As your team grows you will ineveitably have attendance problems. There are a few schools of though on how to deal with these issues in your organization and the reality is that you need to make sure that your policies are in allingment with your company values.
Ultimatly any unplanned absense hurts your teams ability to deliver remarkable service to your customers. Frequent unplanned absense can cause moral to drop and even build resentment amoung your start performers who are left to pickup the slack.
Some people focus on strict policies and disciplinary action while other focus on rewarding good attendance. I personaly believe it needs to be a balance of the two. In the end you want your team to be self selecting and to have a culture that promotes accountability and reliability as rules of playing for your team rather than a goal to strive for. This goal can be hard to achieve if you have one bad apple in the bunch as it will ultimatly drag others down.
Your policies have to be documented and fair so that the team does not feel you are arbitrarily disiplining or letting an employee go. Your culture also has to be strong enough to terminate an emplyee that everyone likes and that does a good job on the days he shows up because it sends the message to your A players that the company takes dependability seriously.
In the end it doesn’t matter how you track and reward / punish attendance and punctuality as long as it is a fair system and upholds your company values.
Let me know how you handle these things in your organization.
JC
