Tag: training management

Staff turnover is an inevitability in any business. As is, hopefully, business growth. When a business expands, new recruits are needed to fulfil an expanding list of tasks. Pinpointing the skills and experience required, however, can be a challenge. It can make recruitment difficult for any organisation. So, how can you best tackle recruitment, conducting it seamlessly for the smooth running of your services? 

Understanding is the vital ingredient. It’s one thing knowing that you need to bring people in, but it’s a different challenge being able to swiftly pinpoint the skills and experience required to best serve your business needs. Having a bird’s eye view of your entire workforce can help. When training, competency management and understanding of future tasks and scheduling are brought together within a single workforce management framework, it helps you in identifying skills gaps and making informed decisions in regards to your recruitment. 

Knowledge driving recruitment 

If you have a central system that holds all the information on your workforce, it makes the task of understanding the skills, experience and competencies available to you straightforward. You can easily run reports and gain vital insight. In industries such as construction, transport and healthcare, core competencies are vital in delivering frontline services. For example, if you have a low or dwindling number of staff appropriately qualified to administer injections, it gives you an opportunity to react before service delivery is impacted. 

Now, this can of course be done internally via training programmes as we touched upon in our previous blog. The same holistic view of training and competencies across your organisation is vital in making informed recruitment decisions, too. 

Where staff cannot be upskilled internally, it makes recruitment inevitable. Using a central system can make the task easier for management teams responsible for recruitment, by being able to identify specific skills and experience that are needed across the organisation. Recruitment isn’t just a numbers game and shouldn’t be left to chance. 

How long will the recruitment process take? 

Another crucial aspect is understanding how long the recruitment process will take. Managers will need to take time out from their usual tasks to conduct interviews; what’s the knock-on effect of this? There’s also a cost implication in terms of not having enough staff available and in terms of the shifting of resources to the recruitment process. 

Diverting resources is obviously a big undertaking, so understanding the consequences upon your resources, time and budgets is fundamental. Having a central view of your workforce will again help in this regard, helping to map out your resources and their allocation.

Recruitment leading to training and competency management 

Once the recruitment phase is completed and you have new staff signed up, what happens next? The first aspect is once again linked to your competency management efforts. If someone says they have certain qualifications, particularly in safety critical environments it is a good idea to check. Evidencing certificates and obtaining references can be completed by the new staff member, with the copies then stored against their record in your system. This means that you will have oversight of their skills, qualifications and experience for the duration of their time with you. This will help your scheduling teams in being able to appropriately assign tasks to them. 

Once you’re satisfied that they are appropriately qualified, they will then need to be enrolled into your organisation and the teams with which they will be working. This process may include mandatory health and safety training for new starters. Assigning this and making sure it’s completed can be done centrally, with any result again being stored against their record. This can trigger alerts for when any refresher training might be required in future, too. 

What happens next? 

Most jobs have a probationary period, something that extends beyond safety critical work and helps to ensure that people are up to the job for which you have employed them for. Similarly, it enables employees the opportunity to leave with shorter notice if they decide the job isn’t for them. 

 Keeping track of this probationary period is crucial. Assessments and feedback of their work will help to make informed decisions on whether or not they have passed. Storing all of this information centrally helps to give your organisation a complete view of its workforce. 

Once a new recruit is up and running, they will hopefully be in a position to fulfil their tasks in the way needed. Seeing them become a regular part of your workforce asap is beneficial to service delivery. This requires careful planning and oversight of your organisation. 

What specific skills and experience does your organisation need? Who will be required to recruit? How much time will be needed? What processes are in place to get new starters up and running? All of these questions can be answered when you have a bird’s eye view of your entire workforce. By linking training and competency management, you can make more informed and accurate decisions. 

CACI has recently published a whitepaper, Effective workforce management to improve outcomes across your business, which explores this topic in more detail. You can download your free copy here. 

Scheduling is the glue that keeps organisations together. It provides clarity over tasks to be completed and helps management teams in looking back to see what has been achieved. Who performed what tasks and when? How did they do? In times of employee strain, when workforces are stretched, having an agile scheduling tool is vital for firms in keeping their projects and services running. Without a robust scheduling framework, organisations are at the mercy of guesswork and good fortune.

