predicting employee burnout

Figures of recent studies in Belgium show that burnout represents a huge potential cost to organizations and a huge personal risk for employees.(Calculated on capacity of the main room at DIS2017)

In this presentation we’ll cover the 4 main reasons for the success of the project

This looks cheasy, but there is much more to cracking the case than having a superhero data scientist. We had an excellent team of sponsors, domain experts, data experts, project managers and a data scientist

Since burnout is not registered in the data (privacy reasons), we predicted a proxy: unplanned absenteeism

Within the whole team, we created a huge number of ideas for potential predictors. We were later able to turn 85% of ideas into data.

We benchmarked several algorithms, some more complex than others, but we always focused on presenting our results in a way that business experts understood technical experts and vice versa

For this, we used for example predictor insights graphs (following slides)

69% of employees had 0 to 4 days of absenteeism in the last year

Starting to explain predictor insights graphs

Those employees who were absent 0 – 4 days in the previous year, were on average absent for 1.4 day during the next quarter

As expected, previous absenteeism is a good predictor of future absenteeism

We also add the overall average number of days of absenteeism during next quarter

Low evaluation scores are related to higher future absenteeism

People who feel they have a backup tend to be less absent

The project was executed in the environment of SD Worx, so the scoring and monitoring of this model can be performed without external intervention

We started the project with a non-technical training for the whole team about projects in predictive analytics and ended the project with a technical training for data scientists – how they can perform similar exercises autonomously

We noticed there is a lot of variation in individual absenteeism, but our prediction works very well when aggregated

SD Worx is able to roll this out towards their current clients without external help