When it comes to workplaces, sickness is a big loss of productivity and can put you behind by days or even weeks. When people are absent from work, you may find your projects lagging behind. How can you reduce the amount of time people spend away from work?
Reduce Fake Call-Outs By Assessing the Work Environment
If your employees feel they constantly need to take “mental health days”, you may have problems within your work environment that make it stressful or perhaps even downright toxic. If you have a lot of employees calling out, even when they may not be sick, giving all kinds of excuses, you may want to meet with your team and find out if there’s anything you can do to help reduce work stresses. While it is good to encourage days off and the taking of scheduled PTO (vacation), understanding why your employees may be under high stress will help reduce sick time. You may be surprised – some easy changes may be able to reduce stress a lot, such as a replacing a constantly broken or problematic printer, which can also help to raise morale.
Let Employees Go Home – And Stay Home – When Sick
It’s important to note that reducing the amount of time your employees stay away from work is important, but the one sure-fire way to go about it incorrectly is to put pressure on your employees to show up to work sick. A sick employee can wreak havoc on your entire team, spreading a cold or infection way past the one person who was initially involved. If you have sick employees, let them stay home without pressure until they are better or at the very least, no longer contagious. One employee absent due to sickness is better than five or even ten employees absent due to sickness.
If Possible, Allow for Remote Work
If employees are sick, but not so sick that they can’t perform some of their functions, if it’s possible for them to work from home while they are sick, allow them to do so. You can even shift around tasks to allow the sick employee to complete work at home, which will mean your company is still being effective and completing tasks on time without risking the health of your other employees.
Have A Cleaning Program in Place
Having an effective cleaning program in place can drastically help reduce the spread of germs. Cleaners such as EcoSource may utilize chemicals on frequently handled, touched, or worked on surfaces to disinfect and clean, which will help your employees to not catch those gross viruses left by someone sneezing and not covering their mouth. Couple this with your own cleaning routine to make sure that items like cell phones and tablets are effectively cleaned, and you can cut off bacteria before it ravishes your team members.
