Absenteeism is a leading problem across organizations globally. According to a report, nearly one million workers are absent because of stress. In the U.S., an employee is generally not marked present if their weekly hours are less than 35.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has specified the key reasons for an average absence rate of 3.1 and a total lost working time of 1.7 hours for 120,777 workers: illness, injury, medical problems, personal/family obligations, military/civic duty, and paternity/maternity leave.
Moreover, this report excludes personal/vacation days, labor disputes, holidays, and similar reasons. The state of absence in other countries also ranges higher, comparable, or lower to this ratio. Absenteeism can have a grievous impact on any organization, especially in the healthcare, education, travel, hotel & hospitality, and manufacturing sectors.
What is Absenteeism?
Work absenteeism is defined as an employee’s non-arrival at work or failure to mark presence in the attendance management system. In the education sector, student absence from a class is also referred to as absenteeism.
According to a 2023 survey, 45.7% students were absent from school at least once in the previous week. Students also require a minimum present percentage to appear in their examination and proceed to the following year. On the other hand, low employee attendance can become a reason for termination.
What is an Attendance Management System?
The Attendance Management System (AMS) is a solution that allows users to mark their presence in the organization. Employee attendance helps enterprises generate accurate payrolls based on working hours.
On the other hand, the student attendance system helps to ensure classroom presence and raises concerns with parents if attendance is below the minimum requirement. Traditionally, registers and logbooks with roll calls were used to manage classroom attendance.
Today, AI-powered facial biometric solutions have become the next-gen technology for managing classroom and employee attendance. Incorporated with liveness detection, geolocation, geofencing, and other technologies, such a solution can enhance user convenience and organizational security. Moreover, they ensure real user presence at the designated location.
Nowadays, CCTV/IP cameras, commonly used for security purposes, can transform into AMS with the integration of face biometrics and liveness detection. This eliminates the risk of tampering or spoofing and enhances organizational productivity by eliminating the need for roll calls or logbook sign-ups.
5 Ways Absenteeism Impacts Organizations
AMS with facial recognition and liveness detection have significantly reduced employee absenteeism and ensured student presence in classrooms; however, the rate is significantly higher than standards.
According to a 2022-2023 report, the observed absence rate among organizations in the health and education industry was 2.7%, whereas the expected was 2.1% for health-related reasons. Such absences can result in the following impact across sectors:
Lost Productivity
Organizations are grievously affected by employee absenteeism. A survey of 94,000 professionals in 14 organizations revealed that the total cost of lost productivity was $84 billion. Another publication stated that the yearly cost of such unscheduled absences of hourly workers resulted in a loss of $3,600 and $2,660 for salaried employees.
The reasons for such heightened costs include wages paid to absent employees, high replacement costs of employees, including recruitment of temporary workers and overtime payments, and high administrative costs.
Poor Quality of Work
Often, employees take unscheduled days off from their workplace and cover up their work by completing it in a shorter period. However, the work delivered by them is not as qualitative as it is time-bound.
So, the organization is not receiving the full benefit of workers’ talents for their compensation. Make-do work becomes visible to such employers, but often when it’s too late. As a result, the organization has suffered a loss of time, quality, and remuneration.
Higher Burden on Other Employees
Organizations with an Attendance Management System can often view the check-in and checkout logs of workers. They can notice that certain employees have worked overtime and continuously undergo this practice, even though they are required to take time off from work to avoid health problems.
Such instances often happen when coworkers hand over their workload under the supervision or call of the manager, resulting in more burden on some workers. This creates a stressful work environment as the projects remain time-bound and require qualitative output. It becomes one of the major reasons that employees tend to leave organizations.
Increases the Turnover Rate
A high absenteeism rate can dramatically impact the organization’s turnover rate. As we mentioned earlier, another person carries the burden of an employee’s absence. Such frequent instances result in health problems, burnout, higher stress, and other problems.
Employees facing such issues regularly have lower work satisfaction levels and deliver results for a longer duration, resulting in lower team productivity. They ultimately decided to leave the organization, resulting in a higher turnover rate.
It is a problem that can be solved by recruiting new workers or equivalently distributing the workload. Managers can also view the employees’ absence patterns observed on the dashboard of the time and attendance tracking system and talk with workers who are frequently absent.
Work Problems
Coworkers completing the work of absent employees are often required to coordinate with unknown employees or people outside the organization. Suppose an employee is only absent for a day or two, and the project requires urgent completion. In that case, the newly designated worker must understand the deliverables and provide the solutions in a shorter period than the one handling them.
Such an instance could result in the loss of a long-term client or connection, resulting in a significant financial loss and a bad company reputation. Moreover, it also causes coordination problems, missing deliverables, and extension of timelines. Individuals paying the organization for the required services could ask to lower the payment, resulting in lower profits.
Moreover, it unnecessarily could pressure an employee who wasn’t involved in the project from the beginning. The employee could also resign from the enterprise even after receiving appreciation because of the stressful work environment.
Conclusion
Employee absenteeism impacts organizations and their employees in multiple ways. It results in lost productivity, heightens coworkers’ stress, produces low-quality work, increases the turnover rate, and causes problems at work. Enterprises also suffer sizeable financial losses due to higher overtime payments, retraining new workers, and recruiting outside sources for timely work completion.
On the other hand, the employees who take on the workload of the absent workers often become more stressed, face health problems due to extended overtime and off hours, diminish their interest in the company and look for alternative options.
Time and attendance tracking solutions can assist organizations in reviewing workers’ check-in and checkout logs. It can derive reports and assist in finding frequent absentees, whom the manager or HR can address to understand their reasons. With such a system, an organization can even observe the months in which certain employees take absences, and the managers can distribute the workload in advance accordingly, diminishing employee pressure.