Workforce operations
Attendance, shifts, multi-site coverage and the casual workforce problem.
Workforce operations is where HR meets the part of the business that does not sit still. It is also where most HR systems stop being useful, because the assumptions they were built on — a desk, a month, a single location — stop holding.
Latest articles
Articles on this topic are on the way. The guidance below is the short version in the meantime.
The four operational problems worth solving first
Capture that suits the site
The most common reason an attendance system fails is that the capture method does not suit the site, so people work around it and the real record goes back to paper. Different sites can and usually should use different methods. Insisting on one is what causes the work-around.
Approval where the work happens
An exception resolved three weeks later is a guess; resolved the same day by the supervisor who was there, it is a fact. This is a routing problem, not a technology problem — the queue has to reach the person accountable for that unit, on a device they actually carry.
One record per person per day
Shifts that cross midnight are the most reliable source of double payment in shift-based organisations. Holding the shift as one record, and preventing overlapping shifts for the same person, removes the class of error rather than catching instances of it.
Authorisation that survives speed
Where a workforce flexes nightly with volume, controls slip precisely when engagement is fastest. Tying every deployment to a request — and surfacing shifts with no request behind them — keeps the trace intact without slowing the engagement down.
And then: the casual workforce itself
Daily engagement, high turnover, site-based supervision and attendance-derived pay do not resemble a salaried monthly process, which is why they are so often managed outside the HR system entirely. Bringing them onto the same worker record is the change that makes total workforce cost answerable.
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