Tag: hr policy

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A complete guide to attendance write-ups [free template included]

Oil painting of a man writing a letter

Summary

  • Attendance write-ups are warnings issued to employees to address time and attendance policy infractions.

  • Attendance write-ups should include information about the employee and their role, outline infractions and previous disciplinary measures taken, and explain how the employee must adjust their actions going forward.  

  • Click here for an attendance write-up template.

Employee attendance is crucial to maintaining productivity and operational efficiency within any organization. However, there are instances when employees fall short of meeting attendance expectations — leaving managers and HR professionals in a difficult situation. 

Absenteeism and chronic tardiness disrupt workflow and place additional burden on other team members, leading to increased stress and burnout. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, businesses in the service industry experience some of the highest rates of absenteeism. Workforce.com’s own research corroborates this, with 31% of businesses listing shift disruption caused by employee absenteeism as one of their biggest problems.

As an HR professional or manager, addressing attendance issues is essential to maintain a productive workplace effectively. This is where attendance write-ups play a significant role. Attendance write-ups are formal documentation (or written warnings) for addressing attendance infractions and reinforcing punctuality expectations.

Free Attendance Write-Up Template

Throughout this article, we will delve into the essential components of an attendance write-up, explore best practices for writing one, and provide a sample write-up letter for reference. By understanding the significance of attendance write-ups, HR professionals and managers can proactively tackle employee attendance issues, promote a culture of accountability, and create a more productive work environment.

When should you use an attendance write-up?

An attendance write-up should be used in situations when an employee’s attendance falls below expected standards or violates company attendance policies, including the following examples: 

  1. Regular tardiness: When an employee consistently arrives late for work without valid reasons.
  2. Excessive absenteeism: When an employee develops a pattern of no-call, no-shows, or unscheduled absences. 
  3. Violations of company attendance policies: These could include failing to properly request time off or abusing paid or sick leave policies. It could also include failing to notify supervisors and/or HR managers before taking a leave of absence or not providing a doctor’s note after taking sick days. 

It’s important to note that the decision to use an attendance write-up should be consistent, fair, and in accordance with established company policies and applicable labor laws such as the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). 

What your attendance write-up should include

Write-ups should include several key components to address attendance problems and communicate expectations to employees effectively:

    • Employee information: This includes the employee’s name, position, and any other relevant identifying information.
    • Employee absences: Highlight the employee’s attendance record, explicitly showing the dates and times when they were late or missed work. If you use an attendance point system, be sure to provide a history of where, when, and how points were accrued. 
    • Outline any previous action taken: This could include anything from verbal warnings to disciplinary action. 
    • Outline the company’s employee attendance policy and how it was violated: Provide clear references to the HR policies or guidelines to ensure transparency and avoid misunderstandings.
    • Explain the importance of the company’s attendance policy: Highlight the negative consequences of violating it. Show how unexcused absences negatively impact coworkers and harm the organization as a whole. 
    • Highlight any further disciplinary action: Outline what the company’s policy says about what disciplinary measures will be taken after an attendance write-up. This could be anything from another written reprimand to termination. 
    • Instructions on how employees can reply to a write-up: It is essential to give employees the opportunity to respond to a write-up by providing feedback and/or insight into their poor attendance and or excessive absenteeism. Your write-up should explain how they can do this and through which channels. 
    • Manager and employee signatures and dates: Include spaces for the employee, supervisor, or HR manager to sign and date the write-up. This acknowledges that the employee has received the write-up and understands its contents.

Maintaining consistent documentation and following company protocols is essential to ensure fairness and compliance with legal requirements.

Attendance write-up best practices

The purpose of issuing an attendance write-up is about more than punishing or scaring an employee. It should be seen as a step toward finding and implementing a solution. Here are some tips that will help you get the most out of attendance write-ups. 

Be sure to have all of your facts straight

Presenting an employee with an attendance write-up is a serious measure to take, so it’s vital that it is based on indisputable facts. If an employee is chronically tardy for work, pull up their attendance record and highlight where they haven’t kept to their work schedule. If you use a digital time clock, you can get this information from past timesheets in the form of punch-in variances or even from point totals if you use a point system. 

