Mitigating risk of Holidays

The summer for many businesses can be seen as a nightmare of juggling staffing with the increased demands of expenditure. For small business this can prove a bigger headache than medium and large who have the staff size to cover holidays and can work on a rota system to handle the time off. For sole traders or small business this may simply not be an option.

Some tips which may help:

Know your customer behaviour

Knowing your customer demand pattern is key to assessing peaks and troughs in your business. If you have a naturally quiet period then using this time as your main holiday may be a better plan, however if you have other responsibilities such as a family the summer and school holidays may be the only time you can have a family get away. By first understanding your customer behaviour you may be able to work with clients to change there demand which would allow a slower fulfillment, meaning you can take a well deserved break. The issue with taking any time off and closing down your business is that you will not get paid, unlike a salaried position where you have holiday entitlement. Depending on your cash flow accepting a holiday may not be possible is one of the harsh realities of being a business person.

Stay-cation

Working less is an effective way to have fun days out with the family or friends. With technology accessible all over the UK you can stay connected and don't have to venture too far. This will ensure overall control is not lost and should anything untoward occur you are able to hurry back to address the issue. Many people are quick to leave the country for foreign holidays forgetting the wealth of entertainment on their doorstep, not to mention the cost saving that may be necessary during this prolonged recession.

Rely on friends or family

Trust no one, is sound advice if you want to work 24 hours a day but there comes a time when you will need to trust somebody. Having a friend or family cover may mean not all services are available but it will at least allow you a break knowing that they will do their upmost to keep your business ticking over.

Hire the professionals

There are agencies which will help, many offering staff and management to help run the business in your absence. Rather than rely on individuals by outsourcing your cover needs to an agency you can hold them to account and demand the expertise that may not be readily available in your local recruitment pool. There is always a premium to be paid for this type of service but may be worth the cost to ensure piece of mind

Forecasting Workload - Beginners Guide

The first question a business has when it expands is how do I know the amount of work there is and how many staff that requires. It is a tricky subject is your new into the employment game. Up till now you will have relied on yourself to do the activities and depending on your type of work this could be skilled or unskilled labour. You may think resource planning is an activity on required for big business or the corporates and you would be wrong. Correct application of resource planning will maximise your potential output, improve efficiency and also help with marketing. There are companies that will offer you all this for a nice price, but in essence all you need are a spreadsheet and a stopwatch.

Give clear instructions
This is the most important aspect of hitting the ground running by giving clear guides you are saving yourself a lot of rework and mistakes. Unfortunately a lot of companies take the approach of learning on the job, the old you watch me doing it, then you do it while I watch you, then your on your own. This means that bad habits, shortcuts and scenarios may be missed and will lead to panic and confusion later. A well prepared manual is essential if you wish to have a productive employee. But remember they will be behind the average time taken for at least the first 3 months, if not productive by 6 months you should consider further training or performance observations. Well written guides to the work you are done should not be complete in one sitting, always leave them as working documents as often a scenario will prompt an addition, so don't go out and get them laminated for the wall.

Break workload into defined tasks
When you do everything for a business you can get so wrapped up into your own little rituals and ways of doing things that it all blends into one. But you must break each activity down into work items, this will allow optimised scheduling of activity but more importantly measurement of that activity. For instance you may think that the task of waiting tables is all one job but it isn't, the tasks involved are: Greeting and seating, drinks order, drinks deliver, started/main order, cutlery and sauce setting, food delivery, courtesy check on happiness, food clearing, desert ordering, desert delivery, table clearing, bill delivery, bill collection, table setting. You can see how a job like waiting tables may seem to be something anyone could do, but without instructions they miss one of the 14 steps listed out and you will have angry customers. You may also think you could put waiting table takes on average 1hour but then you are actually measuring the time the people take to complete meal and not the time the waiter spends working, are you OK that they simply stand and watch as the customers eat? do you think they could be fulfilling another role at the same time?

Measure time of each task - SMV (Standard Minute Value)
Take a stop watch and time yourself doing the activity, just a normal pace not rush or too slow. If the activity involved lots of different scenarios then take the most common one you do and time that. Do this for at least 10 observations and take the average time. More than this would be beneficial but unnecessary for your purposes. Mark the task description and the time taken on each observation on an excel spreadsheet, you can use the function =average(cell array) to give you the average of the ten.

