December 2008 - Northern Ireland Housing Executive

Northern Ireland Housing Executive puts steps in place to manage and improve attendance

The Northern Ireland Housing Executive, the regional housing authority for Northern Ireland is implementing a Time & Attendance / Flexitime solution to improve management of absenteeism and rollout employee self-service across the organisation.

With Headquarters in Belfast, the Housing Executive employs a wide range of professional staff in Housing Administration, Finance, Personnel and Building and Construction. Management of absenteeism is high on the priority list for the Housing Executive and responsibility for attendance monitoring, recording and manpower planning has been devolved to each line manager. "We had become aware that there were many indirect costs associated with absenteeism such as staffing, scheduling, re-training, lost productivity etc. and we wanted to find out exactly what these costs are, in each location. The extensive reporting capabilities of the system will give us access to attendance information and allow us to determine the reasons for absenteeism and its associated costs," said Peter Magill, Manpower Resource Manager at the Housing Executive.

With the emphasis now on work-life balance, the Housing Executive also wanted a system in which employees could be confident that all their flexi-hours would be captured and calculated correctly. "We chose this system because it can handle 100% of our rules and polices as well as enabling us to introduce an easy-to-use employee self- service facility," said Mr Magill. "An employee self-service system will allow staff at the Housing Executive to access and obtain non-critical information such as holidays, over-time, absences and flexi-hours without having to contact Personnel or Payroll departments which will dramatically reduce the number of routine queries", he added.

"It has been proven that companies who introduce self-service systems save time, increase efficiency, create greater employee empowerment and reduce costs", says Leontia Brophy, Senior Account Manager at Softworks.

Commenting on having won the contract, Andrew Ferguson, Managing Director of Softworks said "It is well documented that absenteeism tends to be higher in the public sector than in the private but many government departments are now taking proactive steps to manage employee time and increase efficiencies by implementing our time and attendance/flexitime solutions. We are delighted that the Housing Executive has chosen Softworks and we look forward to developing a long standing mutually beneficial business relationship."