Fighting the Plague of Too Many Sick Days
- Surveying employees about attendance policies
- Creating guidelines around sick days, tardiness and dangling (not filling out time cards)
- Rewarding successful employees with a formal lunch
What can your team do to reward and recognize one another?
When an employee calls in sick, that can impact both staff and patient. And when it's a lot, you might as well hang out the closed sign. The idea is to show up and work, right? The radiology team in South San Francisco had this problem, so they created a survey to assess employee understanding of sick days. They created new policies around sick leave, tardiness and "dangling" (failing to clock in and out). Then they rewarded employees in compliance with a gourmet lunch. After two years, the average number of sick days per FTE fell by nearly 3 days.
Keeping your employees on the job is critical to performance. Inform them of your attendance policy and reward those who show up as required.
It's important for your employees to understand the attendance policy so your team can be on the same page. Pictured is a South San Francisco UBT meeting.
the average annual number of sick days per FTE, below the targeted goal of 6.5 days