Unifying absence & leave with a powerful workforce management solution
Managing workforce absence, leave, scheduling and attendance can be challenging without a workforce management solution in place – especially for large, multi-site organisations with several locations and different employment contracts that vary across departments.
Organisations with multiple locations often fall foul to the same problem. Rather than acting as one, different locations operate in silo, using different software tools, platforms or manual methods to take care of day to day admin and HR tasks.
Managing teams’ absence and leave is a huge challenge for an organisation to oversee if individual departments or locations are operating as separate functions with disjointed processes, making absence visibility and reporting across the business almost impossible.
Workforce management solutions for enterprise organisations
One large enterprise company that has solved this problem with help from edays workforce management software is Sytner Mercedes-Benz.
As the UK’s leading retailer of prestige cars and the largest overall automotive retailer Europe, Sytner’s operation is made up of around 2,500 employees across 17 different sites.
When it came to managing absence and leave, Sytner were struggling with their sites’ disjointed approaches. Some of their locations were using very basic software systems to manage sickness and holiday bookings, while others were simply using paper or spreadsheets. That made company-wide visibility over absence and leave very difficult, as well as near impossible to report on absence and leave using the unreliable and fragmented data that was available.
On top of that, understanding absence rates and how they varied from site to site was incredibly problematic. So if a particular department or location was struggling with higher than usual absence, it could so easily go unnoticed. Given that Sytner’s workforce is made up of a mix of contract types, the people team also struggled to have sight over how much remaining entitlement employees had, increasing the chances that too many people were taking time off during peak seasons, over summer, or around the festive period – leading to understaffing issues.
Unifying absence and leave processes
With edays, Sytner’s absence management was quickly transformed. With one centralised system, all absence and leave bookings could be recorded in one place – ensuring all teams had smooth processes across each of the company’s sites.
Group calendars, return-to-work workflows, entitlement pots, public holidays, employee groups templates and many more features enabled everything to be stored in one place, for people managers and HR to view and manage easily.
While Sytner considered a number of software providers, edays’ ability to be able to handle complexity – such as employees from different sites or on different contracts with different leave entitlements – meant that we were able to meet all of the organisation’s requirements.
The impact
After supporting them through a smooth implementation and rollout, the results have completely changed the way the people team at Sytner are able to view, understand, and manage absence and leave patterns within their workforce.
On a strategic level, Sytner are now in a position to gain valuable insights into from their absence data, and have been able to better manage employee availability with customer demand.
All types of leave, from holidays and maternity leave, to public holidays and bereavement leave is now accounted for correctly.
Access to accurate and reliable absence data has also given the HR team much more confidence, too, in being able to see who’s working and when, and identify any potential issues that may be causing higher absences.
For employees, edays has allowed them to gain more control over managing their annual leave, with a lot more flexibility. Group calendars means colleagues can see eachother’s planned leave, and ensure there are no clashes with too many people off at the same time. A manager’s ability to quickly approve or deny an annual leave requests means no more paper forms, spreadsheets, or email chains waiting to be answered and closed off.
