Employees Abusing The Attendance Policy?

Whether it’s an employee continuously calling in late, calling in sick or leaving early — small business owners have heard all the excuses. According to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, a Los Angeles-based hotel owner listed the top 10 excuses from his employees as to why they were not performing as required. The reasons ranged from, “There’s a car blocking my driveway” to “I missed my plane back from Vegas” to “I dyed my hair last night and it looks terrible”.

Sometimes excuses are indicative of a chronic problem, and according to the article, business owners say it’s best to dish out a stern warning, punishment or even walking papers to the offending employee; the “nip it in the bud” approach. But even the best employees can falter, making it a more delicate situation to handle.

The WSJ reported that an owner of a small software company in Ohio, faced a difficult time when his top-performing software engineer repeatedly called in late, with a varying range of lame excuses, including, “the cat hid my car keys”. What’s the Solution? Instead of disciplining the employee, the business owner decided to switch the engineer’s schedule to a later shift. Now, the employee is mostly on time for work.

Even though some excuses are legitimate, more often that not, workers are not telling the truth in order to protect their job. Why else would employees make up excuses to explain bad behavior? To justify actions they feel they’re entitled to but that defy company policies nonetheless, said Patricia Harned, president of Ethics Resource Center in Arlington, VA. Last year the nonprofit-research organization surveyed 2,852 workers and found that roughly 15% of workers think it’s OK to call in sick from their jobs when not really ill.

While it may seem harmless at first, employee excuses for bad behavior can lead to bigger headaches down the road if ignored. “One of the implications is, you to start to build a culture where it’s acceptable to take care of No. 1, and over time that starts to erode how productive an organization is,” Harned said. “If it becomes OK to skirt the rules in little ways, it eventually becomes acceptable to skirt the rules in big ways, too.”

According to the WSJ, management experts agree. “It’s important that they see you as someone who’s fair,” said Nancy Rothbard, associate professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in Philadelphia. Letting workers get away with bad excuses “sets a bad precedence.”