Excessive Absenteeism

jweakley

I vaguely recall that BLS or some other entity publishes figures on what is average absenteeism for various classes of employee. Does anyone have a statistic for clerical employees?

Jack

System

I suppose it would be cynical to say it depends on how many sick days they have. x}> So I won't say it.

Maybe someone else has a helpful answer.

James Sokolowski
HRhero.com

jweakley

I'll answer my own question. BLS reports that for 2004 office workers experienced 3.7 days of absence.

Jack

pork1

Jack: Interesting, I have been in our HR world of work for many more years than I care to acknowledge and I have never been asked or presented with a survey data sheet for this type of information. Where does BLS get their data? I have never been tasked by a boss for this data, I do not think of this data or the analysis of the data to be of much importance. please tell us more about why your company or boss is interested in this arena.

Attendance is a individual issue; regardless of what others do or have done, to compare or judge an individual or make a national or regional average based on "type of work" the standard for all of those people working in some given vocation would in my opinion be a mistake.

Tardiness and attendance is our number one and two reasons that we terminate people within our company. The standard is individually based, but we use a "no call no show" policy which takes 3 "no call no show events" and 10 minutes into the 4th day and the termination is executed. Along with this, is our written ability to give specific written guidance to those employees that miss work regardless of their excuse. It takes every member of the team to play the daily "game", paper excuses regardless of the circumstance does not put the first "wiggit on the production floor or baby pig", in our case on the shipping truck.

I look forward to you expanding on this subject. maybe I have missed something over the many years!

PORK

LarryC

Hi Pork. To answer your question, the BLS gets their information from willing employers who supply the requested data to them. We participate in this program.