FT
July 15, 2013 4:19 pm
By Andrew Hill
Managers should
develop ways to predict when, why and ideally where staff are most engaged
It’s hard to hide from
big data. After submitting its staff records for independent analysis, one
retailer discovered it was paying more than 150 employees who had called in
sick years earlier – and simply disappeared from the workplace. The human
resources managers responsible were so terrified of the potential backlash if
they revealed the figures to their chief executive, they decided to keep the
job of handling absences in-house.
They should have gone
ahead and outsourced the task. The long-term benefits of knowing where your
staff are – and more important, why they aren’t where they should be – far
outweigh any short-term pain. The benefits should also override employees’
natural suspicions that the company is bringing in Big Brother to vet their
sick-notes.
Absence management
companies have been around since the 1990s. But they have grown from a small
group of consultants, trading anecdote and hearsay, into analytical hubs
aggregating information to prove or disprove HR’s suppositions. After a sunny
weekend of barbecues and parties, for instance, you might assume unscheduled
absences from the office would increase. Data for the UK generally do show an
upward spike in “sickies” on Mondays, according to David Hope, chief executive
of FirstCare, a London-based absence management
company. But small heatwaves don’t trigger more unauthorised days off than
normal, because the impact of cold and flu viruses diminishes during the
summer.
Other revelations can
be specific to individual staff – such as the man who claimed leave to grieve
for a dog that call-centre records showed he had already buried the previous
year – or more general. In Scotland, an apparently random series of peaks in
staff absence was explained only when they were correlated with the
professional football fixture list: Scottish sick days, it turned out,
coincided with the aftermath of matches between arch-rivals.
Absence management
companies operate call centres staffed by nurses and other experts on behalf of
large employers. Employees call the centre rather than their team leader,
explain why they’re off work and receive health advice. Their manager is
automatically notified.
It’s all too easy to
dismiss this as a system for snooping on potential malingerers. If it’s seen
that way, it “creates all sorts of toxic effects and [the system] becomes
useless because people are gaming it”, says Julian Thompson of the RSA, a
think-tank. He is co-author of a new report with Vodafone that predicts
UK organisations could benefit from significant cost savings and output gains
by instituting better and more flexible working practices.
Reducing unjustified
absence is obviously one aim. But properly used, such a service can be far more
valuable. It removes the risk that soft-touch team leaders will grant extra
days off, or that martinets will force their underlings back to the production
line when still ill. It ensures proper records are kept – useful in case of
dispute or dismissal. It also nudges companies to improve management practice.
When the staff member comes back to work, the call-centre prompts the manager
to conduct a formal interview. This is the sort of workplace conversation that
too often is dropped in favour of a passing remark – “Better? Let’s get on,
then” – but can in fact uncover deeper-seated physical or mental health issues.
The data can be
equally powerful. For example, FirstCare spotted that bus drivers with shifts
starting midway through the day complained of back problems more often than
those who drove the first shift. By extending the handover time between drivers
so the incoming crew could adjust their seats properly, the bus operator
alleviated the problem.
In the right hands,
data should be a tool to make workers’ presence more productive. Clever
managers should now develop ways to predict not just when and why employees
disengage, but also when, why and ideally where they are most engaged
with the task in hand.
HR managers often
complain they are trapped by the board’s perception that they are mere payroll
and personnel monkeys. Well, here’s a strategic role for them: building an
empirically sound understanding of how people work best. Then it would be
possible to use data not only to reduce unscheduled absences, but also to
ensure that when staff are there, they really do turn up.
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