Data is everywhere. Organisations leverage data to help forecast for the future, see which areas can be improved, provide information on which marketing channels are working, the list goes on. But how well do you know know your Absence data, and how can you use it to better support employees?

The average employee absence in the UK is 6.9 days according to the CIPD Absence Management Survey, and the median cost is £554 per employee.

To help you leverage absence data, we have an enhanced reporting feature that provides you with all the information you need on employee absence. Our custom Report builder lets you easily report on employee absence with a simple drag and drop UI. With this you can identify and report on absence trends, allowing you to then step in and help employees when they need it. And with our People Insights feature, you can save time and unlock your people data with visual, pre-built, easy-to-use dashboards.

6 ways you can leverage absence data with edays

Being able to leverage your employee absence data is easy. There are hundreds of different and unique reports that you can build through our custom report builder, providing you with different absence data that can help improve employee wellbeing and drive your business forward.

1. Absences by employee

The very first area you will want to look at is absence data on individual employees. Maybe you have noticed someone is taking a lot of time off or that you never see them on a Friday. Whatever the reason, being able to report on individual absences will help you see if there are any trends.

With our reporting feature, you can quickly create a report on an individual employee, see if there are any patterns and either have a formal chat about their absences or step in and help them.

2. Absence by area

Similar to looking at data on individual employees, you can report on different areas within your organisation. Reports can be created by team, location, country, or office. These reports can give you clear visibility of employee absence across different areas.

For example, you may want to see how much annual leave employees have left in each team. With a report like this, you will be able to see if certain teams have employees who still have all their holidays left.

With this data, you can advise the manager to persuade employees to use some of their holidays. You don’t want to come to the end of the year and the whole sales team to be off at once. This can cause major staffing issues and really hurt your organisation.

3. Cost of absence

All organisations want to know they are getting a good return for their investment. With the knowledge of exactly what they get back for every penny spent, they can then use this data to really help grow the business.

Therefore, being able to see the cost of absence to business by team, location, office, or on an individual employee level, you can then investigate solutions on how to reduce this.

4. Absence by type

When we say absence, the majority of the time we are talking about holidays or sickness. However, these are not the only two types of absences. Working from home, doctor’s appointments, lieu day, training and personal days are just a few of the many different absence types that you can collect data on.

Again, by being able to report on all these and many other absence types, you can help really your employees and show them you care.

For example, one of the absence types you can report on is lateness. You may notice that an employee has been turning up late for work quite a lot. However, without sufficient data, just disciplining them for it could be the wrong choice. The data may show they are only ever late on a Thursday and Friday, which may be for an extremely valid reason. By being able to see this, instead of just disciplining them, you can sit down and help them.

5. Monthly, weekly, and yearly reports

To make your life even easier, which we are sure it already is if you are using edays, you can create reports that will automatically run. By selecting certain criteria you want to report on, then selecting whether you want these reports to be based on the current week, previous week, month, or year, you can simply go in and at the start of the week or month and click run.

You can create a holiday report that shows everyone who is on annual leave during a certain month, allowing you to easily plan for future projects.

6. Everything absence

Whatever data you want to get on employee absence, you can get in edays. You can create hundreds of bespoke reports from ones that show total hours of absence, if the employee is still off, percentage absent, and much more.

Being able to easily leverage absence data will not only help your organisation but more importantly, help to boost employee wellbeing and workplace culture.

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