Attendance Bonus
Katy Lu
9 Posts
Do any of your companies offer an attendance bonus? If so, how does it work? I've seen job ads that state attendance bonus paid but have never worked for a company that offered them. Thanks
Comments
Good luck, and welcome to the forum!
You mentioned typically only 5 out of 150 ee's qualify for your end of the year perfect attendance bonus. Same experience here, out of the 60 or so people eligible each week for the drawing, it usually was the same 5 that qualified. The rest didn't care.
There are doctors who have evening hours and invariably someone from 2nd shift will have an evening appointment while the ee on 1st shift had a mid morning appointment. Why is that?
At the risk of sounding like a moralist, it seems there are a larger number of young single mothers today compared to a generation ago who tend to miss alot of time due to issues with children.
Many young people just out of high school taking entry level jobs have no sense of responsibility, they don't understand *why* we expect them to show up for work every day. They didn't have to show up for school every day and they got by. What's the big deal?
So, we are reduced to awarding for good attendance. And us older guys wonder why we have to reward people for behavior that should just plain be expected. Hey, the concept of overtime premium is the reward for working over and above what's expected.
We have had a program called "Perfect Attendance". Employees that do not miss any work during the course of 1 month - unless prearranged/vacation/fml - receive 2 paid hours to use any way they please the following month. If the employee chooses not to use the time, they are allowed to accrue it, but must use the accrued time off before the end of the year. The total time at the end of the year equals 3 days. They can use these 3 days on top of any vacation they have. It's a nice program, but we are getting rid of it. There's lot of room for abuse by supervisors mainly due to supervisors not tracking the time consistently. One supervisor might be excellent at it, but another might be more lackadaisical about it & still put his/her people up for the 2 hours. I'm sure there are ways to tighten this up...
We now allow employees to convert a portion of their sick time to vacation at a rate of 50%. This can only be converted the first payperiod each year. The more sick time an employee has the more they can convert. This has replaced our sick leave drawing and our perfect attendance and has been well received by employees, especially those who use little sick leave.
We offer an attendance "incentive". $100 for each 6 mos of perfect attendance (use no sick leave and can't take day without pay). We have 37 employees and maybe I pay it to 1 or 2 employees; problem "children" are still problems!
Good Luck
We still have a large number of employees who use all of their sick leave benefits - especially staff with families - but for those who come to work it is an extra check at year end when most everyone can use the money.
I have never seen or read of vital stats that support paying attendance bonuses in any industry although probably somebody out there has some. If so I would like to see the metrics of such an operation.
Regular, punctual attendance is just a fundamental part of being employed. The opposite means you are a former employee. Just that simple to me.
Rewarding people for something as fundamental as coming to work seems to me to be folly and poor management.
Never have done it in 26 years of HR and I doubt I ever would entertain putting in such a program.
What I was kicking around was to "cut" an hourly employee's 2007 increase in half. And make half of it dependent on the previous month's attendance. For example, if we were going to give an employee a 4% increase, they would get a 2% increase in January and an additional 2% if the previous month's attendance was good. However we define "good."
Trying to be creative and legal.
Thoughts?
First, bonuses like this, over $25 in value, are taxable income. The only way I have found around this is to offer clothing/promotional items with the Company logo in them -- they are not taxable because they are promotional items.
Secondly, these types of awards/bonuses (when they are cash awards or have a dollar amount assigned to them, such as gift cards) need to be used to figure an employee's base pay rate for overtime calculations. I cannot find any way around this, because the DOL has set the rules to discourage loop holes.
I like some of the ideas above -- extra excused/paid time off may be the way to go.
And yes, I am for attendance awards -- it is an easy to measure and identify good behavior, and why not reward that?
Also, who is going to keep up with all this data? I don't have time. Also, what about the other 11 months of the year. Are you going to measure only the prior month? what about the rest of the time during the year? or is this rolling? When you award a merit increase, one of the items that should be considered is attendance. Therefore, whatever you give a person should have that as a factor anyway.
E Wart