Why the DSN holds a wealth of information for businesses
What the experts say
Interview with Yves HERAULT
In charge of Data Governance and Technical Operations, AXA Santé & Collectives
Why the DSN holds a wealth of information for businesses
February 18, 2021
The DSN (for Déclaration Sociale Nominative) is not just an additional reporting obligation. In fact, the electronic filing contains a wealth of precious information that companies can use to enrich and enhance their human resources policies.
AXA has chosen to deliver tailored support to companies with a new service that analyses their data to help guide their human resources management.
Yves Hérault, in charge of Data Governance and Technical Operations, AXA Santé & Collectives, explains the benefits of the new service in concrete terms.
How do you produce the data analyses, and in what form do you communicate them to client companies?
When we administer group insurance policies – for example, when we enrol a company’s new employee, when we collect premiums, or pay sick leave benefits – we use data retrieved from the specific architecture of the DSN.
We could content ourselves with this simple form of administration. Instead, we have chosen to be proactive and deliver useful information to our business clients in a meaningful way.
Our health & personal protection clients perfectly play the game, since 90% of the companies in our portfolio are using the DSN. Together, they employ more than 2.5 million people, almost 12% of the salaried workforce in France. This large population provides us with a reliable source of data that is updated every month.
Our first step has been to analyse absenteeism to provide companies with an analysis of their individual situation, compared to peers in their industry.
What are the main takeaways from your analysis?
Here are some of our main findings from 2019:
- The absenteeism rate stood at 3.8% in 2019, up 4.8% from 2018. The increase was driven by the number of prescribed medical leaves from work (8% more employees took leave). The average length of their absence was an estimated 22 days, slightly fewer than in 2018. Although medical leave was taken more frequently, the average time off work was shorter.
- Some sectors were less affected by absenteeism: legal professionals, consultants and business service providers had the lowest absenteeism rate (about 2% in 2019).
- Elimination period in insurance policies clearly impacted absenteeism: in 2019, we observed that absenteeism was significantly lower when the payment of benefits began after an elimination period (with a 60-day elimination period), absenteeism was halved compared to very short elimination periods).
- Logically, we found that absenteeism increases with employees’ age. For example, the absenteeism rate increases between the ages of 35 and 45, since parents generally need to take leave when their children are sick.
Can you already tell us what changes were brought by COVID?
The unprecedented health crisis we are facing has naturally created a brand-new situation:
- As of the second week in March, we observed a spike in sick leave, mainly for childcare reasons. The absenteeism rate began to recede in June and July.
- Regarding turnover, hiring continued until mid-March, but then froze, especially affecting fixed-term employment.
- We also observed a significant increase in short time working during the health crisis. However, absenteeism due to short time working was found to be 32%, although the French government had announced that 55% of employees were on short time. Our detailed analysis revealed the reason for this gap: in reality, employees were not on short time the entire week, but only certain days.
How is your new service truly innovative compared to existing employment data reports?
Our goal, our clients’ one, is to help employees stay healthy and remain active in the workforce. Two aspects of the new service are truly innovative:
1. First, the data used for comparison is not drawn from theoretical sampling or surveys: it is extracted from the actual DSN data for employees covered by AXA group insurance policies. What’s unique is our ability to compare against a range of sectors (we have identified 23), thanks to AXA’s extensive database.
We don’t simply display this data in static tables; we make it available through an interactive tool. Companies can independently personalise it by adjusting the various indicators to further tailor their analysis.
Our service enables businesses to accurately map absenteeism in their organisation. Note that we work only with anonymised data that is fully GDPR-compliant and tightly monitored by a dedicated governance structure at AXA France.
2. Second, the service brings many concrete benefits to employees and businesses alike. Based on the information we provide, companies have developed a number of preventive measures. For example, for one client company, we quickly detected an abnormally high absenteeism rate, well above the industry’s average. An ergonomist partnering with AXA investigated the situation and found that the height of the company’s workstations was problematic.
As I have explained, we process millions of items of anonymised data each month. The trends we observe are continuously updated for both individual companies and the industries they belong to, providing our clients with real-time measures of absenteeism.
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Data MAP : Mesurer, Analyser, Prévenir
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