Business after Lockdown: Where do we go from here?

BUSINESS AFTER LOCKDOWN: Where do we go from here?

With a third of the world now in some form of government lockdown, many organisations are starting to plan for “Business after Lockdown”.

Key to business planning is understanding the timeline and triggers for an end to lock down and the recovery of both social and economic activity. Whilst clearly the government is exploring a range of options, they are less forthcoming about what they are and when they might be in place. The absence of clarity creates issues for businesses trying to navigate their way out of crisis whilst avoiding bankruptcy.

Viral Pandemic: a crisis without precedent in the modern world

The reality is that we have never had such a large-scale viral pandemic and there is no precedent on how to act. At this point, no-one can predict or guarantee how and when we in the UK will emerge from this crisis, but it is important for CEO’s and business leaders to develop multiple plans based on different scenarios that can be activated immediately as the picture becomes clearer. Planning is more important now than ever before. Many businesses have effectively been put on “life support” through the UK Governments “furloughing” scheme. Once the Government withdraws the scheme, businesses need to be ready to implement their “recovery” plans rapidly or run the risk of bankruptcy.

So far only one country has emerged from a lockdown, Wuhan in china just announced that after 11 weeks the lockdown is coming to an end. Analysts have stated that within the UK the infection rate (“R nought”) is about 2.6 pre-lockdown and will potentially go down to .62 if people comply with the rules. If R0 goes below 1 then the disease will eventually die out (assuming borders are controlled) but this would likely require the lockdown to continue for 12 weeks (in line with China).

UK Lockdown: one…two…three months

Whilst the UK government won’t speculate, the 12 weeks/3-month period seems to be a recurring theme with those who are at most risk told that they will have to remain inside for 12 weeks and the government furloughing scheme initially fixed for 3 months. Other European countries have either extended their lockdown or will be slightly relaxed the rules (though most of these countries have often had tougher restrictions than the UK).

The risk of course is that if you end the lockdown too soon, you end up where you started; exponential increases in spread, a collapsing healthcare system and a huge body count. However, this must be balanced against social unrest, non-compliance and huge economic damage. Many governments are between a rock and hard place and are placing their hope on science to find a way forward.

Whilst this weekend the UK is likely to see some positive impact from the 3 weeks spent on lockdown, it is very unlikely the government will bring the lockdown to an end and Churchill’s words “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” are perhaps as relevant today as they were in 1942;

There are possible solutions, but many aren’t ready, and all come with many unknown variables;

1. Vaccine – This is unlikely to be ready for 12+ months
   
   
2. Anti-virals – Leveraging existing antivirals that could significantly reduce mortality rates and turn a deadly disease into something more akin to the flu. Whilst trials are already in progress, it is likely that it will be month or more before we know if any prove to be effective.
   
   
3. Antigen tests: Tests that confirm if you have Covid-19 would enable the government to perform community testing and to target lockdowns on specific geographical areas. However, we will not get to 100,000 tests a day until the end of April. If new tests could be available that were “instant” (it takes at least 24 hours currently) and self-administered then restaurants/airports could open to customers who test negative at point of entry, but again this technology is not available yet.
   
   
4. Antibody tests: These test if a person has had Covid-19. The government is actively exploring this option as it would potentially mean that those who test positive could be provided with a certificate and again able to work/visit restaurants and other establishments. However, so far, these tests are too unreliable to be distributed and we don’t yet know the degree of immunity – and how long it last for – in patients who have had Coronavirus.

All the above options have merit and potential but unfortunately uncertainty and – as of now – lack availability. Until these become real the government has limited options; a) Tweaking the lockdown in combination with additional measures (face masks mandated, 2 metre distancing in the workplace, mandatory alcohol gel stations), b) Progressive Herd Immunity (relaxing and then tightening lockdown restrictions to ensure that the NHS is not overloaded) or c) maintain the lockdown until the infection rate falls to such a low level that it can revert to its “track and trace” containment strategy.  

