Ways to Handle Employees’ Attendance Issues in Your Startup

Managing attendance in your startup might seem like an easy task, but unfortunately, it’s much more hectic than you might think. Employee absenteeism and attendance issues can negatively affect every aspect of your business and might result in lost productivity, additional costs, and low employee morale among employees who have to cover for their absent colleagues. If you run a startup or handle HR in your startup, ZenHR provides you with some tips on how to handle your attendance problems the right way.

• Create a Written Employee Attendance Policy

The first and most important step to take is to create a clear and well-written attendance and absenteeism policy, make sure that it’s simple and straightforward and that it is written in a language that everyone can understand.

The attendance policy should cover all the accepted vacation categories and time-off requests, such as personal vacations, partial-day leaves, maternity leaves, sick days. etc. The policy should clearly illustrate what disciplinary action will be taken for abusing each time-off category. Finally, share the policy with all of your team members and ask for their feedback.

If you have a Human Resources Management Software (HRMS) in place, upload the policy document onto it to make sure that all of your employees are able to access it and retrieve it easily.

• Automate Your Time and Attendance System

As a small business or a startup owner, you might believe that automating your “Time and Attendance” is a not an essential step since you’re still small, but as your business grows and the number of employees starts increasing, switching to HR automation becomes an indispensable step.

Automating “Time & Attendance” will prevent inaccuracies and human errors that are associated with time sheets and manual recording of data, and it will save you time and effort. HR automation also prevents time theft or what is called “Buddy Punching” which happens when fellow employees punch in or out of work for each other.

• Manage Payroll Properly

While on-premise payroll management systems can cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars for obtaining the software, licensing, installation, and hardware, cloud-based payroll management systems such as ZenHR, provides a more cost-efficient option for startups and small businesses. Cloud-based HRMS systems also provide their users with ongoing support and real-time system enhancements.

• Respect your Employees’ Work-Life Balance

If you want your employees to respect your workplace attendance policy, you should first respect their personal lives and help them achieve work-life balance. It’s also worth mentioning that when it comes to certain situations, you should be open to skipping your company’s policy especially when an employee is going through hard times such as in the case of sickness or a death in the family.