Whatever data you use for a paper trail, you should be able to find it in your time and attendance software. Be sure to link these infractions to the policies that have been violated. 

Keep it professional

Objectivity is key when it comes to writing employees up. As mentioned above, your attendance write-ups should be based on facts and should not include any subjective opinions. Including something like “John is lazy and irresponsible; he clearly doesn’t care about his job and is always trying to avoid work” can lead to employees becoming defensive, which would make the situation worse.

Instead, highlight the specific issue at hand, such as “John has been late for work on three occasions in the past two weeks, arriving an average of 15 minutes past his scheduled start time without any valid reasons or notifications.”

Don’t view them as final warnings

An attendance write-up shouldn’t be seen as a precursor to termination. It’s just a warning and should be perceived as an opportunity to improve an employee’s behavior and promote good attendance. 

Map out the next steps

Your write-up should include what happens next — like what an employee needs to do to get back in line with your attendance policy and when this progress will be reviewed. 

On the other hand, you should also state what measures will be taken if the employee continues to infringe on your policy. 

Templates

Feel free to copy and paste the templates below for your own personal use. You can also download a file with each template right here. 

Attendance write-up template

[Date]

[Employee’s Full Name]

[Employee’s Position]

Dear [Employee’s Name],

This is an official warning regarding your violation of [Company Name]’s time and attendance policies. 

Attendance infraction:

On [Date(s)], you were observed [mention infraction with details on how it violates the company policy].

Expectations and policies:

[Quote the relevant areas of your time and attendance policies and include a hyperlink to where they can access them directly.]

Previous action taken:

We have discussed this matter on [X] previous occasions. We first [action] on [date]. Additionally, we [action] on [date].

Corrective action and further consequences:

This attendance write up serves as formal documentation of the infraction. Going forward, we expect you to prioritize punctuality and adhere to the established attendance policies. 

Failure to improve your attendance and address this issue may result in further disciplinary action, including [list specifics according to your company policy].

Improvement plan:

To rectify this situation, we recommend that you review and familiarize yourself with our company’s attendance policy and procedures. Additionally, we encourage you to make any necessary adjustments to ensure your timely arrival at work. 

If you encounter any challenges or have concerns related to your attendance, please communicate with your supervisor or the HR department for guidance and support.

Please sign below to acknowledge that you have received and understood this attendance write-up. If you have any questions, feedback, or concerns regarding this write-up, please inform your supervisor. 

Employee’s Signature: _______________________

Date: ________________

Supervisor’s Signature: _______________________

Date: ________________

Please note that this write-up will be kept in your personnel file for future reference. We trust that you will take this matter seriously and make the necessary improvements to maintain consistent attendance.

Sincerely,

[Supervisor’s Name]

[Supervisor’s Title]

[Company Name]

Tackle employee absenteeism at the source

HR managers and supervisors should spend less time and energy on drafting attendance write-ups and implementing disciplinary action. The process can be demoralizing to both employer and employee. 

Having proper time-tracking technology alongside a fair attendance policy can help HR and Ops teams achieve lower absenteeism rates, increase employee loyalty, reduce labor costs, and improve the company culture. 

To find out how, check out our webinar, How to Reduce No Call, No Shows.

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How to develop a call-out policy that reduces business impact

Abstract art of man in apron on cellphone

Summary

  • Practice compassion and consistency when handling call-outs and disciplinary action

  • Clearly communicate call-out policy across your workforce so staff and managers are on the same page

  • Streamline the call-out process with mobile-first scheduling 

Picture this: You’re looking at the clock. It’s 10 minutes before your employee is scheduled to come in for their shift — and, suddenly, your phone rings. It’s your employee calling to say something urgent came up, and they won’t be able to work. All your other team members have already requested the night off.

These kinds of scenarios put managers and supervisors in a dilemma. No business wants to operate understaffed, especially with a last-minute notice, but emergencies do sometimes happen.

Striking a balance between keeping your business running smoothly and letting employees call out when they really need to can be difficult. It’s important to have a call-out policy in place, so your entire team understands when it’s appropriate to call out and how to do so in a way that helps the business work around their absences.