Allow for down time
Factor in between 10 and 20% wastage on each timing, this is time for sneezing, errors, toilets breaks and other comfort breaks. It is important to do this otherwise your timings will be unattainable Your own discretion should be used for idle time because it varies depending on the industry. You find those who work with customers directly have far more idle time due to interactions that may be unexpected however those in a manufacturing setting will simply utilise breaks.

Forecasting workload - arrival rates
To measure the arrival rate of each task you can look over historical data. For manufacturing businesses this will be order fulfillment and stock ledgers, if you are a retail business then you can look at the customers and categorise these into a time destinction you wish to measure. It may be daily to begin with but if your operation is over 6 days it may be more beneficial to do this hourly as you will need to do shift rotas for staff. Half hourly is the lowest level you should go down to, other options would be half daily split into morning and afternoon, third daily morning, afternoon and evening.

Once you have captured your historic data (if you do not have historic data then measure it over the next 4 weeks, you may begin to use averaging after 2 weeks but it will be more volatile due to the lack of observations). You can then take average of previous four week periods to future forecast foot flow. But this is not the final step. You should consider any premiums that need to be applied onto specific dates, local fairs, markets, events, holidays or seasonality. The gut feel is the only way you can measure this to begin with unless you have historic data from previous three years. Seasonality will be a small uplift to reflect perhaps a surge in winter or summer, specific daily adjustors would be that you may be busier on the first of the month because that is traditionally pay day locally.

Testing against actuals

Continue to capture your arrival rates and compare these with forecast, this will be the best way to capture any alterations you may need to make.


Overall Workload
You are now in a position to determine the workload requirement for the specific operating days, hours or half hour periods of your operation. This will assist scheduling new staff at times when others may be present but also allow you to see any likely dips in workload that you could focus marketing on to attract business to those quiet times, offers or deals are a way restaurants fill their orders at quiet times e.g. Early bird deals, pre theatre meal deals, etc. The calculation is simple:

Arrival Rates * SMV = Workload minutes
Workload minutes /time period(e.g. within 1 hour would equal 60) = staff requirement

Where staff requirement is below 1 then you can take the following actions:

•  Migrate workload from other time periods that is not event specific e.g. general cleaning, training
• encourage customer migration to that time with incentives, remember that you will be paying higher than usual staff costs during those periods so some money off to ensure productivity may be more prudent financially.
• Create new tasks or take on new work streams
• Diversify your staff to be able to perform more than one role
• Close business during these hours, if the work does not exist to maintain one staff member is it really worth opening the doors?

If this is your first experience of resource planning I wish you luck should you wish to discuss these techniques or require support on documents, templates or other material feel free to leave a comment and I will contact you.

This is an introduction for small operations the complexity of this gets more as your business expands and you will find automation is the only way to go if you want decent analysis of workload.

Identifying Talent

Talent development is the best way to ensure you company has a pipeline of promising staff that are both engaged and skillful to help you grow and improve. Whilst buying in talented people can be effective the identification and promotion of talent internally has a ripple effect across your organisation to help incentivise staff and improve morale. If others see that there are clear career paths open to them they will be more productive and demonstrate the types of behaviors that you wish to promote.

One of the best ways of identifying talent is to use the 9 box Matrix system of categorising employees. This should not be done in secret but be a very open and honest discussion between manager and employee.

The 9 box matrix contains different areas which determine two factors, their performance and their potential. Each employee is positioned in a box, best to keep this simple as some people like to have the position within the box as a factor.

Firstly the manager and employee should mark where they would place the employee, it can often lead to disagreements but it is good to identify and address some behavioural observations that have been made about the employee. It can also mean that perhaps the manager assumes something about the employee.

Most businesses need a large number of employees in boxes 2,5,6 and 3 who have acceptable or high performance but have little or no potential to move forward. This is not to say they could not be trained to do a higher grade position but it means they perhaps do not wish to progress as they enjoy their job or their job is in an area where promotion may not be possible unless a new skill was developed. But these people will always be the bedrock of any success by ensuring the work is done well.

