Tribunal claims are at their highest level in years. Absence is at a 15-year high. Many HR leaders report they are close to burnout. And the Employment Rights Act changes have not yet fully landed.
The common response to these pressures is to look for a better system, invest in a new wellness initiative, or update policy. Yet organisations making these investments continue to see the same outcomes: rising escalations, slow-moving cases, and absence that doesn’t come down.
The reason is straightforward. Most HRIS and T&A systems, including their absence and case management modules, are built to record status: who is off, for how long, under which code, how many cases are open, and how long they take to close. None of this shows whether the manager responsible for a case followed the agreed policy, had the conversation that was needed, or let it quietly slide. Policy alone makes little difference if it isn’t applied consistently, and most systems have no way of showing whether it is.
This is why the underlying problem is one of leadership as much as it is one of data. Leadership is not only missing the information it needs, it is often not asking enough questions of the information it already has. This was underlined recently by the government-commissioned Keep Britain Working review, which reached a similar conclusion: better data is central to improving workplace health outcomes.
Reducing tribunal risk, case loads and absence starts with visibility of manager behaviour, not just attendance records, and requires leadership prepared to engage with that data and act on it once they have it.
