4 Ways to Tackle Absenteeism in a Flexible PTO Framework
Employee absenteeism can severely damage productivity and culture in organizations with flexible paid time off (PTO) if not tackled at the right time. The good news is there are ways to protect the spirit of your PTO policy without having to stand by and watch your employees abuse it.
The first step is to invest in a system that helps you create a time-off policy, enforce it, and track it — a simple time-off management software. Here are a few things you can do to correct absenteeism trends across the company without taking away the spirit of flexible PTO:
1. Communicate Better
Never expect your employees to behave in a certain way when you haven’t communicated your expectations to them. If you notice that employees are not managing their time off well, you can try some of the following:
- Encourage employees to plan their vacations well in advance. Make the year’s holiday calendar available to them early.
- For planned vacations, request that employees always discuss with their managers or peers the dates that would work for the entire team.
- Ask employees to ensure that they have transferred the appropriate knowledge and authority to a colleague during their time-off period, if needed.
- Communicate that efforts and results matter and that vacations should not hinder employees from achieving their aims at work.
Encourage your leaders and managers to lead by example. Instead of forcing rules on employees, focus on building a culture and workplace where people take responsibility for their share of things and honor others.
2. Encourage Ownership
Your aim should be to help employees belong, not employee engagement or motivation. It’s the sense of belonging that drives employees to take ownership, to steward work relationships with care, and bring their best selves to work.
According to LinkedIn’s “Inside the Mind of Today’s Candidate” report, these are the things that employees say give them a great sense of belonging in their workplaces:
It’s important that your employees feel empowered to keep track of their own time off and make plans accordingly. For example, with the Freshteam mobile app, employees can check their time-off balance and upcoming holidays and make plans prudently.
3. Tie Performance to Results, Not Perception
It’s your employees’ performance that affects the organization’s business goals, not their time at or off work.
Tie employee performance back to concrete results. Talk business. If you notice that an employee can deliver their best at work despite their long or short vacations, then just let them have it. Delivering their best includes not only their tasks, goals, or projects, but also their relationships with peers, their ability to clear dependencies as and when they pop up, their ability to delegate, etc.
With a smart time-off software, people can quickly view their teammates’ upcoming vacations, making it easy to find temporary replacements during vacations. This way, work keeps moving forward unhindered.
4. Embrace Empathy
Everyone is fighting a battle, and some are more fierce than others. As leaders or managers, embrace empathy before anything else. Talk to your employees, especially those who seem to take off from work often. Find out if anything is wrong. Do whatever is in your power to help them get back on their feet. It could be offering the employee a lighter workload temporarily, switching them to a new project, granting a longer vacation — whatever you think would help the employee bring their best self to work again.
Empathy opens people up to you. It gives you an opportunity to connect, influence, and build great friendships at work. It goes a long way.
Every employee is different. Their skills and experience, their style of work, their ability to manage leave, and their relationships are all different. You should focus on what really matters: meeting goals, innovation, relationships, the spirit of the team, values, etc. If that means having a flexible time-off policy, nothing should stop you.
About Freshteam
Freshteam is smart HR software with powerful time-off management capabilities. You can create time-off policies, holiday calendars, or workweeks in minutes, as well as implement vacation-approval workflows in just a few clicks. To make things better, the Freshteam mobile app empowers you and your employees to raise, approve, or act on leave requests from just about anywhere. If you are interested, you can try Freshteam for free by signing up here.
This article by Freshteam is built on the original article that first appeared on the Freshteam blog.
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