A Roadmap for Managing Mobile and Out-of-Office Workforces (Michelle Lanter Smith)

A Roadmap for Managing Mobile and Out-of-Office Workforces

If there’s one universal challenge business leaders have all faced in recent years, it’s their ability to adapt to change.

The advent, maturation and broad embrace of cloud computing and the proliferation of mobile devices have fundamentally altered the business landscape. Organizations today are more agile and flexible than ever before, as “adapting to change” has moved from the conceptual into the operational phase.

Much of this change is reflected in the composition of today’s decentralized workforce. The tools to support mobile communications and in-the-cloud workflow have been in place for some time. Today, company policy and attitudes have caught up, as workforce flexibility has become a major business imperative.

Employees working out of the office will hit 26% by 2015

Indeed, more organizations are turning to distributed mobile labor for a number of reasons — from freeing them from the conventional constraints of time zones and work schedules, allowing work to be done 24/7, to shifting resources to better manage budgets and more easily deploy resources regardless of geographical location.

Industry analyst IDC divides the mobile/remote workforce into three categories:

• Office-based mobile workers;
• Non-office-based mobile field workers; and,
• Home-based mobile workers.

While there’s a huge amount of variety in all three categories, a significant number of industries rely on distributed labor — including construction, health care, building services and maintenance, hospitality and entertainment, retail, manufacturing, staffing, and energy, to name a few.

By 2015, the percentage of employees who will spend at least one day out of the office will grow to over 26 percent, according to the Work Design Collaborative.

The increasingly mobile workforce makes time and labor management an immediate and growing challenge. Keeping up with a mobile distributed labor workforce requires flexible and scalable technology designed to adapt to today’s business and workforce needs. Companies require more than time tracking — they need deeper and broader visibility into an increasingly complex, hard-to- manage workforce, from insights into employee performance to the ability to build budgets.

How to “ground” a mobile management solution

The decentralized nature of a distributed labor force makes a uniform approach to time and attendance a business necessity and a real challenge.

Within any company, diverse functional areas — from Human Resources to Payroll, and Operations to the CFO — need a solution that is not only flexible and scalable, but also delivers information and data in a manner that allows each to make critical business decision that impact the bottom line. At the same time, a time and labor management solution needs to serve the demands of a distributed workforce working under different circumstances, in different environments and locations.

Going forward, a best-of-breed solution can “future proof” your organization for the trends that will impact workforce management, specifically distributed labor, in the years ahead.

• Seamlessly aggregate data from all types of collection modes and deliver the information in an easy to understand format. Regardless of where an employee punches in, the data needs to be collectively tied together. Aggregated data allows managers and supervisors to better manage labor from a cost-savings perspective.
• Address unique payroll rules and effectively manage compliance. The solution needs to account for federal and state wage and hour laws, as well as union contracts. The ability to generate a precise, detailed audit trail that can support compliance, wage and hour disputes, and internal benchmarking and tracking is critical.
• Provide analytical data reporting from the system once time and attendance is merged into the payroll process. This helps managers and supervisors set and adjust schedules and compare staff count to payroll to determine the most effective ways to deploy labor.
• Include GPS functionality to ensure security, accuracy, and compliance. This feature naturally lends itself to mobile time, attendance, and location tracking. GPS can capture, track, and verify where the employee punched in and provide a time stamp on the server to detect and avoid time theft and unauthorized changes.
• Handle data off-line and function without cell service or Internet connectivity. The solution should be able to collect data offline, save it, and relay it once connectivity is restored.
• Deliver data in real time so managers can make time and labor management changes on the fly, as well as utilize the device for multiple functions beyond time and attendance — such as email, presentations, payroll, and communication.
• Issue real-time alerts when thresholds such as budgets and overtime are being reached, or flag instances when employees have punched in outside the authorized work area or have failed to punch in.
• Facilitate use as an employee self-service portal. Value added features such as self-service reduces labor costs for both supervisors and employees. Employees can access time punch confirmation in real time and easily access information on accrued time off and work schedules, or submit time-off requests and receive instant approval. On a business level, self-service reduces time and resource demands on Human Resources and Payroll, while encouraging employee accountability and responsibility for their time, attendance, and scheduling.
• Provide administrative functionality. While mobile solutions offer flexibility and accessibility for distributed labor, supervisors can utilize mobile solutions, such as tablets, when they are “on the road.” A tablet can deliver real-time information and serve as tool to manage and process payroll, monitor overages, or track budgets regardless of location. Transparent budgeting tools can also be applied to help manage or reallocate resources.

