Forecasts and schedules and disruptions, oh my!
Managing ever-changing shift rosters and an hourly workforce is not for the faint of heart. Just read these stories of pure workday terror and see for yourself—if you dare.
The Tale of the Missing Employee
Jane is missing. HR confirms that she didn’t call out sick or previously request for a leave today. She just simply isn’t here to do the job she was assigned.
And now it’s your responsibility to find a replacement or risk being behind on production targets.
You find yourself flipping through rolodexes and dialing numbers until your fingers are sore. While you are busy leaving voicemails, you aren’t taking into account the person’s ability or qualifications to fill that shift, leaving you wide open to a compliance violation. The more contacts you go through, the less mindful you become. You eventually learn that no one is going to cover Jane’s shift.
After realizing you just wasted two hours and accomplished none of your other tasks, you resign to the fact that manual processes don’t solve real-time management woes. Too bad you’re stuck with paper schedules and spreadsheets.
The Time Thief
Legend has it that even if you lock your doors, the Time Thief will still find a way to steal from you. And you’ll never even realize something is missing.
Rob is always late to his shift. No matter how many alarms he sets, he finds himself sitting at the same traffic light at the exact time he’s expected to punch in. But Rob always has a plan. He sends a text to his coworker Joe, asking to cover for him.
Kind-hearted Joe, innocent of the fact that over 75% of companies lose money to buddy punching, agrees to punch Rob’s card along with his own. After all, Rob usually strolls in five minutes behind him. Sometimes ten, but it doesn’t really matter, right?
After all, the shift supervisor has little to no oversight of this manual process, letting Rob rack up minutes (and then eventually hours) of unearned time that he gets paid for.
The Curse of Unbudgeted Overtime
You’ve been warned not to fall into this trap, but you do it anyway: relying on overtime to meet demand and completely hemorrhaging your bottom line.
Even when overtime costs are an expected part of your budget, you still find yourself surprised by how much overtime you are actually distributing. It’s not some trick or spell—it’s lack of transparency.
Jenny has been out sick for a few days. You need to bring someone in to cover another one of her shifts, so you call Mike while he is on his day off. Unbeknownst to you, Jenny is actually back at work. Now you have more employees than necessary, with Mike eligible for paid time and a half for eight extra hours of work—all of which could have been prevented if you had better transparency over where your employees were with real-time schedule updates.
You’re probably among the organizations that consider roughly 27% of their overtime costs to be unbudgeted. Yikes!
The Indeavor Solution
Every good story, even the scary ones, has a hero. Indeavor can conquer ghoulish challenges like missing employees, time thieves, and overall bad labor management practices.
With Indeavor, you can automate the call out process to fill known and unknown vacancies, capture when and where your employees are to prevent time fraud, and prevent unnecessary overtime through pre-set rules and allowances.
Click here to request a demo.
Indeavor’s solution offers clients an end-to-end, cloud-based employee scheduling and absence management system. By integrating with your human capital management and enterprise resource planning systems, you can leverage a robust platform that provides you with real-time employee data. Relieve your supervisors of manual tasks and the constant mental fatigue brought upon by scheduling changes by automating the entire process, connecting the data to all of your existing corporate systems, and ensuring you always have the right qualified employee in each position.
