Navigating Absconding vs. Termination: When to Act and How It Affects Attrition Rates

Hi Anjana,

Typically, any cessation of services of an employee needs to ensure three basic tenets that law generally preaches:

- Genuineness for the action
- Adequacy, signifying the need for such action
- Principles of natural justice being followed

Your understanding of the two terminologies is correct. Law attempts to advocate that prior to terminal action even for an absconding case, an employee (especially a "workman" as defined in various labor enactments) needs to be given sufficient time for meeting any hardships or for responding given a probable element of uncertainty explaining his absence. There have been several cases where an absconding employee has been terminated by the management but later reinstated by appropriate labor authorities.

Given the situation, it is prudent to send the employee some letters by registered AD/post to his officially recorded address and give him fair opportunity and time (in the eyes of the law) before ruling his absconding. He needs to be given an opportunity and adequate time to respond to make the case stronger. Please note that there is no specific timeframe after which he can be declared absconding (unless otherwise specified in Company guidelines or standing orders being followed). Very generally, a month or two (or longer) may just suffice depending on the circumstances of the case (in some cases reported, even a year was insufficient).

Please remember to carefully, legally word the letters sent to him such as "provide genuine and adequate reasons for your absence without authorization" and "the management may be constrained to take appropriate disciplinary action against you including termination of employment should you not choose to respond and/or report to duty within _(time limit)_".

As regards your query on attrition, a general norm needs to be adopted, meaning that you may consider a cut-off for attrition on a monthly basis or even a fortnightly basis. Monthly is better for the purpose of ease in calculating and for empirical data later. That means, you will need to consider an employee on rolls during a month if he has served, say, up to the 15th of that month, or, otherwise. By this method, this employee joining and leaving within 7-10 days will not be considered in the overall annual percentile calculations (i.e. negligible impact). However, by pure logic, since he has joined and has been accounted for in the "headcount" of your Company, logically, he must be shown in the attrition list as well.

Hope this clarifies your queries.

Rahul Kumar

Dear All,

I have a query with reference to an employee who is absconding versus one who is to be terminated. I do understand the basic difference, where the terminated employee is removed from the company due to non-performance or other criteria. The absconding employee is one who has not reported to work over a period of time.

My query here is up to how many days do we wait before issuing letters to the absconding employee and when do we send the final termination letter. There sometimes seems to be a very thin line of difference between the two cases, as ultimately a termination letter is also sent out to the absconding employee.

My next related query is as to how attrition % is calculated.
Also, are the terminated, absconding employees who join and leave within 7-10 days or the first month also calculated towards the attrition%.

Thanks,

Anjana Samuel