to attend work. As an employer, you also need to consider employee mental health. Two-fifths of Canadian employees surveyed in 2023 said they had taken time off in the last five years due to mental health issues. The most common causes? Job demands (80 percent of respondents), family-related pressures (63 percent) and financial concerns (62 percent).

If you’re seeing diminished employee productivity, late customer delivery and escalating overtime or sick pay costs, you know you have an absenteeism problem and it’s time to take action.

managing absenteeism in the workplace: taking action

be proactive and plan

The employers that have the most success in managing absenteeism and mitigating its impact on the business are those that take a proactive approach, as opposed to simply reacting to staff shortages and scrambling to plug gaps in the workforce.

Analyze your labour force and conduct activities like skills audits. These will help you gain a clear picture of where you currently stand, in terms of capacity and capabilities, and where the biggest problems are likely to arise when absence levels are high. You’ll be in a much stronger position to anticipate challenges caused by staff reductions and be ready for them.

Prepare for times of reduced workforce capacity by identifying the tasks and activities that are critical to the functioning of the business. You can then create a detailed rundown of the knowledge and skills required to complete these jobs. This will help you work out which activities need to be prioritized and which ones can be taken on by other employees when key members of staff are absent.

These are generally good practices from a workforce management and scheduling perspective. They help to ensure that you’re always making the best use of available talent and deploying people where they’re most effective, regardless of your current position with respect to absenteeism.

Furthermore, pinpointing the competencies required to complete critical tasks and having a clear picture of the skills in your labour force will help to inform your training and development plans. Putting dedicated training programs in place to upskill in these vital areas will help to ensure you can always keep your core business running, even when you’re understaffed.

look for the root causes of absenteeism

Another way you can be proactive in your absenteeism efforts and general workforce management is by looking for the underlying reasons why people are taking time off in high numbers. This could give rise to long-term, lasting solutions that help you keep overall levels of absence to a minimum.

There could be many root causes of high absenteeism. Long-term health problems and chronic illness are key factors, but it's also possible that lots of people are taking time off because of issues such as:

• Negative aspects of company culture, like workplace bullying or poor management
• Problems in employees' personal lives that are affecting their mental health or ability to work
• Unsatisfactory work/life balance
• General disengagement and dissatisfaction with work

To identify these issues, you need to have close connections with your workforce and an understanding of how people feel about their jobs.

As part of our Inhouse Services solution, Randstad offers a care program that can support your efforts to gauge sentiment in your workforce and identify which aspects of their work people appreciate or find difficult. We can also support your overall efforts to optimize recruitment and HR, which could prove crucial when you’re understaffed and need to hire reliable workers quickly.

We’ve produced a guide that provides further advice on managing absenteeism in the workplace and keeping your business running smoothly even when your workforce is depleted.