Attendance versus Performance?

Attendance is when you make sure your employees attend the work on time and leave on time.

Performance is the quality of job itself. How they do the tasks? What feedback we get from customers? What impact does the employees’ performance create?

Some might confuse between attendance and performance. Many superiors believe if the workers attend work on time, their work performance is excellent or good.

However, this is not necessarily the case all the time. Attendance and performance can be two misunderstood things.

Many workers attend to their duties but the performance is terribly weak. On the other hand, many employees perform best regardless of attending their offices or not.

Attending work and sitting in your office doesn’t necessarily mean you are doing the job.

The helicopter micro-managing adds a lot of pressure to attendance in such a context. You find managers say: I prefer to see workers working in front of me. Or: The worker didn’t come. The attendance is poor. Then it means the job is poor. Or: we have to follow the attendance rules and process. Everyone must adhere to the same.

So the next time you obsess about your workers’ attendance, ask yourself: Does this affect their job performance? What is the actual performance of the staff? Does attendance contribute directly to their job performance? Or there are other job performance elements we are missing?