There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing

If you live in the UK, there’s a good chance you’re one of Virgin Media’s 16m broadband users. Or one of their four million mobile phone users. They cover the UK and Ireland, employing 14,000 people to keep everything running smoothly.

The biggest challenges of any business, especially one as big as this, is to understand:

• How your employees feel about working for you?
• Do your teams have everything they need to be productive?

That’s why Virgin Media choose to work with Qlearsite. At the time, they were experiencing high absence and attrition rates. After analysing all their employee data, they noticed quite high rates of absenteeism and attrition among sales staff in the North East of England.

• What’s driving attrition and absence, and what you can do to improve it?

That’s why Virgin Media choose to work with Qlearsite. At the time, they were experiencing high absence and attrition rates. After analysing all their employee data, they noticed quite high rates of absenteeism and attrition among sales staff in the North East of England.

“There are two benefits from doing this type of work. Efficiency and cost-saving, plus the people who work in the company getting the best working environment and culture.“

— Aggninder Dhillon | Head of People Transformation

Using our advance text analytics, they were able to understand what this group of employees were saying in their free text survey responses. Virgin Media looked into this and found that these sales staff were working outdoors in various locations. The weather wasn’t great, and the uniforms they had simply weren’t good enough to keep them warm and dry.

By upgrading their uniforms, this was an easy fix that made the staff happy and let them get on with their jobs without worrying about being uncomfortable or becoming ill.

With our tools, they could look at problem areas in any level of detail, whether it was specific departments, locations, demographics, etc. From there they could quickly identify fixes, based on data and employee feedback, even in such a large business as Virgin Media.

“The outputs from the Qlearsite technology help us make better decisions. In the people team, that’s really important because we want to get it right first time.“

— Aggninder Dhillon | Head of People Transformation

The result was drastically reduced absenteeism, happier staff, and better productivity. By halving the attrition rate for their sales teams in the North East of England, the estimated annual saving in attrition costs alone was £1m.

Qlearsite’s platform has helped Virgin Media make better people decisions. In the words of Aggninder Dhillon, Head of People Transformation, “We’re now able to run what we call Opportunity Finder projects – testing hypotheses by establishing hard causal relationships between datasets, which enables HR to devise much more targeted interventions.”

“In just one of these, we found above-median sickness absence and, by creating sickness absence champions, we literally halved that rate of attrition – it was a cost-saving of £1 million.“

— Aggninder Dhillon | Head of People Transformation