Those in box 1 should be actively managed out of the business. They would have been identified as lacking the requisite skills for the role and all training interventions undertaken have not improved the situation. If this box is used frequently in your organisation then you may wish to determine the length of service of those falling into this category as it could point to a deficiency with your recruitement process and if the process is outsourced to agents can be used to give direct feedback to those agencies to help improve future joiners.

Those in box 4 and 7 should be moved out of this box within 6 months or fall into box 1. This can be done by targeting training to their particular deficiency. It may also be wise to provide a mentor to those in box 7 as they will be a valuable asset should their current performance improve.

Boxes 8, 9 and 6 are those that should fill any job vacancies at higher positions and providing working groups and mentors will help to keep their ideas fertilised until an opportunity present itself.

One final thing to consider during this classification is that on a micro level it is often difficult to identify how the individual would move to the next box so ensure your management are clear on how the path to the next box whether that be vertical or horizontal is achieved. On a macro level this grid will give you great insight into your organisation and working on percentages can really tell you if you have a good workforce or if perhaps more should be done with training or engagement. A box with more employees to the left should identify overall training deficiencies and a box with more to the bottom will identify a problem with staff engagement.

Does Social media harm your productivity?

Many large companies invest money in IT programmes that block certain websites from use, pretty much any website you have to log in to will be blocked. This seems like a sensible approach at first glance to ensure employees don't just update facebook all day and tweet what their having for lunch but social media is evolving and many high tech and more technology savvy businesses actively encourage the use of social media.

For many types of work there are professional groups on most social media sites which can help the productivity of business. For example often when doing a presentation, creating a spreadsheet or even just trying to figure out how to change something in a word processor it is quicker to be able to access a group and tap into the knowledge of thousands of other industry professionals for advice and support. Whilst Google is great for guides and a simple search query can often eventually find an answer to your particular problem, the time lost trawling through the thousands of entries to find your exact example can be time consuming.

So here are some best practice to allow access to social media whilst ensuring misuse is not promoted:

- Be clear with your employees; explain social media should be used for helping them with any issues they come across to improve both their skills and the efficiency of the tasks they are undertaking.
- Do your homework and find out which sites you may want to grant access to, twitter may not be the best for a programmer but LinkedIn could be ideal to provide them with access to a technical community.
- Empower employees to be responsible; remember by putting in place strict rules and regulations this can harm the overall engagement of the office and make employees feel alienated from your company.
- Begin an internal social network; this can be a place to share best practice and provide cross team collaboration and development which is free and often more useful than scripted external training providers.

And remember if misuse happens then you can deal with that through the appropriate disciplinary procedures. The time taken to address misuse will certainly be less than the time saved by allowing employees to gain useful information to assist them with their job.

Written by
Steven Hill

Manpower planning during a recession

During the recent reccession that is so publicly discussed on news websites, radio and in pubs up and down the land there has been a decline in turnover of staff in most companies. This has meant that the manpower planning undertaken could lead to a higher provision for recruitment and training costs than previously planned. There are both advantage and disadvantages to this for many companies:

Advantages
- Lower turnover means quality of output should improve as more experienced staff are in situ
- A reduction in time gap between leaver and joiner with any checks and training required
- Reduction in complaints when client has to deal with a different employee each time.

Disadvantages
- If there is a headcount reduction required this means that redundancy may need to be considered
- Cost of employees that have been with the company will be higher than new entrants meaning overall wage bill may offset any savings on recruitment process

Unforseen Disadvantages
- If employees are forced to stay due to poor local job market they may infect the rest of your team with negativity. This drives down engagement of the staff and can harm productivity
- More time may be spent dealing with absence and disciplinary issues with staff that do not want to be in the job anymore but have no option.
- Talent pools can stagnate with no fresh new ideas and enthusiasm coming in from external environments sharing best practices

Potential solutions:
- Invest time in engagement, staff get togethers and social activities.
- Have team building days which foster a feeling of teamwork, collaboration and creative thinking.
- Provide an open forum to address any employee concerns and address issues before they escalate.
- Look out for the signs of poor engagement and negativity and stop them before they affect other staff.

Unfortunately during difficult economic times the first thing to be cut back on is staff engagement and team building which often leads to an ever downward spiral until the economy recovers and jobs begin to move freely again.

Written by
Steven Hill

Surveys, why and how?

