Considering life after Covid 19 – thinking about Data

I’m sure many of us have been busily creating new fields and data items in our HR and payroll systems to cope with the new situation we all find ourselves in at the moment. In all this madness we must remember that we will come out the other side and we will be asked for information! This might be internally from our stakeholders or externally from government departments like the Office for National Statistics. Inevitably, even ‘on the fly’, our senior leadership may want to know the exact position of the workforce – such as how many people are working, isolated or ill.

HR data reporting requests after COVID-19

During this time, you need to update your sickness reasons and other fields. Inevitably, you will be asked to show how many members of staff you have had to pay due to COVID-19, but also learning lessons from the past, the government will be interested to know how many people and businesses have actually been affected by this is as a whole, not just the sick! Some possible reporting requests might be:

• How many people are absent due to having symptoms?
• How many people have been paid SSP from day 1 and how much did that cost – assuming we will be able to reclaim this.
• How many are absent due to being hospitalised with confirmed Covid-19?
• How many are self-isolating due to underlying health reasons?
• How many are self-isolating due to a household member having symptoms
• How many people are working from home or unable to work from home?
• How many employees have been furloughed?
• What are the average earnings of those on furlough (to work out the 80% of their earnings)?
• How many people on furlough earn more than £3,125?

Whilst working from home isn’t a sickness reason, the government are likely to want to understand, IF this scenario should ever occur again, how much of us could work from home and this could change the face of the world going forward. This could also be helpful to businesses generally when it comes to their own continuity plans.

There is one other thing to consider as we think of all those keyworkers in payroll at the moment. Has your software provider updated your statutory schemes for SSP? If not, consider the impact of ‘just making a manual adjustment’. This might seem easy now but short term thinking often leads to long term pain and rework – especially as the adjustment may fall over year-end, given where we currently are in the year!

For help and support with all things payroll, and information on our payroll services, please feel free to get in touch.

Written by Emma Perris, one of our lead consultants and payroll specialist at Phase 3.