The FINANCIAL -- E-mail notice, warning, deduction of premium are all on the list of
administrative penalties Georgian companies are using against their
employees in response to absenteeism.
“There have been cases of late arrival and disciplinary problems being amongst the (other) reasons for an employee’s dismissal,” said Tea Bokuchava, from Bank Republic.
At TBC Bank , staff members only have the right to be absent from work 3 times a year. After three absences their salaries are cut by 3-4-5%, etc, in accordance with the number of days missed.
“At hypermarket Goodwill there has already been one case when an employee has been dismissed due to this reason although warnings more often than salary cuts are used as deterrents,” said by Tea Gotsadze, PR Manager of Goodwill.
In certain private companies being 2 hours late may lead to a 10% salary cut.
As 22 year old Mari told The FINANCIAL the accounting programme company for which she works has its own policies regarding absenteeism and being late. “This has become a real problem for the majority of staff as being even several minutes late is reflected in one’s salary at the end of month,” said Mari.
“The company I work for has its own system of monitoring which automatically records the times of one’s arrival and departure, which thereafter is reflected in the amount of the worker’s final salary,” she said.
“If the work day starts at 10:00 AM and you arrive at the office at 12:00, you’ll be charged 10% of the final salary,” Mari told The FINANCIAL.
At Bank Republic if staff violate attendance rules, the BR administration is in the position to apply administrative penalties (e.g. e-mail notice, warning, deduction of premium, etc).
“BR constantly manages attendance problems via continuous staff attendance monitoring, reminders sent to employees etc. As a result of our efforts high corporate culture has been established.
Currently late arrival is not a serious problem at BR; However a couple of cases of late arrivals have been registered where an administrative penalty was applied - warning and/or deduction of premium,” Bokuchava said.
There are no serious problems with absenteeism at Wissol although the company has it internal rules according to which relevant steps of punishment are taken.
“There are practically no incidents of our employees being found absent. We’ve our own policy and we check the employees all the time through a table system. Our working hours are from 10 to 6 PM and on Saturday from 11 till 2. During this period each of the employees has to be in the office on time otherwise they’ll first get rebuked then more harshly rebuked and if that doesn’t work, we’ll be cutting their salaries or ultimately firing them,” said Rusudan Sanikidze, HR manager at Wissol, to The FINANCIAL.
“Despite such regulations only small remarks have been used at our company and there’s been no further complications fortunately although if it was the case then we’d use internal regulations to resolve the issue,” she said.
Absenteeism is not only a problem for Georgian companies but for UK businesses too as such cases lead to 32 billion GBP loss as evaluated by PWC.
“UK workers have an average (median) 10 days unscheduled absence from their jobs each year, around twice that of their counterparts in the US (5.5 days) and Asia-Pacific (4.5 days), but on a par with Western Europe (9.7 days). Sickness accounts for around 80% of absence, which also covers jury service and compassionate leave.
With the average UK salary around 25,000 GBP, absenteeism is costing British business approximately 32 billion GBP per annum,” says the report by PWC.
Georgian companies are also restricting internet access at work. Banks in Georgia don’t allow their employees (operators and other staff except from those that have direct online contact with customers) to access web resources. Social networks, entertainment websites, and private e-mails are inaccessible and prohibited while at work.
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