Time management to workforce optimization

When the employer mandate in the Affordable Care Act was deferred to 2015, many companies decided to shift their focus from “head count” issues to what they considered more immediate workforce concerns (though prudent organizations are implementing tools now to “game plan” potential scenarios if/when the employer mandate takes effect). But today’s distributed mobile workforce makes efficient management an immediate and growing challenge.

Indeed, the challenges require more than traditional tracking a fragmented, decentralized workforce. They require a configurable solution built around a host of best-of-breed criteria, including: centralized deployment with the ability to serve all locations, accurately track and manage labor expenses in real-time, integrate with ERP/HRIS, facilitate compliance, and guard against unauthorized changes.

Just as we’ve moved from preparing for change to managing change — which is to say, managing distributed workforces — organizations now need to think about “optimizing” distributed workforces.

Optimizing distributed workforces goes beyond time and labor management, and extends to monitoring tasks, tracking transportation and managing work orders.

In sum, it’s about giving organizations visibility into an ever-shifting landscape, enabling them to better evaluate the performance of individuals and “virtualized” business units, and more accurately correlate budgets based on real-time workforce data.

Michelle Lanter Smith brings 20 plus years of leadership to her role as Vice President of Marketing at EPAY Systems. She previously served as CEO of Hi-Impact Marketing & Sales Solutions, an integrated marketing agency, and as Chief Strategist at Brillante Multicultural Marketing Group, a multi-cultural marketing and PR agency. She got her start as an IBM Marketing Manager.

The Warning Signs of a Highly Disengaged Employee (Cord Himelstein)

You can, of course, tell yourself it's not your job to engage your employee - that's what their salary is for.  If it isn't worth your while to motivate your team, though, don't get mad when you fall behind competitors who do.

The Warning Signs of a Highly Disengaged Employee

The world is an unhappy place when you don’t like your job.

Job dissatisfaction is the gateway to disengagement,disengagement leads to lowered performance, and lowered performance affects your bottom line.

However, if an employee is disengaged, they rarely verbalize it to their manager — which is a problem. Managers must not only be able to recognize the non-verbal cues of disengagement, but also take steps to re-engage the employee in a positive way.

4 signs of employee disengagement

How can you tell when an employee is unhappy at work? The warning signs are fairly obvious:

• An “I don’t care” attitude – Coupled with lower productivity, employees that illustrate less interest or care for their work activities or their organization’s overall mission are likely disengaged.
• Increased tardiness or absences – An employee who exhibits a pattern of tardiness or absences is most likely disengaged, indicating a decreased motivation to get tasks completed. Or, they could be looking for a new job.
• Declining quality of work – Failing to meet deadlines, or meeting deadlines with sub-par work on a regular basis shows that an employee is less committed, especially if you know them to be capable of better performance
• Permanent mood swings – A once happy employee that slips into a persistent negative attitude might be having a bout personal trouble, or they might be disengaged. Either situation is detrimental to the workplace and must be addressed.

Putting them back on the road to happiness

Realizing the first signs of discontent can help you identify a disengaged employee and take the necessary steps to try to get them back on board – starting with engaging them on a personal level.

It’s important for the manager to be a good listener in these discussions, as unhappy employees may find it socially awkward to air their grievances, or they may fear repercussions for speaking up.