Survival after ‘Life Support’

Whilst there is significant uncertainty on how or when we will emerge, the above demonstrates that many businesses are likely to remain on “life support” for perhaps 3 months or more. But the critical business planning is what happens after lockdown. Many businesses are only surviving due to the governments furloughing scheme, but what happens when the government withdraw the scheme?

Suddenly the cash-flow issues that were “just under control” during lockdown will re-emerge again. For those businesses without a plan, they will be firefighting and without the cash to buy time to come up with an effective plan. Hence the essential need to plan for recovery and plan NOW.

For many businesses the headache will come with remobilisation of staff and the associated costs.
Every business is different, but key considerations are;

1. Training – if colleagues have been furloughed for 3 months, what refresher training will they require?
   
2. Depending how the recovery is achieved, there are likely to be changes made to the workplace (distancing), facilities (High Hygiene), and processes such as Certification checks (If Antigen tests used) and/or onsite testing.
   
3. Staffing and Scheduling. There may be a need for redundancies, part time working, phased return or annualised hours depending on the specifics of the business. This is not a simple task and requires effective planning and scheduling. Reducing the headcount or hours requires effective re-rostering to ensure the business can still serve its customers. Annualised Hours is another popular solution. It does not reduce the salary of the employee but enables the employer to vary the hours worked over the year. This enables the employer to ramp up/down the hours as the recovery takes hold.
   
4. There are many tools and technologies available which could be deployed to address these issues and enable rapid mobilisation.

HFX is a market leader in Cloud workforce management solutions with a wide range of modules including:  Time & Attendance, Flexitime, Annualised Hours, Home Worker, Access Control, Visitors’ Registration, Workforce Optimisation.

Visit our website www.hfx.co.uk or call us on 0333 447872 for more information

Remote Working

Working from home is not a new concept, nor simply a tool for dealing with the Coronavirus. Many employers have facilitated home working to various degrees whether ad-hoc, for specific staffing groups or even as a more generic policy for staff.

With the outbreak of Coronavirus, many companies have simply extended their normal home working practices both in terms of the staffing groups or the period of time that staff can be at home.

But we are not in “normal times” and as we move to home working it is becoming abundantly clear that “working from home” also needs to incorporate “Flexible Working” and for very good reasons.

The school closures that have been mandated from the 23^rd of March mean that many colleagues will not simply be working from home but also juggling work with looking after their children. Not for a week or two, but perhaps for 12 or more weeks.

Whilst the weekend was traditionally a sacred time to spend with your family, in “CoronaTimes” families will be together the entire week. The trips out at weekends will somewhat disappear as facilities close down and social interaction becomes restricted.

Adapt to stay productive

As parents and families adapt to this new reality, they will be looking to balance their parental responsibilities (which might include a degree of home-schooling) with their work-life.  For many, there will also be a realisation that children are unlikely to comply with your request for them to quietly study between the hours of 9am to 5pm whilst you attempt to focus on work.  Those that try will likely see their levels of frustration and stress reach levels rise to such a degree that they are forced to decide between work or family. 

So, organisations need to adapt not just to Home Working, but Flexible Working. For many parents, the answer may lie in utilising their hitherto sacred weekends which now have less value, so that they can both look after their children and attend to their work. Colleagues are going to be far more effective at balancing their parental and work commitments over 7 days than the traditional 5.

Those parents who both work from  home might take a different approach and take it in turns to look after their children which might mean colleagues have a compressed week, e.g. 3 long days (12 hours) working, with 3 days looking after their children whilst their partner works.

There are many possible patterns of working that enable staff to meet the challenge of Home Working and Home Schooling. But they all require their employer to be flexible. Fortunately, Flexible Working (Flexitime) addresses this challenge. Flexitime is not a new concept and has been around for many years. What is new is the concept of combining these together to ensure staff can be productive and successful during this unprecedented period.

Technology can Help

HR Leaders need to engage with staff and provide flexible working patterns that address their specific circumstances whilst also meeting the needs of the organisation. Essential for success is the need for a Cloud based Workforce Management tool that provides managers and staff with visibility of when their colleagues are working (essential for conferencing and communication) but avoids the associated admin by enabling all colleagues to clock in remotely so that their time is automatically recorded.  The combination of flexibility and technology will ensure staff are productive whilst reducing their anxiety and stress. A New World of Work is being forced upon us through these unprecedented times and HR Leaders need to be agile and creative to help lead and navigate their organisation through these rough seas.

