Insights on Excellence | "Insights on Excellence" Archive

Keeping track of who's minding the store

by Stephen Hawley Martin
for Virginia Business
May 23, 2007

Some remote business sites are not staffed with management personnel during late-night shifts, but work-force management technology can help mitigate oversight issues. Since the latest technology is real-time, it's possible to know who is on premises at any given moment. If someone has punched the clock, called in from a phone, or logged into a PC at a work location, that person is there. If they haven't; they're not.

This means a manager back at headquarters can see what's up with a few clicks of a computer mouse. Or the system can be set up to send a text message, a cell phone page or e-mail to notify management if someone has failed to show up. It can tell them who that person should have been, and who might replace him.

This feature is particularly important in certain segments of some industries. Home construction contractors come to mind, as do 24-hour convenience stores and gas stations. Employees travel to these work locations independently, report to work and begin their day. Often they are the only worker on site.

In a manual set up, the employee reports his work activity on a paper time sheet or a clock punch card that is rounded up and submitted at the end of the week or pay period. This means that on a day-to-day or hourly basis, management has little ability to monitor whether and which employees are on premises. Is the store open? Without someone there, it's hard to tell.

In some cases, residential health-care providers, for example, deliver services that may be critical to a patient's well-being, and some employee activities may literally be a matter of life and death. Failure to provide the service, or forgoing services, would put a company and its client at risk. Since it's critical that these companies do the job they've been contracted to do, such technology is a must. For retail businesses and construction contractors, not having someone on site may not be a matter of life or death, but it can cause problems and mean revenue is lost.

Managers need to know when they have a kink in the human-resource supply chain, and it must be addressed immediately. It might be compared to having a production line shut down -- it simply cannot be ignored. The visibility new technology can give into remote work locations represents a profound improvement for these businesses.

What work-force management technology can do is moving ahead at lightning speed, and it's changing the way many health care providers and businesses operate. A new book from Oaklea Press by Lisa Disselkamp, called Working the Clock, is intended to give executives insight into the many ways it can help them run their businesses more efficiently. The example in this article came from that book.

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Stephen Hawley Martin is a former principal of The Martin Agency in Richmond and the author of more than half a dozen books including his newest, Lean Enterprise Leader: How to Get Things Done Without Doing It All Yourself. He is editor and publisher of The Oaklea Press, a book publishing business dedicated primarily to helping business executives increase productivity.