Absenteeism of Operators: A Statistical Study with Managerial Applications

Absenteeism of Operators: A Statistical Study with Managerial Applications By Y. VARDI (Manuscript received July 3, 1980) The need to assess attendance behavior often arises, at the linemanagement level, when an employee is considered for a transfer or a promotion. A sound assessment should, of course, take into account the statistical behavior and distributional properties of absenteeism. The first part of this paper is a detailed statistical analysis of attendance records of a sample of 112 telephone operators. We use exploratory and confirmatory statistical techniques to suggest possible theoretical models that can parsimoniously describe the behavior of the variables of interest. Methodological difficulties that often arise in cross-sectional studies and are caused by biased sampling are pointed out and treated. We explore the relation between age and attendance; in particular it is evident that (for this data set) the frequency of "incidental" absences tends to decrease with age, and that the duration of "disability" absences tends to increase with age. In the second part of the paper we suggest an attendance evaluation method based on the statistical analysis of the first part. The method is designed to reflect the current-year attendance as well as a longerrun attendance behavior, interpreted as a personal characteristic, and its properties are demonstrated via examples.