Labor Management. NOW Simple.» labor management solution

7 Ways Turnover Costs You and Your Business

marketing — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 19:00:19 +0000

Management Philosophy 101 for dealing with staff turnover: The best way to reduce turnover costs is to reduce turnover.

The real cost of employee turnover is difficult to fully quantify because it is based on many variables but it is always more than you think it is.

In the restaurant, retail and hospitality industries, turnover is especially high – but, TimeForge, a labor management solution, can improve staff morale and efficiency in order to effectively reduce turnover and improve your bottom line. One way to find the cost of turnover at your business would include the following, some of which are hard to measure:

Lost productivity – Other staff members will have to pick up the slack of a missing employee, which reduces everyone’s overall productivity.
Temporary cost of replacement (i.e., contractor wages) – Some positions can be filled by others picking up the slack, resulting in no incremental expense. However, if this is a frequent occurrence, morale can suffer — leading to more turnover. Other positions will need to be filled with temporary or contract workers, which results in additional cost.
Recruiting/hiring expense – This is the literal cost of filling the position and can include search fees paid to agencies or headhunters, referral fees paid to employees, ads in newspapers, job board posting fees, etc.
Management time – Time management has to spend going over resumes, scheduling and conducting interviews, evaluating candidates and making job offers. TimeForge can slash the time spent collecting and storing a new hire’s documentation, but interviewing and evaluating applicants is a time-consuming skill that remains unavoidable.
Training costs – This includes all the costs associated with ensuring that new staff members have all the skills and tools they need to do the job.
Learning curve – The time it takes the new employee to perform at an optimal performance level.
Knowledge replacement – This is impossible to measure. Employees leave with accumulated knowledge that is hard to quantify and even harder to replace.

For an even more accurate and comprehensive determination of costs, include the following where appropriate:

Calculate the cost of training your company has invested in the employee leaving. Include internal training, external programs and external academic education. Include licenses or certifications the company has helped the employee obtain to do their job effectively.
Calculate the impact on departmental productivity because the person is leaving. Who will pick up the work, whose work will suffer, what departmental deadlines will not be met or delivered late?
Calculate the cost of department staff and include discussion on their reactions to the vacancy.
Calculate the cost of losing customers that the employee is going to take with them, or the amount it will cost you to retain the customers of the sales person or customer service representative who leaves.
Calculate the cost of drug screens, educational and criminal background checks and other reference checks, especially if these tasks are outsourced. Don’t forget to calculate the number of times these are done per open position, as some companies conduct this process for the final two or three candidates.
Calculate the cost of the various candidate pre-employment tests to help assess a candidate’s skills, abilities, aptitude, attitude, values and behaviors.
Calculate the cost of supervisory time spent in assigning, explaining and reviewing work assignments and output. This represents lost productivity of the supervisor. Consider the amount of time spent at seven hours per week for at least eight weeks.
Calculate the cost of coworkers and supervisory lost productivity due to their time spent on bringing the new employee “up to speed.”
Calculate the cost of mistakes the new employee makes during this elongated indoctrination period.
Calculate the cost of bringing the new person on board, including the cost to put the person on the payroll, establish computer and security passwords and identification cards, business cards, internal and external publicity announcements, telephone hookups, cost of establishing e-mail accounts, costs of establishing credit card accounts, or leasing other equipment such as cell phones, automobiles, pagers.
Calculate the cost of a manager’s time spent developing trust and building confidence in the new employee’s work.

Research continues to show that real turnover costs can run anywhere from 25% to 150% of the position’s salary and benefits, depending on how many of the above costs are applicable to the position.

TimeForge can help reduce your turnover by providing staff and management a superior means of communication, keeping everyone “in the know” at all times. TimeForge reduces turnover by:

No more confusion! Keeping employees from being scheduled at times they are unavailable, and communicating schedule and availability changes to staff and management alike.
Easy communication! Making online shift swaps, pickups, and time off requests a one-click process (with manager’s approval where necessary, of course)
Easily Accessible! Web-based, text message, facebook, and printable schedules, time cards, and upcoming shift reminders.
And much, much more!

The number one reason management-level staff members resign is the time, pain and high rate of error that comes with their job including constructing employee schedules – an issue that TimeForge makes obsolete. As opposed to inefficient and cumbersome Excel spreadsheets and paper logs, TimeForge will save management hours and virtually eliminate errors each week in various HR duties, including documentation/certification creation, storage and sending, schedule construction, and all of their various employee management tasks.

Money spent proactively on employee training, staff morale, career development, staff-management communication and other benefits can have significant return on investment when it leads to reduced turnover, and TimeForge reduces the time and cost associated with accomplishing these vital employee hiring and retention techniques.

TimeForge makes building schedules, tracking attendance, exporting and approving payroll and much more a fast, easy, point-and-click process. With TimeForge, your staff will communicate better, work more efficiently and eliminate costly mistakes associated with human error.

Additionally, our software makes your business more environmentally-friendly by drastically reducing paper usage, which has been shown to elevate staff morale and improve employee retention rate – employees feel good about being associated with a company that’s environmentally-conscientious.

Track Staff Certifications and Qualifications

apresley — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:45:27 +0000

As operations managers and HR professionals know, managing labor is much more than building staff schedules and managing time and attendance for employees. There are many other aspects of human resources and labor management, including:

Talent management
Tracking staff training and continuing education credits
Skills tracking and ranking
Onboarding and hiring processes
Background verification and skill assessments
Certifications and qualification tracking
Raise requests and workflow
And much more …

In many of these HR areas, we recommend that our users utilize a best of breed solution to ensure the best results for our customers. For example, Corvirtus is simply the best company around to perform skills assessments in the hospitality and restaurant industries, and we recommend our customers look at Corvirtus for any unmet assessment needs.

