Attendance problems are often at the top of the list whenever HR managers are surveyed as to where they spend the majority of their time. Without automation it can be an extremely burdensome and complicated process to define and track tardies, absences, and leaves not to mention the warnings, counseling sessions, and termination protocols called out by company/union polices when employees cross various thresholds.
Throw in different policies across difference unions and/or departments within the same organization and the chances of doing this accurately and consistently without software enforcing the rules becomes almost zero.
This was the lament of a labor relations manager I spoke with that was very hopeful the Kronos Workforce Attendance Module (WAM) could resolve so many of the issues stemming from attendance policy enforcement in his organization. The good news is that the software was very well suited to their tracking and policy enforcement management requirements.
It would go a long way to enforcing the rules consistently. The bad news is that consistency is not all it is cracked up to be. Here is an interesting issue that came up during our discovery process for the customer to think about that you might want to consider.
One of the assumptions made is that good employees have good attendance records and bad ones have bad attendance records. After all, companies use attendance policy violations as cause for discipline up to and including termination.
In WAM, this whole process often pivots on whether an event such as a late punch or absence is ‘excused’ or ‘unexused’. Once this determination is made by the manager (or timekeeper) in Kronos Timekeeper the WAM module ruthlessly applies the occurrence rules. It doesn’t look at their performance review, or their union seniority, or the incredible shortage of personnel in that industry or market. WAM doesn’t but managers historically have and so the disconnect between the TimeKeeping side and the Occurance Tracking side was not altogether unwelcome.
This means that what Timekeeper showed as an unexcused absence would not always go down in the spreadsheet as an occurrence—or maybe it would until the threshold was about to be crossed.
The Legal Case for Timekeeper
At the end of a period you could have an employee that technically should be disciplined or even let go because of attendance policy violations but would not if they had saving graces elsewhere. Want to fire your best nurse with the best patient outcomes instead of the worst one because of a difference of one tardy?
As with most companies this client decided that having clear and consistently enforced policies are more important than any particular individuals in the organization and steeled themselves for what the system would do.
Of course, this also put the burden on HR as they could now see specifically which managers were not enforcing policy violations. They were now accountable for enforcing accountability at the next level.
Now if you think this is the obvious course of action, or that attendance policies should be set and administered uniformly with no other information being taken into account, then consider the $20 million settlement Verizon, Inc. paid for violations of the American Disabilities Act in July of this year. The EEOC claimed Verizon and its subsidiaries violated the ADA “by failing to make exceptions to its ‘No-Fault’ attendance plan.”
In the EEOC's view, this plan resulted in Verizon's failure to reasonably accommodate employees whose "chargeable absences" were due to disabilities. Sears, Inc. had a similar case they settled for $6 million for terminating employees not too long before the Verizon case.
According to Barry Taylor, a legal advocacy director for Equip for Equality, "Employers should definitely review any blanket policies that they have related to people with disabilities," Taylor also said the settlements highlight the interactive process duties the ADA requires of employers.
"The ADA is very clear that employers have a requirement to engage in the interactive process and conduct an individualized assessment to determine whether it can provide a reasonable accommodation to employees with disabilities," Taylor said. "Blanket policies ignore this requirement."
At the end of the day we are still somewhere in the middle between rote events and common sense application of policies. Attendance tracking software like Kronos Workforce Attendance Module will facilitate the logging, occurrence counting, and workflow associated with counseling and terminations consistently but that still may not keep you out of court.
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