Illness impacts productivity. Most employees understand the inconvenience an absent employee causes in the workplace. Unlike vacation days, which are taken in advance, a sick absence doesn’t provide advanced notice.
Why Vacations Don’t Impact Production the Same as Sick Days
When employees take a vacation, they usually spend a certain amount of time preparing for their absence. This makes their vacation time as smooth as possible for their colleagues and managers.
The employee changes their voicemail, they update their email. Often, they introduce another employee to help critical clients and partners while they are gone. In addition, the employee often works ahead, getting pending projects, communications, and proposals done before they leave so things aren’t left undone.
All of these customs minimize the negative impact of vacation absenteeism. And, when the vacationing employee returns, they are often rejuvenated and dive back into work with increased energy and engagement. This increased production occurs because of their vacation absence.
Sick Days Impact Production More Because They Are Unplanned
When an employee calls in sick, they steal their team’s ability to plan for greater effectiveness. Remaining employees must compensate for the absence of the sick employee. As a result, remaining employees aren’t able to achieve their full productivity as their day is derailed.
Colleagues must handle customer appointments, someone has to fill in on the manufacturing line, and manager need to work directly with partners. Frustration increases for both employees and customers.
The very nature of sick days means a great deal of inconvenience for the rest of the team. That inconvenience is what produces the greatest loss of productivity. The exact same absence, if planned ahead, just doesn’t impact productivity the same. Temps can be brought it, appointments scheduled accordingly, and reports submitted prior.
Rewarding Perfect Attendance Seems Like the Perfect Solution
From a management perspective, encouraging perfect attendance may seem like an ideal solution. Get employees to come to work and keep processes running smoothly. This is, infact, a basis for many wellness programs. Keep employees healthy, you can keep them coming to work.
From the outside, it may appear that bringing in a sick employee keeps productivity higher than letting them stay home. They can still handle customer call, work on the production like, and turn in reports.
Sure, they may not be that enthusiastic to be here, but at least no one has to fill in for them.
As a result, attendance policies were born. The idea was to decrease the amount of lost productivity from unplanned absences.
Employers defined and created policies to reward employees with perfect attendance. When an employee came to work on time everyday, they were recognized. Employees who called in sick for no reason were motivated to show up. Production continued.
Rewarding Perfect Attendance Hurts Attendance
But, there is a flaw with rewarding perfect attendance. It’s an attempt to manipulate human behavior. When people feel manipulated, their engagement and motivation decreases. As we previously discussed, rewarding employees for a set behavior decreases the overall performance of that behavior in employees.
When rewards for attendance are given, it destroys intrinsic motivation. Employees who already show up for work become demotivated to continue showing up. In study after study, absences increased as much as 8% after employees were recognized for perfect attendance. Even so, habitually absent employees change their behavior, at least for the short-term.
In order for perfect attendance policies to work, the reward usually needs to increase. And when money or tangible gifts are used as a reward, the cost continues to increase.
Thus rewarding for perfect attendance becomes increasingly expensive and less effective simultaneously.
Increasing Absenteeism Through Attendance Recognition
In most areas of the workplace, when you recognize a behavior, you increase the occurrences of that behavior among employees. But, consider how increased attendance actually hurts attendance at work.
Fernando gets sick. Instead of staying home, he’s compelled to come to work. After all, he’s only another week from winning the prize for perfect attendance. Perhaps he’s able to stay at work and recovers. All appears to be well.
Unless you notice that Julia and Mike are also sick. They’ve been showing up. Except Mike finally gets sick enough that he takes 3 days off after 2 days of working while sick.
And, Jamie, Gladys, Jose, and Peter are all sick now. Of those another 6 days of sick absences were reported.
At this point, we stop keeping track. The sickness moves through the workplace in a way we are already accustomed.
All in all, lost production accounts for a staggering 530 Billion dollars a year to U.S. companies (IBI).
Destroying Engagement Through Perfect Attendance Recognition
Another finding from Harvard Business School is that employee engagement decreases when perfect attendance is rewarded. Steller employees were turned off because of the attendance policy.
They felt it was unfair that they had always showed up on time without being rewarded and now those with poor performance were rewarded for changing during the qualification period.
Great employees also felt that it was unfair to focus on attendance instead of performance and hard work.
And, once previously late and absent employees became disqualified, they returned back to their previous patterns of absenteeism.
Overall, production dropped because the attendance program 1.5%. And, the study didn’t even measure the lost productivity due to decreased engagement so the number is likely much higher. After all, employee disengagement costs employers ⅓ of their salary in lost production (Gallup).
Four Ways Encouraging Sick Employees to Work Lowers Production
That production could be broken down into 3 categories:
- The lost productivity from an absent, sick employee
- The lost production from a present, working, but sick employee
- Sick employee stays sick longer because they aren’t able to recuperate as effectively (lower production for more days)
- The lost production from coworkers who have gotten sick from the originally sick employee
- Absences from sick employees sick from exposure to other sick employees
- Lost productivity from those employees as they continue working
- The lost production that occurs from the next round of sick employees (present and absent)
If, instead of encouraging a sick employee to work through their illness, employees were encouraged to stay home, production would actually increase.
Sick employees can get better faster. This increases their production at work as they recover faster. It also prevents production drops as other employees stay well.
IBI, the Integrated Business Institute, a non-profit research organization, totalled the total cost of sick employees to companies. Their numbers show that lost productivity due from sick, working employees is higher than the loss of production from absent sick employees.
And, its very probably that at least some of those absent employees were sick from working employees.
In other words, if the first sick employees stayed home, others wouldn’t get sick and then stay home. The total sick days used would decrease.
The Solution: Redefining “Perfect Attendance”
Employers influence employee behavior by the methods they use for recognition. Simply adjusting attendance recognition a little can make a powerful impact on the results. First, change the tangible rewards for recognition of engagement. Recognize good behavior instead of attempting to force behavior.
Second, define your goals. If increased production is the actual goal, then focus on production and engagement recognition. Instead of recognizing employees who show up sick, recognize employees who show up engaged.
Or, recognize with a twist. Many employers, like Dropbox, Hubspot, GE, and Sony Electronics have found that offering unlimited vacation actually improves employee engagement and productivity.
And a recent study found that encouraging employees to take sick days increases productivity by 6-8%. The study examined productivity levels before and after paid sick days, and retaliation protection, were instituted in areas across the U.S. When employees were encouraged to take sick days, and protected from retaliation, productivity rose.
Recognize employees who took a day off to recover instead of spreading illness. Create a “Perfect Attendance” award for employees who perfectly balance home and work. Foster recognition that encourages a healthy work-life, which will in turn, reduce burnout and increase engagement.
Conclusion
Recognition changes behavior. But, perfect attendance isn’t the behavior that improves productivity. Instead, encouraging employees to take sick days to reduce the amount of sickness in the workplace can increase production. Recognizing high engagement feels more fair to hard-working employees and doesn’t have a detrimental effect on overall performance.
About Thanks
Thanks is a leading provider of a recognition-based platform that increases communication, builds teamwork, and makes recognition a part of company culture. Fast, easy and simple Thanks makes it easy to bring data-driven employee recognition to your entire organization. O.C. Tanner purchased the Thanks platform in 2019 to fulfill the recognition needs of smaller businesses.
Thanks customers benefit from the same decades of research in employee motivation and company culture that O.C. Tanner enterprise clients enjoy, but in a product that is geared for fast, easy and simple deployment. Whether you’re starting a recognition program or improving and expanding on what you already have, Thanks has everything you need to engage your people with effective, scalable recognition.