5 Responses

1. It’s been a while…
   It’s been a while since we ran this kind of course but the exercise we used most heavily was where people learned to determine the cost to the business of absenteeism.

   People were asked to evaluate the value of their worth to the business for a day – based not just on salary but also lost custom and the impact on others etc.

   Everyone in the room is then asked to write up a daily figure and write them on the board and work out the average for the group – we found the average used to come to approx. £230 a day which is pretty close to the actual costs of regular absence per day to the business.

   Once people realise how expensive absence can be to a business – over £1000 a week. Then people begin to feel better about having to manage in this awkward area.

2. course aids
   I have a couple of role play scenarios that I use in my Absence Management course “Managing attendance for business”.

   Although its often quite a challege to get everyone role playing i found this invaluable for delivering feedback on conducting a “back to work” meeting.

   It also allowed us to talk about the repetative “sick day” and how to handle difficult or sensitive issues without having to involve a memeber of the HR team.

   The whole session reinforces company policies and with the introduction covering costs etc, as per Nik’s comment below, gets buy in from the managers and empowers them do deal with their team members the “correct” way to effectively cut costs and impact on the business.

   Please feel free to e mail me if you think this would be useful.
   Debbee

3. Approaches to Managing Attendance
   Hi Lucy, I’ve used an approach which involves the Training Team, the HR Team and the Managers themselves getting involved in the delivery of mini-workshops and the measurement of the success of the interventon. There were a number of side benefits to this approach, including short design and delivery time, a highened awareness across the business of the issue and more buy-in from managers. Please do get in touch if you’d like more to talk it through, it would be too much to describe in a short posting.

   Regards

4. Try to use real examples
   I recently ran this type of session with our team leaders and the role plays that we used were common examples from our business.
   The purpose of the training was to provide practical advice on managing attendance and in particular handling the return to work interview so that correct procedure was followed.

   I analysed the data we hold and took examples of the easier cases to deal with and those that can be more problematic – e.g. frequent one day sickness. I was careful to de-personalise the examples and chose those that were more common. By using real examples, and being able to debate the handling of those examples we were able to get a good understanding of the need to be consistent across our teams – as well as identify the wider problems caused by failing to manage attendance.

5. Attendance Management

   Hi can anyone help with Role Play scenarios for Attendance Management….

    

   thanks

   jean.costello@glasgow.gov.uk