For years, ASOS had been working hard to develop an effective and streamlined employee absence management process for its customer contact center, acknowledging that people’s availability is critical to its operation.

The existing processes were manual and time-consuming with a strong emphasis on human input. This was a result of tracking and managing absence through several spreadsheets which required manual data entry. They also had a paper-based return to work form process which required continuous follow up from their People Experience team. On top of this, many calculations e.g. pay deductions were performed manually leaving calculations open to human error.

ASOS realized that these manual processes were placing a massive administrative burden on their People Experience team and consuming a large proportion of its time. In the quest for ongoing operational improvement, ASOS chose to embrace these challenges and seek a solution that would transform the way things were being done. It also wanted to improve employee experience throughout the process.

To face these challenges head-on, ASOS decided to work with edays on a project to revolutionize their absence management processes. Three main project drivers were identified.

The first driver was to create a self-service absence platform for their workforce that would empower their employees to take ownership of their absence records and increase visibility for managers.

The second was to move away from relying on manual methods and start automating as much of their absence process as possible. This would remove the very complex amalgamation of systems, processes, and spreadsheets that were in place at the time.

The third driver was to simplify reporting to payroll and speed up return to work processing.

Since the edays system has been implemented, ASOS has had fantastic feedback from its workforce. Employees are now empowered with self-service tools that allow them to quickly and easily manage what used to be very manual and time-consuming processes.

The People Experience team is now able to process employees returning to work much faster, with the entire process for collecting return to work information now being online. Previously there were hundreds of return to work forms waiting to be processed, now, on average there are just ten! All absence reports are now available at the click of a button and it’s much easier to manage calculations e.g. pay deductions, in a more automated manner.

The People Experience team has massively benefitted – with the time taken to process an end-to-end absence going from 75 minutes to just FIVE minutes. Best of all, there is no need for the team to come in on weekends as they were previously just to manage the backlog! They can also now report on company-wide absence at the click of a button, with dynamically filtered reports allowing them to interrogate absence data by reason, by each team, and by durations/dates, etc.

The project has been a huge success for ASOS. The innovative edays absence management platform sits at the heart of a very streamlined ecosystem managed expertly by their talented People Experience team.

The edays platform is now being rolled out to a further 2000 employees and the project is constantly evolving for ASOS as they look to integrate edays with its time and attendance, payroll, and workday systems. Fully embedding the edays solution into their HR ecosystem.

ASOS is also delivering initiatives to further improve employee wellbeing and is integrating edays with its online virtual GP solution. ASOS is on a fast track to having one of the most innovative and forward-thinking absence management solutions in the world.