Attendance Management and Absenteeism

Whether providing customer service or generating new business, the call centre is essential to a company's performance.

Attendance management in call centres can be a challenge, as the call centre is almost always the area most afflicted by unscheduled employee absences. In a typical company where call centre employees may represent around 20-30% of a company's full-time employees, they can account for more than 60% of total absences. 

A 2002-03 Australian survey based on more than 1800 call centre employees revealed that the average number of sick days per year per person was more than 8 days, whereas the estimated average for all industry is slightly less than seven and a half.

Other studies have indicated that more than 40 percent of call centre employees admit that almost half of their sick leave is taken for purposes other than illness.

Sick leave and absenteeism in general is a worry on a number of levels, not the least being the disruptions caused to effective service delivery and the costs. Managers and Human Resources specialists are duty bound to take the situation seriously and find out what the causes are on the ground. It is essential to examine the factors behind absenteeism and come up with solutions that work at the individual workplace level.

Not surprisingly, understanding the causes of call centre absence is not always straightforward -absence behaviour is variable and complex. For the same individual employee, absence is likely to have different causes at different times and in different contexts.

In broad terms, there are three major influences on attendance:

• Illness or injury
• Non-work related factors such as family caring responsibilities and emergencies; and
• Attitudes and behaviours associated with a lack of motivation to attend such as low job satisfaction, non-commitment to the organisation, workplace tension or individual work ethic.

A complicating factor that can be present in all three of the attendance issues above, is the level of discretion exercised by employees.

There are involuntary and unavoidable absences caused by sickness or injury that are totally justifiable. The employee is, by any reasonable measure, unfit for normal work duties.  By contrast, there are voluntary and avoidable absences where employees take time off work although they are not medically unfit for normal work duties. They could attend if they really wanted to.

Cases where the individual’s motivation is the cause are generally known as the sickie. Obviously, the degree to which call centre absences are a symptom of individual, managerial, organisational or other factors will vary considerably as will the degree to which the absences are avoidable.

Estimates suggest that sickness absence alone costs businesses more than $1000 per employee per year. When you reflect on that figure, it becomes obvious why it is worth putting effort into managing absenteeism carefully. And $1000 per employee per year may just be the tip of the iceberg for when calculating the cost of sickness absence, many companies take in to account only sick pay. They do not include the cost of replacement labour, overtime or reduced performance.

Today, there are impressive tools and infrastructures around managing absence. Yet, the sickness figure generally remains high. Clearly, acquiring and understanding the tools is not enough. To cause a change, the effective and consistent application of these tools is vital and this is a Team Leader responsibility. Senior call centre managers must ensure that Team Leaders have the training they need.