However, a few of the these HR areas are easily managed inside of TimeForge’s best-of-breed labor management solution. Historical raise requests, qualifications, skill tracking and ranking, and others are already available in TimeForge, and more will become available in the near future.

Let’s review employee certifications …

Did you know that TimeForge can track certifications for staff members? Using TimeForge, you can track any number of certifications (staffing qualifications), testing dates, renewal dates, and test scores. Each certificate can also include a note about the staff member’s qualification.

Specifics of a Certification / Staff Qualification

TimeForge allows savvy managers to set up certifications which are required before the staff member can be scheduled. TimeForge can then stop you and your management team from scheduling employees who are not qualified for the job position.

For example, in the state of Texas, a server (waiter) that serves alcohol needs to have taken an alcohol awareness and training course. Serving alcohol, of any kind, without this certification can land the employee and the responsible manager in jail for the evening. With a single click inside of TimeForge, managers can ensure that staff are only scheduled if they are qualified to be scheduled.

Add a Certificate, Restrict who can be Scheduled

As an added bonus, TimeForge will notify managers and employees 6 weeks before the certificate expires, so that managers and staff members both know that it’s time to renew the qualification. The certification reminder also appears inside of the Daily Log.

Use certifications to make your life easy!

Grocery Stores

apresley — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 04:18:50 +0000

Grocery management sometimes feels like juggling cats – there is a lot to do, only a few hours to do the necessary tasks, and a simple task, such as getting staff and vendors to cooperate, is tedious by itself. Labor management is only one aspect of your day, but it’s an important – and time consuming – one. Over-staff and you could lose a lot of money. Under-staff and your customers will go to another grocer.

TimeForge can cut the time spent doing routine but tedious tasks like building a grocery employee schedule or monitoring attendance at your grocery from hours to minutes. And TimeForge gives you the tools you need to painlessly do the less routine, but vitally important, tasks like fine-tuning your work force and monitoring and forecasting labor costs.

If you spend hours just creating an employee schedule, you’re not alone. It’s not easy. You have to take a huge number of factors into consideration – your employees’ specific availability, skill levels, accrued PTO, time off and shift swap requests, and the busy (and not so busy) times in that particular store.

Once the staff schedule is complete, you have to communicate the schedule to all your employees, redo it in the event of an unexpected illness or time-off requests – and find on-call employees to fill in for absent staff members. All affected staff members need to be reminded of the schedule changes, again. Small mistakes can result in missed shifts, unhappy employees (and increased turnover), or even labor fines.

With TimeForge you can …

Build efficient employee schedules for one or more locations, in just a few minutes for each store.
Export payroll to many popular payroll providers – such as ADP, SurePayroll, Paychex, Quickbooks, and others – with a single click.
Notify employees of schedules or schedule changes by text message or email – eliminating employee confusion and missed shifts and reducing turnover.
Record staff member availability, employee time-off requests, and other key information.
Stop early clock ins and late clock outs or buddy punching to provide immediate labor cost controls.
Remotely check on employees that are clocked in – using the web, Facebook, or a cell phone.
Provide remote 24/7 access for employees to view work schedules, review timecards, request time off, change work availability, swap shifts with other staff members, and receive daily schedule alerts via email or text messages.
And much more …

Your time is money. But in both flush and tight economic periods, grocery managers need to do more than manage day-to-day activities quickly and efficiently. In addition to saving manager and staff hours on scheduling and attendance monitoring, with TimeForge you can cut costs by:

Scheduling employees with the strongest skills during your busiest times.
Receive notifications of potential labor shortages automatically.
Monitoring your labor costs – in real time.
Take advantage of nearly 3 dozen different reports to keep an eye on labor costs and scheduling trends.
Using your existing staff more efficiently in order to avoid layoffs or unnecessary hiring.
Trying out various “what-if” scenarios to visualize staffing or schedule changes—without losing your original schedule.

In fact, TimeForge can help you increase grocery store profits by 3-5%

TimeForge is a complete labor management solution for the restaurant and hospitality industry, providing one-click seamless access to employee scheduling, time and attendance, and payroll reports. Use the whole TimeForge product suite, or only the parts that your business requires.

Quickbooks and TimeForge

apresley — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:30:31 +0000

You asked, and we now have it! TimeForge now integrates with Quickbooks, Quickbooks Pro, and Quickbooks Enterprise to provide a complete labor management solution for your business – whether you are operating an independent business, a franchisee or franchisor, or are part of a corporate chain.

Now, using TimeForge you can:

Create fast employee schedules with TimeForge.
Communicate upcoming work schedules and schedule changes to staff members with TimeForge.
Capture time punches (employee clock in and clock out) with TimeForge (or use one of our integrated partners – like Dinerware).
Review and approve time cards for payroll with TimeForge.
Export the approved payroll to one of our supported 3rd party vendors with TimeForge.

TimeForge supports a number of 3rd party payroll vendors, including ADP, Paychex, CompuPay, SurePayroll, Heartland Payroll, and others. Now, with the TimeForge Bridge to Quickbooks we also support Quickbooks, Quickbooks Pro, and Quickbooks Enterprise.

For more information on using the TimeForge Quickbooks Bridge, please contact TimeForge support.

The TimeForge Bridge to Quickbooks will be appearing in the Intuit Partner Software directory soon.

(Please note, exporting payroll requires the use of TimeForge Attendance. We do not support the export of employee schedules for the purposes of running payroll).

Labor Management. NOW Simple.» labor management solution

7 Ways Turnover Costs You and Your Business

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Grocery Stores

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