Right People, Right Place, Right Time

Everyone wants to hit that magic button and hey presto the perfect schedule appears...am I right?

Whilst recently attending the Retail Tech & HR Tech shows in London, I was blown away by the sheer number of software providers (533 in total ...thanks Co-pilot!) all showcasing their capabilities. I asked one simple question of each Workforce Management vendor ‘does it produce automated schedules?’ and the answer of course was always a resounding YES!

Right People, Right Place, Right Time is key to the success of any business looking to optimise efficiency & drive sales and if you get this right the benefits are huge. If we get this wrong we greatly increase the risk of unhappy colleagues and customers... anyway we will come on to that a bit later.

So, going back to the original question, is it really that simple? And the answer is a resounding NO!

Let’s take a deeper look ........

We will shortly take a deeper dive into the 7 key pillars of how you can configure your WFM system to achieve manageable and sustainable automatically generated schedules, but let's start by looking at some of the key challenges that all businesses will face when new processes and procedures bring mass change.

There is a well-known quote from Richard Marcinko:

‘Change hurts. It makes people insecure, confused, and angry. People want things to be the same as they’ve aways been, because that makes life easier. But, if you’re a leader, you can't let people hang on to the past’

• Mindset

  • You will need to challenge and change the mindset of your colleagues away from the past by clearly demonstrating to them the benefits of the changes to them on a personal level and wider business benefits, this is a crucial first step.

• Capability

  • Transformation projects can appear extremely daunting to your colleagues, and you will need to invest in coaching and offer guidance to get your teams up to speed so they can start to deliver the benefits.

• Confidence

  • By building the capability with your teams you will naturally start to increase confidence. Managing and configuring WFM systems require continual improvement and in time having the confidence to ‘lift the bonnet and see what's under the hood’ will bear fruit.

• Complexity

  • Simplicity is the key, Simple for users, Simple to configure, Simple to manage. It is all too easy to overly complicate configurations. Not only does this potentially dilute the user experience it can cause a real maintenance headache for your central teams

• Adoption

  • I find myself repeatedly saying that the configuration and implementation piece is the easy part and adoption is the real challenge. You need to be taking everyone along on the journey and it’s a whole team effort and your Operations, People & Finance teams will all play their part in supporting and driving compliance.

The 7 Pillars

We have established that there are many fantastic software solutions that will auto generate schedules and covered some of the many challenges you may face, but what are the 7 key pillars required to achieve this?

1. Operating Hours

   • When will your unit be operational?

2. Accurate forecasting

   • This will drive your labour demand

3. Labour deployment

   • How are we going to allocate our labour throughout the operational hours?

4. Contracted hours

   • Have we got enough contracted hours to meet demand?

5. Availability

   • Do we have people available when we need them?

6. Work Assignments

   • Multiple locations

7. Skill Sets

   • It's not just about bums on seats, have we got the required skillset to operate?

Having been through the above process myself I can tell you that for the magic button to work it takes a lot of configuration, testing and training . The reality is that you will never walk away from some element of manual intervention, if we can get the system to do 95% of the heavy lifting that’s got to a good thing, right?

So, we are going to spend a lot of time and effort configuring our 7 pillars, multiple cycles of testing and most importantly training our colleagues on how they can benefit from this and what is required of them to maintain this.

Benefits

So, there’s got to be some benefits for everyone’s investment in Right People, Right Place, Right Time, but what are they?

• Transform the Customer experience

  • We want to give our customers the best experience we can, great service, short queues, great product availability.

• Enhance the colleague experience

  • Giving colleagues an equitable, data driven schedule, built on accurate forecasting and most importantly at least 3 weeks in advance will ensure they can best achieve a good work/life balance.

• Colleagues front of house

  • Freeing Managers from onerous administrative tasks means extra time customer facing helping to drive the customer experience, brand standards and driving sales.

• Forecast Accuracy

  • The more accurate your forecast the better control you are going to have over your labour allocations and ultimately labour cost.

• Increase sales and efficiency

  • As you match your resources to your demand curve you will be in the best position to maximise the number of customers you serve whilst driving efficiency by reducing labour allocations over the shoulder periods.

How can you tell if it’s working?

This is always the million-dollar question, my recommendation is you carry out some regression analysis on your data. When I recently did this with a leading provider of WFM solutions it showed a clear correlation between schedule efficiency and sales performance and better NPS (Net Promoter Scores) in the operating units.

This is a powerful message as it provides key stakeholders with confidence in the system but also clearly demonstrates to your front-line managers and wider workforce that there are tangible benefits that will deliver a better work-life balance and performance in their operating units.

Summary

So, when we reflect on our journey, we can see that there are lots of fantastic software solutions in the current WFM market offering automated scheduling, there is a familiarity to the look, feel and functionality of many of these.

Nothing happens by magic, we are going to have to invest time and resources to support the system functionality, this will be a continual process, training and coaching your front-line managers and colleagues can help you deliver this through self-service.

We can also see that automated scheduling brings fantastic opportunities to drive sales, increase efficiencies and deliver an enhanced customer and colleague experience.

Can you afford not to focus on Right People, Right Place, Right Time?