T&T ranks fifth among countries in the world with the highest rates of workplace absenteeism. This was one of the facts coming out of the first day of the Absenteeism Conference hosted by the Employers Solutions Centre Ltd (ESCL) at the Hilton Trinidad and Conference Centre in Port-of-Spain yesterday.
World Trade Organisation chair at UWI Dr Keith Nurse, who gave that information in his presentation at the conference, said culture is to blame for the country’s absenteeism problem.
Concern about the problem was also expressed by ESCL chairman Glenn Maharaj who described absenteeism as one of the most common workplace issues in the country.
“We have inadequate staffing to fill high level positions across the entire country, across all industries. This continues to be a major challenge for the private sector, especially in the manufacturing and retail industries,” he said.
Maharaj called on Labour Minister Jennifer Baptiste-Primus to partner with business to find solutions to the problem
“One of the solutions would be in finding the right balance of usage of resources between the private sector and the social programme,” he said.
He said surveys conducted by the Employers Consultative Association (ECA) showed that traditional approaches to dealing with absenteeism are “relatively ineffective.”
Dr Nurse noted, however, that the average T&T worker was tech savvy, so there was no need to be physically at work.
“It is not really that your workers show up to work that really matters anymore. Are they serving your clients? They could be doing that from home, their car, on their smart devices, wherever they are located. Presence at work as your indication of success—I suspect that you are looking at an old indicator,” he said.
Dr Nurse added: “Having them at the workplace you may not achieve the results and secondly, the time it takes to get to work they are tired because of traffic which they sit in for two to three hours per day.”