Resource planning during Coronatimes

The most common challenge for almost every organisation during these “coronatimes” is demand forecasting and resource planning.

Almost every business is effected with some reporting increased demand for their services or product whilst many reporting significant drops in orders.

To add more pressure, the coronavirus is likely to create unprecedented absences of up to 20% of your workforce.

So businesses are having to plan and model the potential for significant fluctuations in demand and the potential that 20% of their workforce will not be available for work.

This requires a significant amount of modelling and analysis. Just creating one model can take as long as a week to produce, but with such uncertainty around the impact of coronavirus there is a need for many models with differing assumptions. As the picture becomes clearer these models need updating based on revised assumptions and estimates.

Planning for the future has never been so precarious and now more than ever is the need for instant analysis, modelling and assessments.  

Two frequent questions are;

What if my business suffers a 30% reduction in orders? How many staff would I need, what shift patterns would they work to cover gaps in delivery?

What if 20% of my staff were off sick at any one time? What shift patterns make the most of the remaining staff, how many staff would I need to cover 20% absence over the next 3 months?

These complex calculations require more than a knowledge of the business, they require a tool that can rapidly provide detailed analysis, costing and optimised shift patterns based on the requirements or predictions provided. Some tools take months to implement and require extensive training and configuration.

However, HFX has developed “Workforce Design” that not only can be implemented in a day, provides real-time analysis of “what if” predictions and during these coronatimes, HFX is offering a consultant lead remote session using the tool to model your scenarios for you, eliminating the need for any training. The other benefit to business is that this service (time limited) will provide you with a 50 page analytics report (produced by Workforce Design) and guidance for a fixed price without the need for subscription or any on-going cost.

What Does Brexit Mean for HR?

Since Freedom of Movement within the EU came into existence through the Maastricht treaty in 1992, UK companies have had access to an almost limitless pool of foreign worker to recruit into the workplace. As more countries joined the EU, this pool grew larger and filling vacancies within the company became a relatively simple task.

There was also an incentive for EU workers to work in the UK due to the favourable exchange rate bearing in mind that most would send part of their salary back home to their families (in 2015 £1 would get you €1.4). However, since the decision to leave the UK in 2016, the pound has slipped to about €1.10 to the pound for those EU nationals repatriating their earnings back home, this represented an effective 20% pay cut since 2016.

This has removed much of the incentive to work in the UK and many EU nationals have or are planning to return to their home country. In addition, the pending border controls have created uncertainty and concern among foreign workers in terms of whether they can remain in the UK and how easy it will be to travel back and forth. As a result, high numbers are returning to their native countries in order to have guaranteed stability for their families. At the same time, the number of foreign workers wanting to come and work in the UK has dropped off for the same reason – uncertainty following Brexit.

Figures from the ONS report that EU migration is at its lowest levels since 2010 and that the number of EU nationals returning home has increased by 50% since the referendum. For organisations that have relied on EU workers, this represents a significant challenge as not only are they losing workers, but also struggling to replace those workers through traditional routes. With the unemployment rate at 3.9% – its lowest level since 1974 – the available pool of workers has reduced even more significantly. The impact of these changes is likely to be felt across every HR department with longer lead times to fill a vacancy, increased recruitment budgets and inflations busting pay reviews.

However, whilst the HR department is often left with the problem, the solution may lie elsewhere. To understand the solution, we need to explore whether the limitless supply of workers diminishes the need to improve workforce productivity, since 2008 UK productivity has flat-lined. If the UK had continued to improve productivity as the same pre-2008 levels, then we would be 20% more productive. In practical terms this means that organisations could have achieved 20% more without increasing their staff headcount.

So, what went wrong? This has yet to be entirely answered, but there is a convincing argument that during the 2008 recession many organisations stopped investing in productivity improvements. When the growth did return many organisations took the expedient route of increasing the head count which was accommodated by the pool of available EU workers. Indeed, there is some correlation between the period of productivity stagnation and increased EU workers within the UK.

