Attendance is often an issue for businesses; there will always be problematic employees who will be habitually absent. If you’ve been managing people for a while, I’m sure you’ve already heard every excuse imaginable. So what does a well-meaning boss do to motivate people to come to work?

You guessed it! They may come up with a perfect attendance reward, in the hopes that such a reward will boost employee job satisfaction. The question is-

Is it working?

Before you implement such a reward or incentive program, I suggest you study your employees’ attitude first. Just as a company would study its market to find out if a product will be effective, so should a leader observe his team.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Will a monetary or benefit-type reward excite the lazy people in your team to wake up early and come to work on time? If the incentive you’re thinking of won’t be enough to excite these people, then your campaign won’t work, so think of something else to give them!
• Will this reward boost employee job satisfaction among people who are already consistent with their attendance? If you give out a reward and these people think “it’s not worth their effort,” then chances are even the so-called goody-goodies in your team might start acting up.

Here are some two scenarios when a perfect attendance rewards may not work in increasing employee job satisfaction and lowering absenteeism rates. Learn from these lessons, so you can create an incentive plan that works:

1.  People just don’t think that the reward is worth it. Perfect attendance rewards are usually small and often insignificant versus a free rest day after calling in “sick.” When employees begin to equate attendance with that small reward, they’ll think that attendance is not a highly valued work ethic.

2.  People might just go to work for the reward. In cases that the employee does like the reward involved, they may just attend for the sake of the reward. This will not mean that they will be working better, nor will this equate to higher employee job satisfaction rates. This reward alone isn’t enough to ensure that your employees are happy. You have to ensure that they have proper work/life balance and that they’re compensated properly based on their efforts.

3.  What if employee A has a perfect 22/22 attendance, then employee B has a 20/22 but the two absences were excused so he still qualified for the reward? The employee who strived hard to get the perfect attendance reward will think that it was unfair for you to give the reward to employee B. Even if employee B’s absence is “valid,” it doesn’t excuse the fact that employee A went to work every day, even if he has problems of his own.

The result of such a reward system depends on how the management handles things. It could boost employee job satisfaction and increase employee attendance, or it could demoralize your team. It all depends on how you implement the system.