Today's market is very competitive and it is not an easy task for an organization to tackle with all the problems efficiently and maintain a good balance between its resources, productivity and tough competition in the market. The first and the foremost thing required to survive and grow in the competitive market is efficient workforce management, so that the productivity is not hampered.


In order to increase productivity and succeed in the competitive market, workforce planning is essential for every organization. One of the basic motives of effective workforce panning is also to minimize absenteeism, so that productivity can be maximized.


Effective absence management is crucial for every organization as excessive absenteeism incurs heavy loses to the organization. It has been noticed that only two third of the absenteeism cases are genuine, while others are non-genuine reasons. Since management training courses and programs alone cannot reduce the rate of absenteeism, effective mechanisms are needed to deal with the same. Therefore, investing in effective employee management mechanisms is the only way to improve the attendance of employees in an organization.


According to the workforce planning and management training guidelines, only those tools can prove to be helpful in reducing absenteeism in an organization, which can take into account the various reasons causing absenteeism. Policies should be formed based on these causes.


While drafting the policies, organizations should always remember that employees sometimes fall ill and require offs from work so that they can recover. An effective absent management mechanism should always understand that some causes of absenteeism are simply unavoidable and the mechanism should offer support to those employees who are absent because of these causes. In fact, the mechanism should be efficient enough to help the employee recover and get back to work as soon as possible.


According to researches some of the common factors which lead to absenteeism include:

Health and lifestyle of employees.

High risk of injury while at work.

The attitude to work.

Gender. It has been found that women remain more absent than men.

However, the absent management mechanism should also be capable of identifying the non-genuine absenteeism and keep a check on such cases. There should be a disciplinary and focused approach for considering the non genuine absenteeism cases.


Recently, it has been observed that schedule optimization and flexi-time working patterns can help to reduce the rate of absenteeism within an organization and also increase the productivity along with employee satisfaction.