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BEAT “PRESENTEEISM” … WITH THE TWELVE EFFECTIVE STRATEGIES FOR CREATING A GREAT PLACE TO WORK
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THE GREAT WORKPLACE REVOLUTION
By Thomas S. Klobucher
I decided to write this book to combat a major challenge that I knew thousands of workplaces in America were facing. I believe that this is a challenge that America itself must overcome if it is to remain a global leader in the twenty-first century: the problem of presenteeism.
You have probably already heard of the problem of absenteeism. That’s when workers don’t show up at all, either because they have a valid excuse (illness, emergency, or severe weather, for example), or because they simply don’t feel like coming in, and don’t bother to give management any reasonable explanation for their absence.
The classic business-school response to absenteeism is that employees should be on site, in the facility, and ready to work nineteen out of every twenty calendar days.
This standard is not enough, because the problem of presenteeism is much bigger and so much more difficult to measure: On any given day, some percentage of your workforce is present, but is performing significantly below its true potential.
These employees may have shown up for work sick, or hung over, or profoundly distracted because of some pressing family emergency, or even (here’s the part we as managers can have the biggest impact on) unmotivated because of a sense of disillusionment with the workplace itself.
The workers in question have shown up, and are technically present, but they are not “all there.”
If you have ever had the experience of knowing or strongly suspecting that an employee was looking for another job while on your payroll, you have had direct experience with presenteeism. Such employees are “present” in body, but absent in spirit. Because spirit counts, we should all be concerned about presenteeism.
Presenteeism, as I use the term in my book THE GREAT WORKPLACE REVOLUTION, includes not only factors like illness that are generally beyond the reach of management, but also factors like the lack of a sense of challenge or the absence of a clear personal development path.
I believe that creating a great place to work is one of the very best ways to counteract this challenge. To put the matter bluntly, some organizations have far fewer restless employees who wish they were somewhere else than other organizations do. I call the organizations that have effectively met the challenge of presenteeism Great Workplaces.
These organizations do a better job of tailoring the workspace to individual workers. This customization of the workplace, for both individuals and teams, is based on generational, career-path-driven, and skill set issues that combine to make each strong team, and each employee who is worth retaining, a unique, but solvable, retention puzzle.
I offer the case studies and best practices that make up the heart of this book, not as an academic exercise, but primarily as the answer to a question that has troubled me for decades: What do GREAT WORKPLACES … organizations with a truly motivated, truly present workforce … have in common? What do they do to tailor their workspaces and engage their employees?
The answer, proven in our case studies, is: they all follow the TWELVE EFFECTIVE STRATEGIES FOR CREATING A GREAT PLACE TO WORK.
