Impact
A high degree of absenteeism and turnover can cause serious problems for businesses. Absenteeism hurts productivity and costs money. Caroline's company, for example, is currently suffering a high degree of absenteeism in its production department. Employees on the assembly line are often absent. The production employees must operate complex machinery that requires training, so temp employees don't have the requisite skills to pick up the slack for absent operators. Thus, production decreases with each absent employee. This costs the company money.
Moreover, most of the absences are paid leave, which means even though production is down, labor costs remain the same. Although Caroline suspects that many of these employees are abusing their sick leave, it's very hard to prove.
Turnover is even a more serious problem for Caroline's company. Not only can turnover cause productivity problems, but it results in the loss of human resources that may not be easily replaced. For example, some of the company's best and most innovative engineers and researchers have voluntarily separated from service to pursue other opportunities. Loss of these employees not only hurts productivity but weakens the company strategically because of the specialized skills and creativity that the employees brought with them. Even if the company can find the same quality of workers, the search, training and time involved costs serious cash.