I met a retired international executive for an electronics giant who told me about an attendance problem you and I are unlikely to ever face.
The company had found a perfect place to build a TV set factory in the jungles of Malaysia. The land was cheap, as was the labor, and they could bus their workers in from town.
LAST 'DITCH' EFFORT
When the plant was completed and production began, they were soon running at capacity. Then, a short time later, production dropped off sharply.
Because the company had huge TV set orders from retailers, my friend got on the horn to the factory immediately. The plant manager told him they had a big problem: workers wouldn't come to work.
It turned out to be a life and death situation. Because the factory was in the jungle, the company had built a cyclone fence around it to keep various wild animals at bay. But they had overlooked one predator: the cobra.
As long as the cobras were in the attack mode, with their mantels flared, they couldn't fit through the fence. But in their little snake minds, the cobras figured out that if they relaxed, their mantels contracted. They were able to slither through the fence's openings.
When workers climbed off the buses and walked toward the factory, cobras would spring up and attack. Several workers were killed, and the others refused to show up for work.
Failing to get the TV sets built could mean the end of my acquaintance's career, so he jetted off for Malaysia. His farm upbringing came in handy as he discovered the soil surrounding the plant was clay.
He had workers use a bulldozer to scrape out a four-foot moat around the perimeter of the fence. They torched it with flamethrowers so it would hold liquid, and filled it with oil. Apparently cobras won't cross oil, so they sat at the end of the jungle and hissed.
My friend didn't win environmentalist-of-the-year for his solution, but the workers came back and the TVs got made. He kept his job.
REALLY SICK?
Attendance problems we face as managers may not be as exotic, but the bottom line is the same: if employees don't come to work, the work doesn't get done.
I'll give you a couple of personal examples.
I had a Chyron operator who called in sick like clockwork as soon as sick-leave was accrued. The employee was one of the best at running the CG, but the absences kept putting us in a bind. I don't have to tell anyone what a scramble it is to get somebody else in on their day-off once the "I'm sick" call comes in.
This employee's sick leave behavior caused several problems.
Number one, we weren't getting consistent performance out of our graphics operators. On the days the employee called in sick, we were plugging in another operator who didn't operate the machine all that often.
Number two, the employees who were coming in on their days-off began to grouse about it. One in particular said he knew the pattern so well that he would count on getting the call at the appropriate interval, even betting with me which day it would happen. (He won the bet.)
And there was a number three. If it was okay for employee A to do this, we had the potential of employees B, C and D to do the same thing.
NUMERICAL BAR
I worked with our personnel director and came up with a plan. First, she told me it was company policy that required a doctor's note from employees who regularly took sick leave. We set a numerical bar that precisely defined the word "regularly."
I met with the employee in the presence of the personnel director so there was no question whether I was confused over the policy. This also gave the employee notice that sick leave abuse was not just an issue with me but one with the company.
And I also moved the employee to another job within the studio. Pay was the same, hours were the same, but it wasn't as critical to our newscasts. Others could more easily fill in.
"But I'm your best CG operator," the employee protested.
"When you're operating the machine, that's true," I said. "But we go into such a bucket when you're not here that on average I think we can do better with someone else running the Chyron."
The argument didn't end there, but I stuck to my guns and made the change. We actually ended up developing a better CG operator, and one who came to work every day.
In the end, the employee's use of sick leave was about cut in half. And I don't know if I can attribute it to anything I did, but none of my other employees seemed to take sick leave as cavalierly.
Another employee at around that same time developed a tardiness problem. That individual worked on our early morning newscasts, with a crew call at 5 a.m.
Since the employee ran teleprompter, which didn't really require any preparation before the 6 a.m. newscast, I was faced with the "but I'm not really late" excuse.
However, because the newscast director didn't know if the employee was going to show up at all, he would call in a replacement. Often the replacement would arrive, yawning, to find the employee in question had finally arrived and was doing his job.
This was much easier to solve. I documented the occurrences and told the employee it was a last chance situation: if you can't get to work on time, don't bother coming in at all because you will have terminated yourself.
The employee saw the handwriting on the wall, didn't want to get fired, and quit.
However, we put in a policy that required a minimum amount of warning that employees had to alert us if they were going to be absent.
In these and a number of other cases, I found several linchpins of an effective attendance policy.
One is that an attendance policy doesn't have to be company-wide. In situations that are mission-critical to your operation, you can have tighter rules. They just have to be logical and fair. And they have to be aimed at the job, not an individual.
These rules need to be communicated, especially when orienting a new employee.
And they have to be consistently enforced.
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