Harrods Aviation is the leading London-based business aviation service provider, who offer high quality FBO services at London Luton and Stansted airports. With nearly 300 staff across their ground and office teams, they needed a solution that would be flexible enough to handle their diverse requirements, and streamlined enough to help them achieve their paperless goal.

Previously dealing with antiquated systems and lots of paper forms, they realised they needed something more modern and less prone to human error, in order to help them manage their absence, leave, overtime and TOIL more effectively.

The Harrods Aviation team are a mix of office-based 9-5 workers (sales, purchasing, marketing, IT), and shift workers (ground staff, operations, maintenance, safety and facilities), working from multiple different locations. The de-centralised nature of the industry they’re in, meant that the paper forms and spreadsheets they were previously using to track absence and leave left a lot of gaps for human error, and for things to be missed.

They needed to gain better visibility, and real time data, in order to better manage their sickness absences and holidays, and to ease the admin burden on their line managers and HR team. This, paired with their goal as a business to go completely paperless across the company, meant that Harrods Aviation began to look for an absence management system.

“We knew that we were slightly behind the times on implementing a system like this, and the need to leave the paper forms behind pushed us to finally start looking for a system that would suit us. But we were concerned about the culture shock for our staff.

“We’ve got a really diverse workforce so while the younger team members were probably crying out for us to leave the paper system behind, we were a little apprehensive about rolling something out across the board. Especially since some of our employees don’t even have mobile phones – we knew that moving to something cloud-based was going to be a big change.”

Vanessa Garrod, HR Manager at Harrods Aviation

Harrods Aviation needed a system that could keep up with their ever-evolving needs. It needed to be centralised, agile, and able to help them minimise the risk of human error when inputting requests and overtime hours.

Not only is the edays system uncomplicated and easy-to-use, but our unique features can help businesses like Harrods Aviation where they need to be able to streamline some specific processes.

The ability to store their documents and forms directly in the system helped to keep everything in one accessible place, while the delegate access means that if managers are on leave, the requests can automatically be redistributed to someone else for approval, allowing for a slick employee experience across a large team.

Harrods Aviation also use the Bradford factor to monitor staff sickness levels. With the scores built directly into the edays system, they have also enabled automatic triggers so that when people hit certain scores, managers are prompted to schedule wellbeing calls, fill out forms or take any other appropriate next step to try and improve sickness rates.

“As an introduction to a company that hasn’t used this kind of software before, our experience has been a really good one. The flexibility is great – we’ve set up various custom absence types in the system, which has really helped us to reduce admin time spent on requests. For example, we’ve got a medical appointment one and that is limited to four hours. So if someone tries to put that in for a day, it won’t allow them to do it. It’s such a time-saver.”

Vanessa Garrod, HR Manager at Harrods Aviation

Having implemented edays in February 2022, Harrods Aviation have benefitted from more visibility over absence and leave, the ability to look at trends and patterns, and an improved employee experience.

“To get everyone on board with a new system is often hard, but everyone I’ve spoken to seems to really enjoy using it. It’s straightforward, it’s not complicated, it’s really clear; you can see your leave, entitlement, working pattern. And I think that’s the key thing when you’re introducing this kind of system to people.

“We’re looking forward to rolling out the edays mobile app soon, as that kind of thing will work well for us. With most of our team being shift workers, being able to check overtime and holidays and submit things when they’re not on shift, that will be really good for us.”

Vanessa Garrod, HR Manager at Harrods Aviation