Create a clear and comprehensive call-out policy

Your call-out policy should clarify everything that your team needs to know about calling out so that there’s no room for misunderstanding what’s allowed and what’s not. Putting your policies and procedures into words builds accountability and sets clear expectations on what employees need to do in order to call out. Including these five elements ensures that your call-out policy covers everything your employees need to know:

  1. Definitions: Define “call out” – specifically, an employee informing you that they’re unable to work their scheduled shift as planned. Define tardiness vs. absence — someone calling to say they’ll be late versus not working at all. You should also clarify the difference between excused and unexcused absences and what criteria you use to excuse absences. For example, absences due to medical or family emergencies should be excused, but call-outs without notice and a legitimate reason should not. 
  2. Deadlines: What is the latest time before their shift that an employee can call out in order to be excused from work? You might ask employees to call out at least eight hours before their shift starts to receive an excused absence without reason, or they can call out at any time if it’s a valid emergency.
  3. Procedure: Explain how employees should submit a formal call-out request – via phone call, email, text message, or app. Who is responsible for getting their shift covered – the employee or management? Does an employee who calls out need to follow up and provide documentation or proof, like a signed doctor’s note?
  4. Records: Explain how you track attendance and shift changes across your team for visibility – for example, timekeeping and scheduling software, paper timecards, or a retail point-of-sale system.
  5. Consequences: Describe what circumstances require disciplinary action, like reaching a certain number of absences, and what penalties employees may receive. Set a limit on unexcused absences and how many will be considered job abandonment.

Keep your call-out policy simple and easy to comprehend using simple language instead of legal jargon. Walk through all of your procedures clearly, including visual how-to guides if necessary, so that employees know exactly how to call out of work while following company policy.

Treat your employees with compassion

Nobody wants to call out if it means they’ll lose their job, even if they need to call out. But you also don’t want employees fighting through hazardous weather to come to work or struggling with a personal health matter while trying to be productive. Exercising compassion and empathy puts support structures in place so that your employees can call out of work when they need to while still following the policy. 

The key to a compassionate call-out procedure is to offer flexibility as long as employees give notice as soon as possible and can provide a good reason for their absence. Include specific wording in your documentation that allows you to excuse absences for additional reasons outside of those explicitly given in your policy.

An employee experiencing a medical emergency or car trouble right before their shift might choose a “no call, no show” if they know that they won’t be excused from work for calling out too late. But if you’re willing to excuse call-outs in these extenuating circumstances, that employee would make sure you knew why they weren’t able to show up. This lets you plan around their absence more effectively because you know about it before the fact instead of after it has already happened.

Your call-out policy should prioritize your employees’ well-being and build mutual respect for both company and employee time. Give employees a certain number of sick days or personal days that they can use to call out of work at their discretion. Tell employees that you’d prefer them to be safe and call out of work than to come in under less-than-ideal circumstances. 

Create a company culture that encourages employees to communicate their needs and put themselves first. In turn, you’ll have a workforce that has more trust in their management and communicates in a timely, transparent manner when they need to take a day off.

Apply disciplinary action fairly and consistently

There’s a fine line between using disciplinary action to assign accountability and using it to punish your employees. The difference comes down to how fair the consequences are and how consistently the rules are applied.

Whatever consequences employees receive should be proportionate to how disruptive their absences are to the business. Employees who frequently call out at the last minute without a justified reason should receive more scrutiny than those who only call out once every few months. Similarly, an unexcused, no-call, no-show absence is more serious than an employee who calls out and gets their shift covered by a co-worker.

Every employee’s situation is unique, so it can be difficult to apply the rules fairly across all circumstances. An attendance point system can remove bias from attendance tracking. With a point system, employees might accrue a certain number of points for excused absences and more for unexcused absences. These points can expire or be removed from employee records over time, ensuring that only employees who excessively miss work or call out late are flagged for disciplinary action. 

Whenever you discipline employees, make sure that those consequences are justified, backed up with evidence of unexcused absences and call-outs. Don’t display favoritism toward employees with higher seniority or longer tenure; all employees should respect the company’s call-out policy equally.

Educate employees on your call-out policy

You can’t expect employees to comply with rules if they don’t even know what those rules are. That’s why it’s important to make sure your workers understand your call-out policy well before you expect them to follow it.

