How To Increase Attendance On Team Building Activities

Posted by Stephanie Snyder on June 7th, 2021

Achieving team-building objectives can become challenging if no member shows up in the meeting. Poor attendance reduces productivity, increases expenses, and drains team members' morale who must pick up the slack. Generally, poor attendance impacts your bottom line. This article will discuss five ways on how you can increase attendance in team-building activities.

Establish Clear Anticipations

You need to ensure that your team members know the attendance anticipations, including how they can request leave and call-off processes. Also, make sure they understand the effect of poor attendance on workload, fellow members’ impacts, and team-building activities. 

You need to share this information with your team members during the onboarding process and make sure you address it frequently. Furthermore, having an electronic and physical method for your team members to refer to will help limit the excuses for not attending the meeting and misunderstanding the meeting anticipations.

Consistency is critical when managing and executing an efficient attendance policy. Make sure you treat all your team members equally. If members recognize that a particular member in a similar condition is treated differently, it can increase turnover rates and reduce morale. Consider executing a strike and point system. It can hold your team members answerable for their attendance and establish clear penalties also.

Identify Hidden Causes

It’s your responsibility to find out why your team members fail to attend the meeting. Absenteeism can be a result of considerable difficulty. Apart from common illness and minor injuries, there could be other severe aspects causing poor attendance. Poor attendance may be due to: personal or family issues, heavy workload, lack of training, or conflicts with supervisors or fellow members.

Before you decide to take any disciplinary action, take your time to meet with your team member to determine the cause of their attendance matters. You might find out that their failure to attend is under ADA or FMLA. Taking your time to find out the root cause of skipped work can result in a strategy of action to get the team member to work and get back on track.

Train Your Team Leaders

Your team leaders must encourage and manage team members’ attendance. Mainly, team members must communicate with their team leaders directly in case they'll miss the meeting. Therefore, correctly trained team leaders address and monitor matters efficiently and promptly. Initially, team leaders could accept absenteeism without asking too many questions and understanding the influence the absence could cause.

If the pattern grows or the team leaders feel that the team member could be abusing the policy, they should note the absence and the team member's attendance henceforth. Correct documentation will be crucial if the attendance matters progress, leading to termination or disciplinary actions. Your team leaders need to be familiar with the attendance policy, know how to track attendance, and understand when to administer disciplinary actions.

Reward Excellent Attendance

You need to balance between rewarding excellent attendance and the consequences of attendance matters. It's a great technique to indicate that you recognize team members' commitment and give your team members something positive to fight for. The greatest challenge you can experience when considering a reward system is the members’ mindset that it would be rewarding your members for conducting what is expected of them. 

You can consider simple rewards such as giving certificates monthly or recognizing a particular member during a staff meeting or in a newsletter. You can also consider having fun together by visiting attractive places like West Virginia state parks and many more.

Provide Flexibility

This may not be an easy technique, but executing flexibility in team-building activities can increase members’ engagement and attendance. By permitting your team members to set their suitable start times, you may assist members experiencing challenges at home with childcare. 

Allowing your team members to switch their shifts with fellow members could remove call-offs because of unanticipated personal matters. Like your standard work schedules, you need to correctly document and approve any flex schedule so that you can easily monitor and track the activities.

Addressing and recognizing attendance matters consistently and rapidly is your first step in reducing attendance issues. You need to apply the techniques mentioned above and develop an attendance policy compliant and efficient to increase team-building activities.