Absenteeism – Senior Adviser Q&A
Published: May 14, 2023
Advice Team Leader, Ava Kulkarni, talks us through employee absenteeism at the workplace. Gain a better understanding of how to manage your employees who misuse sick leave.
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Absenteeism would probably be described as any time
that an employee is either
rostered on to work or is a regular work day for them
but they don't actually show up to work.
This is probably one of the most common calls
that we get on the advice line
here is, you know, issues around
absenteeism and, you know, the problem
with absenteeism is it could be as a result of sick leave
as a result of the employee abandoning their position
or, you know, just unauthorized absence.
Probably one of the most difficult
situation the employer is in is when
they cannot figure out if the employee's
actually unwell or sort of misusing
their sick leave.
So I think one thing an employer can
look out for is when there is some sort
of pattern to the sickness.
So if an employee's away every other Monday, for
example, there's a chance that it might
not be a genuine sick leave day.
And when that's the case, when an employer starts
to notice some sort of pattern then
there's some processes that we can take
them through in order to address that
particular situation.
Probably the first step to take is,
you know, gather the evidence that they have
in terms of how they found out that the
employee potentially wasn't genuinely
unwell and then we would probably take
the employer through disciplinary process
in terms of putting that allegation to the employee,
finding out what the employee's response to that is,
and then seeing if, you know, giving them
a warning for that for that particular
allegation of misconduct would be justified.