In the context of Resource Planning it is often good to regularly check up the activity of your workforce and when it is on a non captured platform then a survey is a great way of doing this.

Surveys are simple and one common example would be to format an excel document to list the times on the left hand column and ask them to enter in the activity they were doing over at least a one week period so you can analyse any intra day and daily fluctuations. If you have a small workforce then free formatted text is ok as you can spend the time manually configuring the information however to save time and also for larger groups you can specifically set the paramters of the entry by using an index key. The index key will list usually in categories the general types of activity you wish your workforce to be doing and one other category with a free format text box at the bottom to explain. This will mean you can simply copy and paste the data into a database and quickly get stats around the activity undertaken in your business.

Step 1:
Set up excel template with times (usual working times with some leeway either side e.g. 9 to 5 you should allow entry between 8.00am and 6.00pm)

Step 2:
Set up an index key for the types of work you wish to capture, you can list as many categories as you want but do not over complicate as it will then be counter productive to fill in and give you less meaningful results.

Once you have the template you can then send to employees and await the responses. There are further ways to automate this process:

- Use conditional formatting to highlight any areas not completed
- Use VBA to automate a return to a specified inbox at the click of a button
- Use VBA to collate all your responses into one database.

Please contact author for information on these further steps or any information around personalising this template

Written by
Google Steven Hill

Organisational Structure and Spans of Control

When a business begins the management structure is simple, one person does everything. As it expands it becomes more complex as you layer employees then your time spend managing those employees grows, with payroll queries, issues, reviews, etc. Then if you continue to grow you delegate this to middle manager who acts as a span breaker, and once it becomes so large you may even divide the work into departments. This is when companies usually go wrong.

If you follow a management principle from the start of say 1 manager manages 6 people this should be carried forward and in fact it is actually easier to manage managers as generally you can be more relaxed that they are doing a fine job so your spans could increase. Most companies work counter intuitive to this and have less spans the higher up the organisation you go and a lot of Multi Nationals end up with spans that shrink during a recession. The problem is that often during any kind of project to reduce your workforce and improve your capacity it is so easy to forget the additional benefits this efficiency will save you. I will illustrate below in a case study example:

Company 1

This company has 100 retail stores around the UK and currently employees managers on spans of 1:5 in most of it stored having 3 managers and one overall manager. They introduce a new stock management system meaning that they no longer require any time to do a stock check in the evenings, saving them 6fte per store (fte = full time equivalent). The original 6 saving is accompanied by the reduction of 1 manager and the total saving is then calculated on the basis of these 7 staff. Perhaps there is a selection process where staff are pooled to identify those at risk or the turnover is high enough to manage down the staffing number over time.

The lost opportunity here is the saving you have made on 1 of the other managers only now managing 4 people and the overall manager now managing 2 managers. This would be an additional saving that most companies would say is not realisable due to the fact you cannot get rid of part of a person. Wrong, if you are going to the effort of implementing a new system then surely its little effort to also do analysis of the roles and adjust them accordingl;
- Could the overall manager take on some more senior direct employees thus saving you a new manager
- Could you look at other time saving methods to reduce the management time required?


However, if you do remove another of the managers you end up with a strange structure or different levels reporting into the same person, but in practice this is not an issue as long as you have the correct people in the job. You still have the same career path as before.

Too often there are efficiencies made during a recession that affect the 'front line' of a business with little affect on the middle or senior management, when in fact this is your biggest cost. I can't say i have ever been into any company and thought, wow i wish there was more managers around, but i often think I wish there was more front line staff to serve or help me.

Written by
Google Steven Hill

Idle time: Why should we pay for it?

One of the main complaints of any employer is the productivity of their employees. Some of the largest companies spend thousands of hours and huge sums of money to try and understand their employees and what motivates them best. Even the most intense interview process will not always ensure the right candidate is in the job. Being an employer means that you have to accept that everyone is and individual, the larger the company the more difficult this becomes so you have to create general rules and guidance to staff and their managers to say what is and is not deemed acceptable for performance.

Sales targets are one way that companies ensure they get their bang for the buck but what if you dont work in a sales driven environment how can you measure productivity. What if the output is not determined by quantity of words written or emails sent? Well productivity can usually be measured backwards by setting an expectation of what amount of time is acceptable to be away from your work, Idle time.