Make sure that all company policies are available and readily accessible to employees. Post your call-out policy on a staff bulletin board and send it to all employees via email. Add it to your employee handbook, and then ensure that all workers have a copy. Remind employees frequently about your call-out policy, especially during time periods when they’re more likely to take time off, like a holiday, spring break, or flu season.

Ensure that all managers understand the call-out policy thoroughly so that they can accurately answer any questions from their team members. Hold training sessions as necessary for managers on your call-out policy. Go over the difference between excused and unexcused absences, what kind of disciplinary actions are appropriate, and how to document call-outs. Educating both your managers and employees so that everyone knows what’s expected of them makes your call-out policy more likely to succeed. 

Fill call-outs faster with the right tools

In an ideal world, employees would never need to call out, but in reality, things happen. Put tools and policies in place to help you expect the unexpected and navigate unforeseen circumstances with ease. The right scheduling solutions can help automate the process of backfilling call-outs, proactively reducing the impact absenteeism has on your bottom line.

Workforce.com empowers both managers and workers to deal with call-outs efficiently while staying in close communication throughout the process. Shift swaps enable employees to take ownership of calling out. Meanwhile, managers have the option to reassign shifts, offer shift bids, or even remove them if no coverage is available.

If you’re in HR and having a hard time enforcing an efficient call-out policy, here’s what you can do to back control.

For more info, go ahead and contact one of our workforce management pros today.

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Policy management: What is it and what does it look like for HR?

Summary

  • Policy management involves the creation and maintenance of administrative procedures and guidelines within an organization — More

  • There are four circumstances in which HR management should introduce new policy — More

  • Policy management automation is becoming increasingly common with frontline HR teams — More

Below the surface of any organization is a process that, perhaps while not the most glamorous, serves to create order, fairness, and standardization. Few people like to talk about it, and even fewer enjoy directly working with it. 

This, of course, is policy management. While sometimes an afterthought, its importance cannot be overstated and it ought to be carried out efficiently and effectively throughout a workforce. 

But let’s back up a second. How about we first pinpoint a clear definition for policy management? Beyond that, where is policy management even going, particularly for HR teams? And how do you automate it? Well, let’s take a look.

 

What is policy management? 

Policy management involves the creation, distribution, and maintenance of different administrative procedures and guidelines within an organization. Modern approaches to policy management seek to not only manage but also automate how policies are applied across different business functions. 

The purpose of policy management is to essentially ensure HR compliance, reduce risk, and protect stakeholders at every turn of a business’s operations. It achieves this by introducing the standardization and centralization of different policies in the workplace. Implementing and properly following these policies creates an audit trail that can protect an organization from all kinds of liability. 

 

The different kinds of policy management

Since policy management spans a wide variety of industries, what it looks like can change drastically – this naturally obfuscates how one should manage it properly within their own business.  

You’ll typically find that the organizations most concerned with compliance and risk management tend to lean heavily on policy management – think local government, public safety, IT, and legal services. However, there is a certain kind of policy management that often gets overlooked: hourly employee HR.

While HR policy management for hourly workers may not be as technical as IT policy management or as critical as public safety policy management, it nonetheless affects the lives of countless hardworking people and frontline businesses. To understand it is one thing; to get it right is another matter entirely. Let’s take a closer look at what policy and procedure management mean for your human resources department. 

 

HR policy management for hourly employees

Streamlining the creation and application of HR policies is becoming increasingly important for hourly workforces, particularly in hospitality, retail, and QSR. While quite extensive, HR policy management in these areas is extremely important to get right in order to protect both employers and employees alike.  

Unfortunately, frontline employees can often experience a disconnect with HR when it comes to understanding and following policy; this can lead to breaches in labor compliance, codes of conduct, and much more. To avoid these issues, it’s best to understand where your company needs to implement policy as well as how to easily communicate and follow that policy. 

