Workforce Management Blog

Failure to plan often results in failure to succeed within the hospitality industry.  The demands of hospitality are endless, specifically to the workforce. You must adjust the workforce to the constant change in demand, whether it is a normal business-as-usual- day, or a week full of events and conferences in the middle of peak season.

The hospitality sector faces strains and challenges unique to the industry. The biggest challenge is centered on controlling labour costs without compromising the quality of service provided to guests. Fortunately, there is automated workforce management systems that can help increase workforce efficiency and increase profitability as well.

The key benefits of using automated workforce management solutions are:

1. Reduced labour costs and increased workforce productivity and guest satisfaction

Manage more effectively staffing demands
Determine how many employees are needed to operate effectively

2. Ability to monitor planned costs vs. actual costs with increase labour visibility

Provides daily insight for management to see their planned costs against their actual costs – allowing for changes to be made immediately to stay within budge

3. Compliance with HR regulations and specific working agreements

Minimizes the risk of non-compliance with labour laws

4. Pay based on schedule

Avoids unnecessary costs and payments

To learn more about how workforce management solutions are benefiting the hospitality industry, visit our Synerion Hospitality Suite – the most comprehensive and integrated workforce management solution in the market.

You’ve adapted and evolved your business on multiple levels as technology changes and opportunities have presented themselves to increase workforce productivity, but your employees are still punching in on time cards. It’s time to realize that time cards are a thing of the past. Sure, they worked well for tracking time and attendance before, but while they prove to manage time, they require unnecessary resources and produce avoidable errors costing your organization time and money on a daily basis. Upgrading your payroll system to an automated time and attendance software can eliminate these problems, while saving you 2-5% of your payroll costs annually.

Punch Cards Cost Money

Punch cards require multiple steps. Employees take time to punch in, punch out, the HR department then have to calculate the hours each employee has worked and equate the other factors such as vacation pay, into the process to determine the accurate amount due to the employee.

As well, buddy punching is very common. Buddy punching is when an employee punches the time clock on behalf of another employee, who is leaving early, arriving late, absent from work or not scheduled for work that day. This is a time and attendance issue that allows employees to get paid for time in which they are not on the job, and is the basis for payroll fraud or time theft. Studies show that buddy punching can account for up to 5% of total payroll costs, which can costs companies thousands or even millions of lost dollars per year.
Time and Attendance Software Systems Save Money

An automated time and attendance systems reduces human errors and tracks employees’ attendance by using advanced methods such as biometrics. Upgrading to an automated time and attendance system can not only save you money, but increase your productivity through a variety of workforce management solutions such as activity costing, labour forecasting and absentee management.

There are multiple benefits and uses associated with a time and attendance software system. To learn more about how these can benefit your organization, click here.

Go Green, Increase Productivity – Workforce Management Software
With Earth Day just passing, many people are asking themselves what they can do to help preserve the environment for future generations. This isn’t just a personal matter however, more and more organizations are asking themselves the same question.

Adopting an effective employee management system will enable your company to cut labour costs and increase productivity, but it is also a greener alternative to a manual HR process. In particular, organizations within the healthcare industry readily realize the multiple streams of benefits of utilizing a time and attendance system.

Recruitment has always been a challenge for those in healthcare. In order to keep the highest of standards for providing superior healthcare services, the industry needs to find skilled professionals quickly due to shortages, but then have to endure long training periods. These challenges require a lot of time and money in order to achieve superior performance levels in your workforce. Healthcare industries should not just provide services that improve the lives of its patients, but it should also utilize solutions that align with all other aspects of the organization.

As well, traditional methods of workforce management, such as timesheets, have a detrimental effect on the environment, contributing a high level of paper waste annually. Green technologies do exist that can replace these old methods.

Workforce management solutions include time and attendance software that uses automated data collection methods that do not include paper nor plastic disposables- biometrics, the internet, voice recognition, mobile phones, all of which are extremely accurate methods in tracking employee behavior.