The main component of idle time is Lunch breaks, the standard given is an hour which for many employees is too much at one time and prefer shorter 15 minute breaks in morning and afternoon with only half hour break at lunch time. There are many ways to divide this up. There is then toilet breaks and you cannot begin to track that as its both distasteful but can also be deemed as discriminatory to those with specific toilet requirements. Here are some example ways companies can track idle time:

Clock in - Clock out

In telephony units when the agents telephone is set to idle this tracks total time spent on that selection. On most basic aspect and other brand telephony equipment you can set specific keys to determine if employee is on call, idle, break etc. This is the most accurate and can be targetted to say 10% average over a week and any excess to that will highlight as a potential problem and can be addressed.
For non telephony based employers you can also have a clock in and out system, whether it be a computer, till or hole punch on the wall. This is all a way to determine where your staff are and what they are doing right now.

Manager Observation

This is unfortunately the most difficult to manage and costly as you need to spend time observing your staff. Certain things are true about human nature, when being observed you are always more likely to do things correctly than if you are left to your own devices when shortcuts can become appealing. Also when you are not busy you make the work stretch to fit the time you wish it to. Have you ever been into a bank on a busy day, the teller works quickly to serve and move to next customer, however if queue is only small and they don't want to have to move onto other non teller activity they may provoke more conversation from customers to avoid having to move away from the front of house thus making the work fit the time. The other element to managerial observation is very difficult to approach a member of staff and say i think you could go faster without damaging their confidence and potentially having a reverse effect.

Self Assessment

By far the best solution is to have a system with allows the employee to enter in their own shift pattern throughout the day. this means that the employee is giving an accurate reflection of what activity they have been doing throughout the day, this can be done using a simple excel sheet and can be capture using drop down boxes at 30 minute or even 15 minute intervals. With engagement of staff being critical to the smooth running of a business allowing this manual keying means you are empowering staff to take the initiative and often you will find the results remarkably honest. When an employee can see they have not been perhaps as productive as they can be they will often approach you for extra duties and tasks to ensure they can successfully fill their day. By putting their activity down in writing it often bring to life just how long they are perhaps spending on activity that should be quicker, it can also help you identify efficiency savings in your business practices.

For more details on this solution please contact the author

Written by
Steven Hill
Steve@vinylpuppet.com

Google

The Principles of Resource Planning

Resource Planning sounds like a simple concept. To ensure that you have the right people in the right place at the right time. But if it was that simple your entire workforce would have 100% productivity and engagement. Even in a small business, retail unit, call centre or manufacturer there are so many variables that you need to predict. Now you may be considering paying a company thousands to help you with this, or you just rely on everyone trying their best, but you do need to consider this and you don't need to spend huge sums of money doing it.

Some simple basics for Resource Planning:

Know your workflow

Retail - spend a week capturing the number of customers coming into your shop, doesnt have to be exact. Also if you have a till roll with time stamp this will show when customers purchased things so just enter into a spreadsheet.
Call centre - use your call log sheet to show the arrival rate of calls, ensuring it is when they called and not when you answered, if you have call waiting technology.
Manufacturer - log when each item is produced ideally both start and end times.

When are your staff available

This is the amount of employees you have in your business at any one time.

e.g. of datasheet now created

With this information you can do a quick analysis to determine what wastage there is and then amend your shift patterns or workflow accordingly. Now one thing to remember is that in a customer driven business you cannot amend the arrival rate as that is determined by other peoples decision making of when they wish to use your service, however you can encourage them to a more suitable time. e.g. A coffee shop is busy between lunch hours of 12 till 2pm. There is a customer who comes in everyday at 12.30 and waits to order 3 sandwiches for the hairdressers along the road. This customer could, call ahead and you could do the making of the sandwiches prior to 12 saving both you and the customer time.

The best way to determine the fit of your plan is to graph your customers/workflow against your available staff

You can see there is some disconnect between arrival patterns and available employees. This would highlight when certain tasks like stock check, cleaning, reviews, back office activity, etc could be completed during less busy times. Alternatively it could show you when you are overstaffed and allow you to reduce your wage bill by removing some hours.

This is a quick excercise to determine how well your current Resource Planning is working.

Written by Steven Hill

Google