Regardless of what caused productivity stagnation, the solution lies within the organisation by focusing on and investing in staff productivity. If you can improve the productivity within your existing workforce by just 5% that can reduce the need to increase headcount. As always whilst the solution may not be within HR, often it is left to HR to lead the initiative.

Often productivity is considered hard to measure and organisations find it difficult to identify the areas that require improvement, but there are 5 key areas to explore;

1. Workforce Planning: do staff rosters align to business demand? Is it such a basic question that it is more overlooked than any other factor? Often the question cannot even be answered without detailed study. In our experience there can often be a 10% productivity gain through alignment of rosters to business activity. Often the issue is that whilst the rosters were originally aligned – albeit with a bit of guess work – they were never updated to reflect the changing and evolving business activity.
2. Process and Technology: too many manual and/or cumbersome processes that consume too much time and are inefficient.
3. Training: poor or infrequent training results in poor quality (and increased rework).
4. Tools: providing the right tools to do the job is essential in maintaining high levels of productivity.
5. Staff Retention: high staff turnover impacts productivity significantly as new recruits take time to come up to speed and often require time and intervention from other colleagues.

Focusing on these 5 areas will boost productivity and ensure that more can be achieved without needing to add to headcount.

However, there is a greater prize. Companies with high productivity levels have lower costs, increased profit and are more resilient to economic cycles.

Whilst many problems end up on the desk of HR to solve, now is the time for HR to take a strategic lead and present the problem – and solution – to the wider business. At HFX our solutions are powerful tools to help you improve productivity. Contact us via email at sales@hfx.co.uk or via telephone at 03333447872 to find out how our software solutions can help your productivity. Alternatively visit: https://www.hfx.co.uk/solutions/workforce-optimisation/ to find out more.

Alpha6: Complex Rostering Reduced to Six Steps

Defining the problem:

In many organisations business activity comes in ebb and flows based on demands from their customers. Whilst this can be forecast to some degree based on orders, shipments, contracts and seasons of the year etc, there is a high degree of complexity in ensuring sufficient staff are rostered to reflect the level of activity. This complexity arises from the working rules, policies and practices that limit staff assignments; Union Rules, Health and Safety Rules, EU working time rules, breaks between shifts, maximum shift lengths, holiday rules and internal policies all constrain the ability to map the right number of staff to achieve the right level of activity at the right time.

The result is that many organisations tend to roster to meet a constant somewhere between the ebb and flow of the activity levels (if indeed they have measured these). The problem is compounded as managers often do not consider absences (such as holiday entitlement) when they device the roster.

The consequence of these omissions is that often staff are over-rostered – e.g. present when there is little or no work to be done and absent (under-rostered) when there is a high demand of work. The result is that overtime and agency workers are deployed to meet the demand or else the organisation maybe damaged in terms of reputation, Service Level Agreement or in terms of financial penalties.

One way of avoiding the risk is to factor in the costs of overtime and agency work to avoid delays but this makes the organisation uncompetitive and risks losing customers or failing to acquire new business as a result.

Fool’s Gold:
in the past electronic solutions have been developed that attempt to map shifts and rosters to demand through complex algorithms and brute force mapping. The solutions have often been expensive, highly complicated with only IT personnel able to tweak rules and parameters and often long delays between each attempt to identify the correct pattern. The systems often return unworkable rosters that will not meet union rules and are based on a singular fallacy that there is such a thing as a perfect roster. An optimal roster can still be an unworkable one based on the internal preferences and policies of the organisation. These preferences often cannot be codified in a fully electronic system and the missing element is the human factor.

Alpha6 Methodology
Alpha6 is a methodology and process that has been developed and honed over 20 years to create optimal rosters that both meet the requirements of the business and the written and unwritten rules around staff working times. But most importantly it also includes the human factor in guiding the process from each step forward. Alpha6 done manually is not pain free; it requires training, skill and collaboration from other team members.