Why is scheduling so important?

Scheduling pervades every aspect of company life. At a basic level, the majority of working contracts outline expected hours along the lines of the 9-5 theme. From there, employees are expected to complete tasks in a timely fashion. Staying on top of individuals is easy enough, but what if you have an entire workforce to assign tasks to and track? In industries such as healthcare, transport and construction, project completion and service delivery are dependent upon the input of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of staff members.

In such organisations, a central administrative team needs to assign tasks to employees to ensure that projects and services can be delivered effectively and efficiently. It can be akin to moving chess pieces around a board, using different pieces in different ways to attack the tasks at hand. From time to time you also need to go on the defensive, when projects overrun, or services are disrupted.

Linking scheduling to other aspects of workforce management

To fill your tasks, an understanding of what each employee is competent in is vital. You can’t use a knight to do a bishop’s job, to labour the chess analogy. Manually researching who can step in to fill a role is a painstaking process. It’s also a waste of time, since with a robust scheduling system, it is something that can be done automatically.

Quickly filtering through employees and instantly understanding their training, competencies and experiences facilitates swift and efficient decision making. Further understanding of their existing schedule enables administrators to assign tasks within business rules and legally contractable hours.

By setting out schedules in advance, organisations can clearly communicate with their employees and enable them due oversight of their shifts and tasks. Within a centralised scheduling system, it is also possible to facilitate the swapping of schedules between staff members to provide flexibility.

Your business rules, your scheduling

Everything can be completed within the boundaries of your business rules. Each organisation has its own unique ways of working, so catering for these on a case-by-case basis is vital. This can also be true of individual departments within an organisation. For example, many contracts reward staff for longer service with the provision of extra annual leave. Holidays need to be factored in, as do the rules around when a certain number of employees can be off at any given moment.

Factoring in overtime and how that’s dealt with, in terms of overrunning projects, compensation and the impact it has on future shifts, also requires careful consideration. Considering these elements in an automated fashion facilitates not only swift decision making, but also fair and consistent decision making.

External and internal regulations also need to be factored into your scheduling process. Aspects such as fatigue management can easily get overlooked when there’s pressure on to finish projects and tasks, but ignoring them can be costly.

The cost of getting scheduling wrong

Renown Consultants Limited was fined £450,000 with £300,000 in costs in 2020 after being convicted under the Health and Safety at Work Act. The company had failed to ensure that two of its workers were sufficiently rested to travel home after a shift in 2013. The two employees were driving from Stevenage to Doncaster after a nightshift when the driver fell asleep, resulting in a collision which was fatal to both passengers.

Travel times to and from shifts that require safety intensive work to be conducted must be factored in. Clearly, travelling from Stevenage to Doncaster is a lengthy journey – 133 miles. Again, a robust scheduling solution can help factor in aspects such as distances and potential travel times. This can help to avoid unnecessary journeys and deploy staff more intelligently based upon their location.

This also helps in plotting out schedules for staff such as district nurses. In conducting care visits, it makes sense to reduce travel times between tasks, helping to improve efficiency and complete more visits in a single shift.

Plug your scheduling into your wider organisation

Scheduling is vital for every company. In managing a large workforce, it is even more important, especially where vital infrastructure and healthcare services are concerned. Having robust oversight of your scheduling links closely to your efforts to deliver services and projects, recruit new staff, train existing employees and keep on top of your competency management.

It also helps in monitoring and reporting on objectives and outcomes. If projects have overrun or performed well, having a holistic view of who managed and worked on them is vital in garnering understanding that can inform future tasks.

Fundamentally, however, scheduling is central to the very core activities of any business. Leaving it to chance, guesswork and human error is a risky process. The tools exist to enhance your scheduling, by equipping your administrative teams with the tools to help them make swift, informed and effective decisions. Without the need to manually trawl through records, it leaves them free to focus on exceptions and improvements, in turn helping to move your organisation forward.

CACI has recently published a whitepaper, Effective workforce management to improve outcomes across your business, which explores this topic in more detail. You can download your free copy here.