If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it’s that employees are adaptable. Even though many businesses have returned to the workplace – alongside those that have chosen to set up a hybrid solution or abandoned their office space for the foreseeable future – the impact of COVID-19 (and its various lockdowns) continues to reshape the labour sector.
“The ways in which we work are completely different,” explains Dereck Sigamoney, LabourGenie.Net’s Managing Director. “We’ve got to be monitoring our own productivity and efficiencies to a large extent.”
Instead of catching up with colleagues – something which was once vital to the workplace – the focus is now on deliverables. “People are indicating a readiness to return to the office because they’re missing interaction with their colleagues,” he adds.
For every organisation, one of the biggest costs of doing business is labour. Human capital is an expensive investment and as such should be carefully managed to ensure high levels of productivity, which is why Sigamoney believes that a workforce management solution should be a key component that most organisations should adopt.
“If we’re not managing the cost of labour, it can become a runaway expense in an organisation,” he warns. “If you’re not looking at what your overtime ratios are, you will have no idea what your labour spend is going to be.”
Sigamoney explains that understanding staffing coverage, peak and low periods, potential overtime demands, customer footfall and buying patterns, or even footfall, used to be left to guesswork. Today, advanced workforce management scheduling solutions contain features like labour analytics, which help companies to better meet supply and demand.
“With advanced, automated workforce management solutions, operational management of having the right employee, at the right time, with the right skill and at the right cost, are done based on the demand of the operation,” he says.
People, processes and technology
Being able to measure details such labour efficiencies, effectiveness and productivity can easily be done with a workforce management solution that integrates technology like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). “If you understand and can quantify what your labour bill is going to be before you incur the labour rands, this is going to be one of the most powerful operational tools that organisations will use to forecast and benchmark,” says Sigamoney.
“While tech is an enabler, workforce management is a principle. You need to have the methods and procedures in place that drive technology. At the same time, the technology needs to have the robustness to uphold all of those disciplines, methods, procedures, methodologies, processes – it is always about people, process and then technology.”
Even though workforce management comes across complex, Sigamoney believes it shouldn’t be rocket science “because it’s not,” he says. “We have a demand in terms of labour and we supply that demand. It’s about having the right person at the right place with the right skills and at the right cost.”
For Sigamoney, those are the four pillars of workforce management. “When you have that right, you’ve mastered workforce management. Naturally there are also factors like labour relations and the Basic Conditions of Employment Act, which drives people’s hours and how you calculate working time. It all gets built into the system.”
The benefit of this is that it takes away the guesswork from employers. Not all managers are experts at interpreting the law or the Labour Relations Act, especially when it comes to details like overtime or maternity leave. Problems arise when critical decisions are left up to people that don’t necessarily have the skill to compute these calculations.
“Implementing a workforce management solution is about how willing an organisation is to adopt change is they have an existing solution,” adds Sigamoney. “And it also depends on the platform that the customer is using as an existing solution.”
Sigamoney’s advice is to put legacy systems into an archive that is accessible if need be. While data integrity and data cleaning are an important part of the process, a company shouldn’t also have to carry data across that isn’t meaningful.
“When looking into a workforce management solution, automation and multi layered integration is important. Ease of integration and ML too because you need a solution to get cleverer and cleverer as the workforce changes,” he says.
“Look at the company that develops the solution – how innovative are they? Are they at the cutting-edge of technology? Ask about an engineering roadmap and what do companies like Gartner, Forrester and Glassdoor say about the solution?”
Ultimately, choosing a workforce management solution is an opportunity to invest in innovation that goes beyond staffing, revenue and labour spend. It is a way to put money directly back into a business’s bottom line by solving labour inefficiencies like scheduling and overtime easily.
“For me, it’s investing in the magic. Becoming more productive. Doing more with less. And that’s powerful,” he ends.