Rome’s police pull mass sickies into the New Year
Over 750 of the 1,000 police officers scheduled to work New Years Eve in Rome reported an absence, leaving the city full of party-goers without any police supervision.
Fortunately, Rome’s mayor officials reported that, despite some 600,000 people celebrating in the city of Rome on New Year’s Eve, the celebrations went along safely and without problems.
La Repubblica reports that, although 1,000 police officers were scheduled to supervise the partying in Rome, a staggering 83.5% were absent. That’s an absence level no business should be proud of! In fact, it’s one of the highest absence levels in a single day we’ve ever heard of, besides those in which protests are carried out of course.
The reasons for absence, however, do not seem to be clear cut cases of irresponsible policemen looking to get off work to go out on a bender. There were actually political influences behind the absenteeism as Rome’s police have been quarreling with the city’s government for some months regarding pay and new working practices. Nonetheless, such a high level of absenteeism among a professional public service on such a high profile night of the year does not seem to be the best method to their message across to the government, nor the local people. In light of this, Italian officials have been outraged and are seeking to conduct disciplinary action on the offenders. To make this fair they’d have to investigate each case very carefully and also the individual policeman’s previous absence record, which Honeydew agrees is good practice.
Hopefully Italian officials are using a modern absence management system so they can deal with this absence abuse in a professional and data-driven manner.
Such high levels of unplanned absence can have drastic effects on any business. Not only would it result in mass sick pay costs but there would be a huge decrease in productivity and loss in revenue as a result. In fact, an absence level of 83.5% could shut down some companies for a day at least.
If you’d like advice on how to keep you absence levels down to manageable and productive percentages, please get in touch.
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