Work ethic is the belief of the employee on the appropriate behaviour at work. Every company has a behavioural expectation that is the norm and this is closely related to company culture. One of the major factors shaping company culture and work ethics is attendance.

Companies with positive work ethics have employees who come on time, are actively engaged in their work and are motivated. On the other hand absenteeism, frequent leaves, coming late and leaving early from office are all reflection of poor work ethics.

Rules on attendance and employee attendance affect company work ethic. To put it simply, low attendance, absenteeism and tardiness leads to poor work ethic in office.

Therefore, a company must ensure that healthy work ethic is maintained by managing good attendance. This has to be done by careful monitoring of employees and policies by top management.

Let us look at how this can be done effectively.

Monitoring Employee Attendance for Work Ethic

Employees with poor attendance are toxic for your office environment. Casual attitude of few employees can spread throughout the office to bring down everyone’s productivity. For this reason it is important to have employees with right work ethics in your company.

All efforts should be made to avoid hiring employees who are tardy and low on motivation in the first place. Background check on candidates is helpful for this. What is the reputation that they have in previous company? You want to hire candidates who add to your work ethics rather than pull it down.

It is more likely that a new hire will be influenced by your company culture rather than him changing your company. So make sure that all new hires are made aware of attendance policies and sign the policy. This gives a clear message that you are serious about attendance in office.

There should also be policies on absenteeism and tardiness. Many companies do not define these formally even though they are equally harmful to a full day leave. Coming late to office, taking undue long breaks, surfing the internet all count as absenteeism. These behaviours reflect insincerity and bad work ethics of employee.

Without monitoring attendance and work the HR has no way to know that low attendance and absenteeism is a ground reality in the company. Wifi attendance monitoring, productivity tracking and online work tracking are all effective ways to monitor employees and catch any problems in the nip.

Besides this managers and supervisors must also be trained to report attendance problem and tardiness immediately to HR.

Action by Management

Once low attendance is brought to notice, management must take swift action on it. Actions let employees that casual attitude and tardiness is not tolerated in this company and will be dealt with accordingly.

Consequences of poor attendance must be spelt out in the attendance policy and implemented in case of breach. Warnings and escalations usually work to change employee’s behaviour.

However, management should not shy away from taking decisive actions when required. People who are not productive should not be kept in the company. Such employees only cause resentment among productive workers and negatively affect new hires.

Removing an employee on attendance grounds might be a hard call but the management has to take it to preserve the company work ethics.

Final Thoughts

Attendance, company culture and work ethics are closely related to each other. Low attendance and tardiness by employees is reflection of poor culture in the company. Over time this leads to low morale and unproductive work ethics among employees.

To prevent work ethics from going bad, companies must hire wisely, have a formal attendance policy and take action when attendance is below par for an employee.