The Turnover Hiding in the Attendance Policy
When manufacturers talk about retention, the conversation almost always centers on the employees who choose to leave. Wages, culture, the quality of frontline leadership. These are real drivers and they deserve the attention they get. But they are also slow-moving and mostly out of direct control. Hourly wages are typically standardized by job, skill level or shift, and plant HR leaders rarely have the authority to adjust them.
Culture and supervisor development take sustained investment over years, not quarters. The split between voluntary and involuntary turnover is that nearly every retention effort targets the first kind, which is part of why they stall.
Involuntary turnover tells a different story. In many plants, a meaningful share of terminations trace back to attendance. Points accumulate, an employee crosses the disciplinary threshold, and the policy runs its course. On paper, the system worked as designed. But it raises a question worth sitting with.
How many of those employees actually knew where they stood before the final occurrence?
In practice, often very few. An employee deciding whether to call off usually has no visibility into their current point total, how the absence will be classified or whether this one puts them at the edge of termination. The absence gets reported to a supervisor, a voicemail box or an automated line that logs the call and offers nothing in return. Weeks later, that same employee sits in a termination meeting, genuinely surprised by a number they never saw coming.
None of this is an argument for discouraging legitimate absences or pressuring sick employees to work. People get sick, and sound policies account for that. It is an argument for transparency at the moment it matters. An employee who understands they are one occurrence from losing their job tends to make a different decision than one who is guessing, and a policy buried in a handbook rarely changes behavior the way clear information at the point of the call-off can.
The results can be striking. At Martinrea's North Vernon plant, absenteeism fell from 21 percent to 9 percent after the company made attendance standing and consequences visible to employees, and no-call no-shows dropped by half within 45 days.
“We've seen a 50 percent reduction in no-call no-shows,” said Martinrea's HR Manager Shanna Wilson. “We've seen a huge reduction in turnover because of that.”
Transparency also addresses a quieter problem: inconsistent enforcement. When staffing is tight, plants often hesitate to terminate everyone who crosses the threshold. Some employees stay on while others are let go under the same policy, supervisors apply the rules differently across shifts and employees begin to see favoritism where leaders see judgment calls. A shared record provides a common foundation and makes consistent enforcement easier to defend.
No HR team can resolve wages, culture and leadership on a short timeline. But removing the ambiguity around attendance is fixable now. When employees understand the policy, know their standing, and see what the next occurrence means before it happens, fewer preventable problems become terminations. That is a gain for the operation, and for the people whose livelihoods depend on getting it right.
About the Author
Sheila Stafford is CEO and co-founder of TeamSense, working directly with manufacturers on attendance and communication challenges. She may be reached at sheila@teamsense.com.
TeamSense is an MMA Premium Associate Member and has been an MMA member company since April 2026. Visit online: www.teamsense.com.
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