Absenteeism costs the U.S. 225.8 billion dollars a year (CDC). It makes sense that employers would try to curb absenteeism through recognition programs that reward and incentivize perfect attendance.
The problem?
Research has proven that perfect attendance awards are detrimental to attendance, performance, and productivity. Let’s take a look at why that is.
Perfect Attendance Spreads Illness
Sick Employees Decrease Productivity, but not in the ways many managers assume. When an employee calls in sick, their team feels the impact of their absence. Team processes are hurt as the missing employee leaves a gap that has to be filled by the remaining team.
Often, the perception is that this friction in effectiveness is the cost of illness. If only employees will show up and still get their work done.
But, when employees show up sick to work, they aren’t as productive. And, they are likely to be sick for more days, hurting productivity even more. All those sick working ways help spread illness, causing even more employees to get sick.
Some of those employees will take time off to recover. As a result, even more sick days will be lost because of sick working employees. And, the more employees are encouraged to work while sick, the more this problem is exasperated.
Attendance Based Recognition Can Discriminate Against Disabled Employees
If employers aren’t careful, attendance recognition can discriminate against disabled employees, a protected class. FMLA laws protect employees from retaliation for FMLA absences.
Perfect attendance might exclude an employee who is chronically ill or disabled. This punishes employees striving to work even with debilitating obstacles. And, it’s against the law.
Employers who discriminate against employees using FMLA face high fines. And, employees don’t have to tell managers that their absence falls under FMLA for it to count. An FMLA absence is considered FMLA if it falls under the FMLA leave, even if the employee doesn’t identify it as such. The same is true for situations that fall under ADA.
Recognition Based on Attendance Can Discriminate Against Dependable Employees
FMLA allows up to 12 weeks of excused absences. Legally, FMLA absent employees can be gone without and you can’t retaliate by withholding a reward for attendance from them. Only non-FMLA and non-ADA absences count.
But, recognizing one employee for perfect attendance (who missed up to 12 weeks for FMLA) and not recognizing another employee (who only missed 2 days of non-FMLA sickness) can be hard to explain.
Further, studies found that rewarding habitually late or absent employees served to alienate reliable employees who have an unexpected and occasional absences. Doing this only serves to “punish” employees who have been reliable over the long term.
Attendance-Based Focus Fails to Motivate The Employees You Seek to Motivate
Harvard Business School found that attendance programs fail to actually change the behavior of the employees who are habitually late. The study looked at the effect of a perfect attendance program on unexcused absences or late arrivals.
Researchers found that once employees were absent and disqualified from the reward, their normal behavior returned to previous (or worse than previous) levels of absenteeism.
According to the study, gaming the system was common. Employees would call in sick, rather than show up late. Or, they only showed up on time when they were eligible for the reward.
Overall, employees had a 50% higher chance of having a single unexcused absence than before. In other words, the attendance program increased absences, instead of decreasing it.
Attendance Rewards Decreases Morale and Engagement
Harvard researchers found that the most productive employees had a 6-8% drop in productivity after attendance recognition was introduced. Upon interviewing them at the end of the study, the general consensus was that recognition for perfect attendance wasn’t fair.
Top performers wondered why a reward was necessary, why they hadn’t been recognized previously, why habitually late employees were winning the award, and why hard work wasn’t being recognized.
Perfect attendance decreases morale by:
- Failing to reward employees for hard work
- Inadvertently punishing reliable employees for unavoidable absences
- Rewarding habitually absent employees who perform during the qualification period
- Which appears to be unfair.
Attendance recognition usually aims to improve productivity, but instead hurt productivity by 8%. Instead, seek to recognize behaviors that increase productivity and engagement.
Perfect Attendance Discourages a Healthy Work/Life Balance
In today’s world, a healthy work/life balance is important. Younger workers are very aware of which employers foster and which harm work/life balance. But, it’s important to all generations of the workforce. Millennials value flexible work schedules as one of their top sought-after benefits.
A big part of that is their desire to have a healthier work/life balance. When employees feel like their work supports their personal life, they are more intrinsically motivated and engaged. When employees are overworked, they burnout. Prioritizing perfect attendance above employee wellness leads to greater burnout.
Instead, encourage employees to take time off to recover, mentally and physically. This requires a focus on something more than just perfect attendance.
Perfect Attendance Demotivates Employees To Attend Work
Intrinsic motivation is the internal, driving motivation that propels employees into peak performance. But, the funny thing about intrinsic motivation is that it can’t be forced. People work best when they have a level of autonomy, which provides ownership over their job.
But, perfect attendance rewards counteract intrinsic motivation because it robs the employee of ownership over their work. It forces one priority to the top, even if more important considerations suffer. And, it doesn’t reward the employee for focusing on higher priorities. Instead, a high performing employee may miss recognition, while an underperforming employee is recognized solely on the basis of attendance.
Conclusion
Employee attendance is important, but before you seek to improve or perfect employee attendance, make sure that you address the pitfalls of attendance recognition. Instead, check out three ways you can recognize employee attendance in a manner that increases engagement!