Global Witness: Providing necessary visibility and modernisation
Global Witness is an international non-profit that works to hold companies and governments to account for their impact on the environment and human rights.
OVERVIEW
Global Witness is an international non-profit that works to hold companies and governments to account for their impact on the environment and human rights.
Founded in 1993, the organisation has campaigned against environmental exploitation, conflict minerals, and corruption, helping to change laws and bring about greater transparency.
With staff based in the UK and across the globe, the organisation found themselves struggling to manage absence and leave due to clunky paper-based processes. To streamline their approach and improve the employee experience, they turned to edays.
Rolling edays out at Global Witness
THE CHALLENGE
Before adopting edays, Global Witness relied on a manual, paper-based process to track annual leave, sickness, and other absences.
But this system meant that it was essentially out of date by the time it made its way to people managers for approval, meaning the teams were struggling with a single source of truth for their data and time off requests.
The decentralised nature of the organisation also posed a challenge. With employees located in different countries and time zones, visibility over absence trends and entitlements was poor, and the people team often had to chase multiple people for updates or approvals.
Louise Carmichael
People Operations Manager
People were emailing me and copying in their managers, it was a very time-consuming, manual process. It also made it hard to get accurate live data about who was off, why, and when.
THE SOLUTION
After realising they needed to modernise, the team decided to implement edays.
The system’s simplicity, adaptability, and ability to provide better visibility were key selling points.
The onboarding and implementation process was smooth, with support from the edays team throughout. Louise particularly appreciated how quickly the platform was configured to meet Global Witness’ needs, with different entitlement pots and rules being applied to different types of absence and leave.
Louise Carmichael
People Operations Manager
It was incredibly straightforward, and the support from the edays team was brilliant. From the outset, edays felt really intuitive – you don’t need lots of training to use it, which was great for getting employees and managers on board.
We also love the flexibility and how easy it is to customise everything, whether that’s being able to import different public holidays for employees in different regions, or the way you can colour-code different leave types to make things really clear at a glance.
THE IMPACT
Since launching edays, Global Witness has seen a marked improvement in how absence is recorded and managed.
Line managers now have clear visibility of their teams’ leave, and employees appreciate the ability to manage their own time off with confidence.
Reporting has also become more powerful. With real-time dashboards and exportable data, the people team can now track trends, monitor wellbeing, and make more informed decisions.
Overall, the move to edays has freed up valuable time for HR and added a layer of transparency and efficiency that simply wasn’t possible before.
Louise Carmichael
People Operations Manager
I think it’s just built up a lot of trust in the system and it’s given staff a much better sense of ownership and understanding around their annual leave. We’re starting to build a better picture of absence across the organisation. It gives us the data we need to make sure people are taking the time off they need.
For an organisation of around 100 employees like us, it’s absolutely spot on. I would definitely recommend it for people.
CASE STUDIES
