Dive Brief:
- Faced with a massive infrastructure project, Virgin Atlantic turned to analytics to help reduce absenteeism, according to an article at Diginomica.com.
- Analytics today is an indispensable HR tool, becoming one of the company's five pillars of HR to drive change, even though the People Insight (analytics) team was only set up a year ago. Out of the 100-member HR team serving Virgin’s 13,800 employees, just three are in the "People Insight" analytics team.
- Through a combination of tightening up the policy, educating line managers and introducing sickness champions, absence due to sickness rates fell. In some contact centers there was a dramatic reduction in absence rates from 9% to 4%, resulting in overall savings of about £750,000, or $1,150,252.50 according to the article.
Dive Insight:
"We identified which contact centers had particularly high absence rates and we went into the business and showed them the data," Aggy Dhillon, head of People Insight at Virgin Media, told Diginomica. "There was a feeling with contact centers that they didn’t have sickness or absence problems, so we did a lot of work around really validating that data for them."
What the analytics team also uncovered was a lack of knowledge about absence policies at various contact centers, and that Virgin’s policy was also more lenient than the industry standard. "The reason we were successful was we had a load of untapped data sources, we had a growing reason for doing the project and when the leadership team saw the data, they believed it," Dhillon said.
