Staff Burnout Doesn't Come Out of Nowhere: Proof of Concept for an Early Warning Dashboard

The problem: Few sectors have higher sickness rates than health and social care: shift work, emotional strain, chronic understaffing. Managers sense that a team is tipping, but they only see it in the numbers once the resignation is on the table or the long-term absence has begun. Satisfaction scores, sick days, and turnover live in separate systems and are never looked at together.

My approach: An interactive Power BI dashboard as a proof of concept, bringing together publicly available data and making the link visible while there is still time to act:

1. Data integration: Job satisfaction and sickness rate statistics at regional (state) and sector level, with a year filter, brought together in an interactive dashboard.
2. Correlation analysis: The connection becomes visible instead of felt: declining satisfaction measurably goes hand in hand with rising sick days.
3. Early warning instead of post-mortem: Sector benchmarks show where teams or departments deviate from the norm, anonymized and GDPR-compliant, without monitoring individual employees.

The benefit: This proof of concept demonstrates how care organizations can systematically connect sickness rates with staff satisfaction to take timely action before long-term absences and costly temporary agency staff strain teams:

• Objective decision-making: Feeding in your facility’s own anonymized data provides management with an objective foundation for workforce planning and targeted health measures, instead of guessing where issues lie.
• Ethical data collection & works council compliance: Care through data only succeeds with staff trust. With Ertoba Analytics, I supply the technical foundation: a proprietary platform for encrypted assessments (AES-256-GCM encryption, row-level security). Strict minimum group thresholds make it mathematically impossible to trace responses to individual employees - the primary condition for works council and staff committee approval.
• Psychological expertise: As a psychologist (B.Sc.), I provide not just technical dashboards, but validated interpretation: which metrics indicate actual burnout risks, and which concrete interventions sustainably stabilize the team?