Here are some of the most common areas where HR policies are put into place for hourly workers:

  • Leave and time off: Covering such things as vacation, sick leave, and holidays, time off policies should be clearly communicated in an employee handbook and fall in line with state and federal labor laws. More than this, employees should be able to easily interact with and utilize leave policies within a scheduling system. 
  • Meal and rest breaks: Every state has its own laws regarding the length and frequency of breaks in the workplace. HR policy needs to account for these laws by transparently meeting all requirements throughout the scheduling process. 
  • Time tracking and pay: Employees should always have an understanding of how their work hours are being tracked, as well as what their pay rate is, the frequency of paydays, and any special procedures for holiday pay, overtime rates, or absenteeism. At the same time, management needs to be able to apply and follow these policies across their workforce accurately. 
  • Attendance and tardiness: Attendance policies can vary greatly between organizations. Clear guidelines mapping out how tardiness, unexcused absences, call-outs, and no-shows will be interpreted should be communicated to all employees and closely followed. 
  • Job and shift qualifications: Some organizations may require specific training, licenses, or qualifications to work specific shifts/roles. It helps to have policy that manages, records, and enforces these requirements within the scheduling process so that work standards are met and laws are followed. 
  • Training and handbook acknowledgments: Organizations should have a central repository of training material and other important documentation for employees to refer to whenever needed. More than this, they should have a simple attestation process and a clear paper trail to ensure all workers are complying with the required materials. 
  • Disciplinary actions and termination: As a tremendously sensitive area of employment, termination procedures and disciplinary documentation should be clear, concise, and followed very closely. Effective policy management here prevents lawsuits and removes the volatility of human emotion from difficult situations. 
  • Tipping: F&B and hospitality businesses can choose from a variety of unique ways to distribute tips, but it should be based on sound and accessible policy. 
  • Overtime: Employees should understand their overtime rates as well as their employer’s tolerance for overtime occurrence. Moreover, the employer should have procedures in place to closely approve, track, and pay overtime accruals. 
  • Incident reports: Without strict procedures and reminders in place, it is sometimes easy to forget about documentation amidst the chaos of a workplace incident. However, it is crucial for liability reasons that organizations have policy in place to remind and guide employees through the reporting process. 

 

When to introduce new HR policies

While the purpose of HR policy is to introduce order to how people are managed in the workplace, it would be a mistake to assume that all policy is static and unchanging in nature. In fact, according to a Forbes quote from veteran CHRO Rohit Manchua, “Policies ought to be living documents that are reflective of collective human consciousness … [they] ought to be updated on an ongoing basis.” These updates should be relevant to employee sentiments and should align with the overall strategic initiatives of the company. 

Indeed, examples of policy management updates can be seen everywhere. In 2019 a study of C-suite executives in the healthcare industry found that more than 50% of those surveyed would be revising their privacy policies and conducting new training regiments to comply with new data privacy regulations in the industry. 

So this begs the question, when is the right time to introduce new policy? Well, here are a few circumstances according to Forbes’ Human Resource Council:

  1. During the launch of a strategic initiative

  2. During growth and decline periods

  3. In response to employee feedback

  4. If an urgent matter arises

HR managers should use any of these situations as an opportunity to review, rework, and roll out new policies and procedures to guide their hourly workforce. 

But the work should not stop there. Beyond simply updating policy, managers should utilize the four circumstances listed above to introduce automation in any way they can to improve policy adherence and streamline procedural workflows. 

 

Policy management automation – the future for HR teams?

Particularly in larger organizations, policy management can often swell into an unwieldy behemoth filled with red tape and bottleneck. Ensuring all employees and managers follow carefully planned policy procedures is no easy task, often resulting in countless errors when done completely manually. It’s not enough anymore to simply write down policies and hand out booklets. 

Luckily there seems to be an emerging answer for these HR issues. 

In recent years there has been a growing push to automate many policy management functions. Things like attendance strikes, overtime approvals, meal breaks, qualification-based scheduling, and more are now being handed over to policy management software. 

These tools often come with a high degree of configuration, allowing HR professionals to create and manage nearly any kind of policy workflow. Automation like this reduces human error, increases employee accountability, and speeds up administrative tasks at every point of the policy lifecycle. 

Perhaps most importantly, policy management automation understands the living and breathing nature of policies – they cannot sit idle in a notebook collecting dust. Instead,  policies and procedures are automatically applied to your employee scheduling and time-tracking processes to ensure compliance and improve employee engagement. 

For more information about how to perfectly sync policy management with things like scheduling, check out the free webinar below about employee call-out policies:

Webinar: The Best Way to Replace Call-Outs