Is employee absenteeism causing stress within your childcare?

If you are like many childcare owners trying to run a high-quality early childhood education center, you dread the 6 AM text messages on Monday morning learning that 5 of your teachers are not coming in. Immediately you begin to stress and wonder how you are going to keep your rooms in ratio. Will the state show up for an inspection and find you out of compliance? Will you be hearing from unhappy parents? How are you possibly going to cover 3 different rooms by yourself? Not only do these disruptions cause the owner/admin stress, but they also cause other teachers stress because they may be asked to fill in and work extra hours. Those extra hours often result in overtime pay making already tight margins even tighter.

Here are 5 strategies to manage unplanned absences and mitigate your risk of being out of ratio.

1) Schedule more resources on days employees call off the most.

The first key to reducing stress is to take a lesson from the airline industry and over-schedule on days when employees typically call off the most. To find which days those are, you need to track all absences so you can run a staff absence report in your childcare management software. CareDay provides capabilities to not only track these absences but also analyze them to give you the information you need to plan for potentially tight coverage days. Below is a screenshot from CareDay’s staff absences analysis report.

As you can see, within this childcare company Mondays are by far the day most employees are absent. For that reason, they are going to schedule any additional staff they have available on Mondays to offset the absences historically typical for that day of the week.

2) Identify the people making up abnormal amounts of absenteeism.

If your center is like most, there are probably a few people who make up the overwhelming majority of unplanned absences. The key is to identify as early as possible who those people are and find a path to correct the behavior. Employees who are frequently absent often bring down the culture of the center and cause undue stress on other employees. Looking at the dataset below, we can see that Olivia A. makes up almost one-quarter of the total absences for this center. By simply figuring out what is going on with Olivia, we can reduce absenteeism by almost 24%.

3) Find centers with lower absenteeism rates.

Multi-center operations get the luxury of being able to compare one center to the next when it comes to absenteeism. In high-performing operations, you should see absenteeism normalize for any significant period of time. Let’s do an analysis to see what is happening across these childcare centers below.

From this CareDay report, we can see that Center 1 and Center 2 collectively contribute to more than 60% of the overall absenteeism in this childcare operation, despite having a similar workforce size as the other centers. This unusually high rate tells us that we need to further investigate and having this data easily shows us where to begin our quest for information. Maybe Center 1 and Center 2 suffered from a COVID outbreak. Maybe the management needs support in fostering a culture of reliability. Or maybe the employees at these centers have more transportation issues than others. No matter the reason, the data should help point you in the right direction to come up with a plan to address the attendance issues if needed.

4) Carrots work better than sticks

At this point in your journey, you should have a better understanding of the days employees are absent the most, the employees who are absent the most, and the centers that have the most days of absenteeism. The next step is to find ways to incentivize employees to come to work for all scheduled shifts. Quarterly bonuses and public recognition are great ways to acknowledge employees who are reliable and do the hard work of educating children every day. Remember, modifying your culture is a slow process but usually pays off in spades.

5) Talk regularly and positively about how absenteeism causes stress on fellow employees (and the kiddos!)

This last point is a big one! Oftentimes simply shining light on the problems causing stress creates a positive effect on outcomes. As employees get to know each other and personally feel the pressure of covering for absent coworkers, they tend to want to do their part. Remember, it takes consistent reminders to truly change behavior, and positive reinforcement around doing what is right works wonders on workplace culture!

By implementing these five strategies, you should be well on your way to a lower-stress operating model and ultimately higher rewards!