Workforce Management Featured Article
Applying Data Analytics to Worker Absence Trends
While the holiday season may be over, North American companies are facing a slightly less pleasant season coming soon: the cold, flu and stomach bug season. Worker absences can cause missed deadlines, short-staffing, burnout of healthy employees and missed opportunities at a time when the company is hoping for a great start to the year. Absences also cost companies a lot of cold, hard cash.
According to an Aon Hewitt survey released last year, absences cost companies about eight percent of payroll on average each year. Despite this, few companies take any kind of formalized approach to identifying the causes and patterns of absences or take steps to mitigate them. Data analytics, so useful to customer support, sales, marketing and operations, are hardly ever applied to employee absences.
According to Sam Barrett writing for the Web site Employee Benefits, employers today should be looking for patterns in their data, including higher levels of absence in a particular department or spikes in certain types of absence. They can investigate instances where an employee has higher absence rates because this could be caused by illness or personal issues such as elder care, which may require support. In cases such as these, an open, supportive culture can actually help mitigate absences.
“Absence management systems can help organizations adopt a consistent approach to tackling this workplace issue, wrote Barrett. “As well as giving a view of the extent of the problem, the data from these systems can be used to shape wellbeing and absence strategies.”
Companies today should be tracking the number of days lost to absences so they can compare historical data in the future; the reasons for absence and their duration; which departments or teams are losing the most days to absences; and individual employees’ absence records. Beate O’Neil, head of wellness consulting at Punter Southall Health and Protection Consulting, told Barrett that companies should be careful, however, of creating too many categories for the reasons for absences.
“Be selective as this will make it easier to identify any spikes,” she said. “If [an employer] picks too many, [it] risks ending up with one or two of each, which is fairly meaningless.”
Existing solutions such as workforce management or performance management may be used to help keep track of the data. Help employees understand why you’re tracking and analyzing absences and don’t focus on punitive reasons for it. Offer benefits to workers that help them understand you’re trying to help – free flu shots, hand sanitizer in offices or information about available social services to help with difficult situations at home, for example – and your absence mitigation program will go much more smoothly with the cooperation of workers. You may also want to communicate that you’re looking more for broad trends rather than information about individual workers.
“One employer found that workers in one of its warehouses were experiencing a high rate of musculoskeletal absence,” wrote Barrett. “Further investigation found that a new process was causing them to twist more, resulting in back problems.”
Meta-analysis may also reveal trends such as absences related to stress and anxiety due to impossible goals or difficult work schedules, or unhealthy conditions --- for example, mold, overly dry air or allergens -- in certain offices or buildings. Remember that the goal isn’t to punish workers, but instead to identify the reasons behind absences and take steps to mitigate them, which helps the company AND its workers.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi