Engineer Sharon Chen is the founder, owner, and president of Storm Bay Injection Moulding, a large and successful company that produces injection-moulded plastic parts, predominantly for automotive and marine applications. A couple of years ago, Sharon had decided to reorganize Storm Bay into a number of stable self-managed teams. For the most part, the introduction of teams had proven very successful, reducing supervision costs, increasing productivity, and lowering labour turnover. However, there was one problem that the conversion to teams had not solved—elevated absenteeism among the workforce. In fact, the data suggested that a slight increase in absence had accompanied the introduction of teams, and Sharon suspected some collusion among team members to “share out” sick days while not damaging productivity too much. In consultation with her manager of HR, Sharon decided to implement an attendance bonus. Although attendance bonuses are not uncommon, they are usually based strictly on individual behaviour:

Those employees who don’t use sick days receive some extra compensation. However, given that Storm Bay was organized into self managed teams, Sharon chose a team-based attendance bonus in which employees could only achieve the maximum 6 percent bonus if their teammates also exhibited excellent attendance.

Is attendance management something that teams should be involved in, or is this one of those things that should be handled between HR and individual employees?