Your workforce and your reputation are the business’s largest and most important assets. Managing your workforce with empathy to ensure happy, engaged employees can be a balancing act. However, providing flexible working practices that are still profitable for your business is achievable, and something that every security business should be aiming for.
The importance of an engaged workforce can’t be stressed enough because motivated employees are what makes a business successful. Research indicates that highly engaged staff show a 40% reduction in absenteeism, and almost 60% less turnover. Engaged employees show up every day with enthusiasm and purpose. They tend to work harder, treat customers well (leading to more business), and, are more likely to remain with the company.
What makes an Engaged Employee?
Employee engagement is determined by factors such as feeling clear about your role at work, and having the right tools to enable you to do your job to the best of your ability. Being recognised for hard work and diligence is also a key factor.
Workforce management, when done well, can make a significant difference to all of these factors, and therefore help to foster an engaged workforce, which is good for business.
How Workforce Management helps
In a world where almost everyone carries a smartphone, people are quite used to the idea of constant connectivity. This can be harnessed to enable security businesses to run more smoothly and efficiently, benefitting everyone. Being able to prove that a contracted service has been delivered is not only good for customer service, and invoicing, it is also provides recognition for hardworking staff.
Employees benefit too
- Work/life Balance and Flexibility
While we all know that contracts are contracts, and security businesses must deliver, replacing paper-based systems with an electronic workforce management solution, can provide additional flexibility to workers, supporting work/life balance. Shifts and rosters, which can be designed in a fraction of the time with a purpose-built solution, can be published further in advance, giving people enough notice of work patterns to plan their lives around their shifts.
Employees are more easily able to swap shifts or sign up for additional work, and the control room still has oversight to see exactly who is working where and when.
- Duty of Care
Using an app to deliver work schedules and assignment instructions provides your employees with the tools and information they need to do their job. Task lists for completion while onsite sent directly to their mobile device is convenient for all, and helps to prove compliance with any regulatory requirements, including Duty of Care.
Check calls can be built into the employee’s Actions for the day/shift, with an automated prompt to make the call.
- Payroll Visibility for Staff
With an online time & attendance solution where people clock in and out electronically, they are able to check their hours accrued and see what their salary will be via their phone.
- Holiday Management
Another benefit of good time & attendance systems is that employees are able to check their holiday accrual and request holidays through the app.
Workforce Management – Return on Investment
The benefits to the business of a workforce management solution are many. Saving time on back office processes such as designing rosters, managing shifts/attendance/service delivery, holidays and absence. Reducing reliance on manual systems, keeping electronic records provides audit trails, proves compliance and streamlines invoices for all work completed.
Having detailed records also means better analysis of the business. Managing rosters and schedules is one thing, ensuring that every shift is profitable is much more complex. However, with electronic workforce management all the variables, fixed costs, recurring costs, salaried people, hourly people and the cost of equipment required that go into costing a shift can be analysed to ensure every shift is profitable.
Paul Ridden is CEO of SmartTask
Paul has spent most of his working life in the computer industry, with the last ten years spent focusing on software solutions for the security, cleaning, FM and logistics sectors. Part of Paul’s role is to use his passion and entrepreneurial approach to build a technology team that can develop and deliver affordable software solutions that take advantage of the latest technologies and help deliver value to all SmartTask users, large and small.