Alpha1: Demand to Requirements
The start of the process is to identify the demand levels and translate them into requirements. Demand are the activities that need to be completed over a week broken down by between 15 and 60-minute intervals. The activity could be building a widget or packing etc. The important element is when these activities need to start (e.g. when the shipment arrives) and be completed by.

From this Raw business level view of demand, you can with knowledge of the duration each activity takes, and quantity translate these into a requirements grid. Again, this is by 15 to 60-minute intervals over each day for a week. You know have a set of requirements of how many staff you need by each 15-60 segment of the day and week.

However, there is an immediate sense check to do on the requirements grid. Staff do not come into work for just 15 minutes so we need to look at how sensible the requirements and apply some annealing – softening of the requirements.

So, for example, your faithful transposing of demand into requirements (say by 15 minutes) may show as follows: 8:15 = 5, 8:30 = 1, 8:45 = 5 – you will not be sending 4 people home at 8:30 so amending the requirements to 8:15 = 4, 8:30 = 4, 8:45 = 4 will iron out the undoable without impacting significantly either on cost or productivity

Alpha2: Constraints
Understanding and documenting the constraints will save you huge amount of time.
These include the contracted hours of staff, their holiday entitlement, average time off work due to training or sickness, the minimum and maximum shift lengths that have been agreed internally, the number of shifts that can be worked in a row, the minimum and maximum off duty days that can be used.  There may also be rules around how many nights can be worked in a row that is different from how many earlies or days.

Alpha3: Shifts and Requirements
With both the requirements and constraints identified the next process is to select a number of shifts that fit within the constraints identified that can satisfy the requirements. Without an electronic system, you will need to narrow down these shifts before you attempt this stage. In general, the process of mapping shifts to requirements is a two-way process where adapting shift start/end times and durations becomes a learning process. At the end of the process you will have identified the number of shifts and the type of shifts that meet the requirements. By aligning the shift durations and quantity you will be able to calculate the number of staff required to full fill the requirements.

Alpha4: Planning for absence
Whilst Alpha3 provides the number staff to fulfil the requirements it does not consider staff holiday, absence and training. If you need 60 staff to fulfil the requirements, then you must also factor in their holidays and cover. If staff have 20 days holiday a year then that is 1200 days holiday which is an additional 5 staff required (because cover staff also get holiday). This cover needs to be spread over the period of a year and applied to any “tension” days or shifts (e.g. it may be that staff are more likely to take off Saturday and Sundays as holiday or night shifts). You may also factor in things like training or sickness. The main calculation here is how much to plan for versus how much to deal with through overtime. In some cases, your calculation might reveal you need 4.5 people for cover. In this scenario, it might be more cost effective to roster 4 more people and deal with .5 as overtime.

Alpha5: OFF DUTY
With your completed staffing level you now start with a pattern, one week (row) for each staff member. Thus, if you have a requirement for 67 staff the pattern will go for 67 weeks and there will be 67 lines in your pattern (with columns Mon to Sun). Obviously, staff do not work 7 days a week but given the requirements we know how many staff are needed on any given day and subtract that from the number of staff calculated. At the bottom of the pattern we know the total number of off duties for each day of the pattern. The process now is to plug in the required number of off-duties on each day for each row of the pattern. However, in general the 2 golden rules are that staff prefer weekends off and want a minimum of 2 off duties in a row. A roster that has off duty/on duty/off duty is likely to be rejected by staff.  The best approach is to start from Saturday/Sunday and work backwards/forwards ensuring that all off-duties are included. Be cognisant of the period between off duties and the rules about how many on duty shifts employees should work in a row. The key point here is that staff generally care more about when they are NOT working than when they are working. Getting this right is a critical stage.

Alpha6: ON DUTY
With the Off-duty roster completed the next step is to plug in the on-duty shifts. Based on the previous steps you will know how many of each shift need to be done on each day. However, an early typically cannot follow a night shift and you need to be cognisant of any rules about how many night shifts can be worked in row.  You now have an optimised pattern that meets the business needs whilst also being employee friendly.

HFX Imperago Workforce Design incorporates and automates the Alpha6 process reducing this process from 3-5 days to 15 minutes.