Not only do these technologies have a more positive effect on the environment, but also they are more accurate, efficient and effective in meeting organizational goals.  It is a win-win solution for all.

There are multiple benefits of adopting a WCM solution for your organization. To learn more about what WCM can do for you, visit our website.

The beginning of the global economic recovery raised the renewed need for efficient and high-quality recruiting services. Mergers and acquisitions forced organizations to look inward and examine the gaps between what they have and what they want: what expertise should be retained, what skills and competencies are in the surplus, and what skills are missing. The world of employment has changed so much that organizations now experience a shortage in some skills and competencies essential for their growth. Among others, this is the result of an entire generation leaving the workforce (the baby boomers), changes in technological processes and Generation Y joining the workforce. To address these challenges and develop the future leadership of the organization, organizations must focus on recruiting the right talent into the organization.

In a study by IDC in 2010, executives were asked to rank the most important initiatives in the field of talent management carried out in their organization that had the strongest impact on their business objectives in the area of human resources. It is not surprising that the top ranking issues were: alignment in accordance with business objectives, recruitment, and performance management.

When an organization decides to change its corporate strategy, the HR department must respond almost immediately: it must identify the set of skills required to carry out the current strategy, and it must plan and execute a structured recruitment process to bring on board the missing skills. The nature of the recruitment manager’s job changes accordingly. He or she can no longer be satisfied with receiving instructions and job requirements as defined by professional managers. He must take into account the full range of strategic plans relating to the employee skills, directions for future growth, internal mobility as part of job promotion, performance management, and more.

“The people make the organization” is no longer an empty expression. More and more organizations have realized that to obtain better business results they must invest in employees or rather in the talent pool. In recent years we have seen increasing investment by organizations in technological systems for performance management and in learning management systems in order to deepen and enhance capabilities and skills within the organization.

Strategic recruitment must be based on analysis and planning of human resources: What kinds of employees/skills are required? When and where? What gaps currently exist in the critical positions in the organization, and in what direction does the business unit advance? What technologies are going to be used, and what new processes will be adopted?

Talent management will not succeed in earnest unless companies view the process as requiring integration of data, processes, and tools. When companies invest in this process, the result is greater revenue and profitability, more engaged employees and a much more effective organization.

Synerion Recruitment enables job management, capture of applicant resumes from various channels (e-mail, scan, fax, and social networks), creation of an applicant pool, and bi-directional matching between applicant and job requirements to identify candidates most suitable for the organization’s needs.

To learn more about the benefits and advantages of recruitment software, click here.

In today’s economy, competition is ever increasing, and it is the organizations that are able to identify the key talent and get that talent working for their organization in the shortest period of time that will flourish. However many organizations act too slowly to fill positions within their company resulting in lost opportunities and revenue.

A simple method to determine the lost revenue as a result of an unfilled position is the employee revenue calculation. This number represents on average the amount of revenue generated by each individual employee on a daily basis. To calculate:

Daily Revenue Lost per unfilled position = Total Revenue/Number of Employees/ 365

By using the above calculation organizations can see how much revenue on average is being lost on a daily basis every time an organization has a job opening that has not been filled based on the amount of revenue each employee generates per day.

Other impacts of unfilled positions include:

-        Overworked Employees: Employees in the company have to pitch in to get the work done which would normally be done by the person in the position that is currently being recruited for

-        A team in an organization which has a  vacant position will require more support from the management team

-        Customers will become dissatisfied since their requests are taking longer to be fulfilled

-        Excessive vacancies can lead to poor hires simply to fill the vacancies which will ultimately harm the business

In order to deal with the costs of unfilled vacancies many organizations are now choosing to invest in recruitment solutions. Recruitment  workforce solutions allow organizations to quickly get a pool of applicants, identify the most suitable candidates and identify a workflow to get a new employee contributing to the organization in the shortest amount of time.

In an increasingly competitive economy, investing in a recruitment solution has the opportunity to give organizations the competitive advantage they need.

To learn more about the advantages of investing in a Recruitment workforce solution, click here.