Wellbeing and retention | Businesses failing to support employees as 84% aren't reporting on absences

Alongside failures to monitor absenteeism, HR teams are placing a high reliance on inaccurate people data to inform key business decisions, new MHR research finds.

A staggering 84% of UK businesses do not report on employee absences, despite almost half (44%) looking into retention and a third (30%) reporting on projected overhead charges, a new survey by MHR International, the HR, payroll, finance, learning and expert, finds. This means a significant majority of organisations are missing out on crucial insights that could directly impact retention rates and overheads, along with other financial and productivity levels, and employee wellbeing.

According to the survey of 250 HR managers and directors in the UK and Ireland, not only are businesses failing to monitor absences, but they are also struggling with the reliability of the people data they do collect. In fact, 37% of HR departments surveyed admit they are facing challenges in accurately reporting on employee data due to not having a single source of truth.

This is down to issues with the data itself, as 44% are struggling with duplicates, whilst 41% say their data is outdated, and 40% are missing information completely resulting in ill-informed business decisions being made. In addition, almost a third (32%) of businesses revealed they have no historical data to make comparisons, which makes it nearly impossible to identify patterns and trends.