Hologic: Absence innovation for essential workers

We’ve recently worked with an innovative medical technology company, whose purpose is to enable healthier lives everywhere, every day. The organization discovers and develops products and services that benefit all. Our lead HR contact for EMEA has been using the edays system for nearly two years. However, in the past twelve months, the impact edays has had on her day-to-day tasks has been especially impressive. 

Our contact explained that, throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, edays has been utilized to great effect, due to its ability to create multiple absence categorizations. While many staff was able to continue their jobs from home over the last year, a proportion of staff in the manufacturing part of the business still needed to access sites to do their jobs. The decision was made early on to work with staff on a 1-2-1 basis if they needed to isolate and ensure this did not affect the sickness absence rates. However, a challenge that came with this decision was ensuring that HR could keep track of who was isolating and for how long.

The last 12 months have seen the EMEA team grow, and it was important to have immediate data to understand which teams were in, which were not, and whether anyone had isolated themselves after being in contact with other members of staff. They also needed a system to understand which employees had outstanding holiday allowance across a variety of locations with differing local laws and legislations. Understanding whether any had accrued annual leave was also important so that they could monitor which teams were taking enough time to rest from the increase in workload and put their wellbeing first.

The organization’s HR department utilized edays and its ability to add absence categories so that members of staff could simply log in to the platform to log periods of medical isolation. From this, the team was able to pull detailed reports that indicated who was off, why, and for how long. By being able to manage the process and having a clear indication of who had to isolate, The organization was able to protect its workforce and its employee’s wellbeing.

Recent employee growth could have been tricky to manage during the pandemic, but daily reporting across all sites meant that HR had visibility of the number of employees on-site vs. those at home, which also helped HR in highlighting which employees had holidays left to take.

With different European countries offering staff different holiday allowances, The organization also found the edays system offered them a far more streamlined way of managing holidays on an international scale. An administrator was able to set up each country based on allowance, which made it possible for every member of the HR team (who does not know each country’s specific allowances) to manage absence effectively across EMEA. As the pandemic has affected lockdowns and legislation differently all over the world the ability to be country-specific has been incredibly helpful.

Overall, the organization has found that staff has become more accountable for their own health. The decision by the company to not have periods of isolation affect absence rates has helped to maintain a healthy workforce. This has been noticed in staff’s willingness to take time off when they have felt burnout in the last year. Honesty with managers is encouraged and adds to the creation of a healthy absence culture. 

edays has also enabled the HR team to adapt their ‘return to work’ interviews too. Being able to recognize trends in employee absences and note whether they were recorded correctly under the appropriate type of absence is important for HR teams to get to the bottom of any potential wellbeing issues. An example of this was when the company changed shift patterns for the entire business. The HR team was able to monitor the success of these changes whilst using edays to see if there were peaks and/or troughs of employee absence.

Overall, in using the edays system, the HR team has been able to accurately track the cost of absence across the pandemic. By creating absence types in the system, the HR department can determine the average cost of isolation per month. From a business perspective, this has been incredibly useful: from an HR perspective, this data can be further analysed to understand whether productivity was impacted significantly and how this would further impact business costs.