Case Study: House of IT

House of IT is an Australian BPO with clients in Australia, Europe and the USA. Their services include outsourcing of data entry, Software Development, IT Support and Managed Services.

Background

House of IT is an Australian BPO with clients in Australia, Europe and the USA. Their services include outsourcing of data entry, Software Development, IT Support and Managed Services. In addition to their headquarters in Camberwell, Australia, they maintain offices in the Philippines, where they employ local staff to help them deliver their IT services.

Many BPOs struggle with high rates of employee absenteeism. In addition, employees often don’t send advance notification if they will be late or absent. To solve this problem, House of IT decided to use engageSPARK to manage their employee attendance.

They set up an attendance hotline on the engageSPARK platform that their employees can call or text to (for free) to report that they’ll be late or absent, reducing excuses like “no load”, “no airtime”, or “no internet”.  Because of this, managers and HR get notified instantly of an employee’s absence or lateness.

Results

House of IT set up three attendance hotlines, one for each of the major carriers in the Philippines (Globe, Smart, and Sun). They then set up automated IVR (Interactive Voice Response) engagements that are triggered by an employee calling or texting to the attendance hotline number. The employee then receives an automated phone call asking them several key questions, including whether they will be late or absent, and what their reason is.

The system sends an automatic SMS text message to the department head to notify them instantly of staff absences or late arrivals. The department head then notifies HR, so they can find a replacement, or adjust the team tasks accordingly.

As a result of implementing this attendance hotline, House of IT was able to achieve a much greater transparency in managing employee attendance. Employees had previously used various excuses such as “no load/no airtime” or “no internet” to explain why they didn’t notify the company of their absence. These excuses are now no longer valid, since they can text/call the hotline 24/7 for free. House of IT added the hotline number to the back of all employee access badges, to make sure every employee has the number.

Since the attendance hotline was set up, House of IT has seen improvements in attendance rates, because employees are now more aware that their attendance is closely tracked by the management, and they know that their excuses are no longer valid. In addition, the engageSPARK platform allows all attendance records to be tracked in one centralized location, making it easier for HR to monitor attendance rates and to respond to absences immediately.

Conclusion

The attendance hotline has enabled House of IT to improve their employee attendance management dramatically, by making employee attendance behavior much more transparent. HR can closely monitor attendance rates in real time, and respond rapidly whenever there is a staff shortage. As many of their projects are time sensitive, this provides a critical advantage to the company.

Also, since all employee responses are recorded and stored in one centralized location on the engageSPARK platform, standardized tracking and reporting is now possible. Managers can easily check historical records from each employee, and act accordingly.

Finally, implementation of this system has had the beneficial side effect of improving attendance rates, since employees are now much more aware of how the company tracks and responds to their attendance.