An Enhanced Deep Neural Network for Predicting Workplace Absenteeism

Organizations can grow, succeed, and sustain if their employees are committed. The main assets of an organization are those employees who are giving it a required number of hours per month, in other words, those employees who are punctual towards their attendance. Absenteeism from work is a multibillion-dollar problem, and it costs money and decreases revenue. At the time of hiring an employee, organizations do not have an objective mechanism to predict whether an employee will be punctual towards attendance or will be habitually absent. For some organizations, it can be very difficult to deal with those employees who are not punctual, as firing may be either not possible or it may have a huge cost to the organization. In this paper, we propose Neural Networks and Deep Learning algorithms that can predict the behavior of employees towards punctuality at workplace. The efficacy of the proposed method is tested with traditional machine learning techniques, and the results indicate 90.6% performance in Deep Neural Network as compared to 73.3% performance in a single-layer Neural Network and 82% performance in Decision Tree, SVM, and Random Forest. The proposed model will provide a useful mechanism to organizations that are interested to know the behavior of employees at the time of hiring and can reduce the cost of paying to inefficient or habitually absent employees. This paper is a first study of its kind to analyze the patterns of absenteeism in employees using deep learning algorithms and helps the organization to further improve the quality of life of employees and hence reduce absenteeism.