Make them feel safe from those things and have a candid conversation that gets to the root of the issue — it will put them on the road to happiness.

This was originally published on the Michael C. Fina blog.

Cord Himelstein is the VP of Marketing and Communications at Michael C. Fina, a leading provider of global employee recognition and incentive programs headquartered in New York that has been family-owned and operated since 1935. Contact him at chimelstein@mcfina.com.

The Three Cs of Implementing Strategy (Scott Edinger)

Now, if he'd done this as an infographic, everyone would be on board!

Three Cs of Implementing Strategy

Ask most organizational leaders about their areas of focus and you will hear that strategy is among their highest priorities. Unfortunately, too often leaders pour their energy and resources into formulating strategy and spend too little time figuring out how to implement that strategy throughout the organization.Strategies are frequently created, perhaps not in an ivory tower, but often at a nice resort or conference center, by a small group of people who have been well fed and cared for in the process. Those strategies are typically beautiful, and display particularly well in PowerPoint. (I’ve never seen a strategy fail in the boardroom.) Unfortunately, most leaders fail—not in the formulation of strategy, but in its implementation.

To successfully execute an organization’s strategy, it must be the focus of every person in that organization. It is up to the leaders to create, monitor, and reward that focus as it is expressed. So how then do you provide the leadership required to implement strategies in a way that allows them to come to life in each corner of an organization? I offer that if you pay attention to the Three Cs of strategy, you will be well on your way to success in this endeavor.

Clarify your strategy: All too often, strategies are expressed as high-level statements that resonate with board and executive levels but fall flat with mid-level and frontline personnel. Unfortunately, if people don’t understand the strategy, they are unable to connect with it. So the first step is to clarify your strategy in a way that people in your organization can rally to support its implementation. Done well, this strategy will tie together your goals and objectives and clearly explain what you intend to do. In their book “Top Management Strategy”, Ben Tregoe and John Zimmerman offer a very useful definition of strategy, calling it, “the framework which guides those choices that determine the nature and direction of an organization.” Most importantly, try to stay away from “corporate speak,” or “bureaucratize,” which Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines calls “difficult to understand and boring.”

Communicate your strategy: I’ve never encountered an organization where I heard from people that we communicate too often or with plenty of clarity. So then, communication is the second C. Powerfully communicating the essence of your strategy at every level of the organization using multiple mediums is the key here. (Don’t expect the posters you had made up to do the job.) Use internal blogs and message boards, brown bag luncheons, podcasts, and department meetings to communicate what the strategy is and how everybody’s work is informed by that strategy. Discussions need to occur at each level, translating the organization’s strategy to understandable and contextualized sound bites, which connect to the work of individuals. In short, communicating the strategy provides the “connective tissue” throughout the organization that helps people understand the big picture.

Cascade your strategy: If strategy is “what” you do then tactics are “how” you do it. And if you want your strategy implemented well, you need to cascade it throughout the organization and get to the practical and tactical components of people’s jobs every day. Ideally, you will involve your managers in this process, and they will help to translate the elements of the strategy for your organization to their own functional areas. Doing this allows them to develop and own the process of cascading the strategy and designing implementation plans with high likelihood of execution. Cascading strategy is the proverbial rubber hitting the road. The bulk of the work in implementing strategy is done at this stage. It is the team meetings, the one-on-one coaching, the process improvements, the customer meetings, and the responses to the market that, in alignment with an organization’s strategy, can make a tremendous difference for an organization.

The pace of business shows no signs of slowing down and the competition in any sector isn’t getting easier. But effectively implementing strategy can be a source of competitive advantage. Try these Three Cs and see if they help.Leaders from Fortune 500 companies to small not-for-profits must be armed with the ability to effectively implement the strategies of their organization, all while juggling 100s of emails and voice mails, and addressing the exigencies of the day.  Because implementing strategy is not additive work for the leader. It is, in fact, their pivotal job.