Never has the need for businesses to offer the best and most flexible employee experience been greater.
This was the message ringing loud and clear from the 2018 edition of Stockholm’s Workforce Management Day. Employee flexibility is all too often equated with lower productivity and increased costs. In particular, business owners and managers fear logistical headaches and wasted hours spent wrestling over spreadsheets.
We believe the opposite to be true. With the right tools and technology in place, flexible working can allow businesses to improve productivity, save time, reduce costs, improve employee retention and boost employee happiness.
And this was the theme for this year’s event ‘Happy Workforce - Happy Business.’ Throughout the day, guests heard from a range of industry experts, workforce management specialists and Quinyx customers who covered everything from how having successful employees creates a successful business through to the different strategies, processes, systems and tips that make for great workforce management.
After such an inspiring and insightful day, it’s been hard work to whittle down our key takeaways but here are our top 5 learnings from Workforce Management Day:
1. Create kick-ass schedules
Here’s some eye-opening statistics for you: 4 out of 10 employees are considering changing jobs because they’re not satisfied with their work schedule while nearly half of part-time employees rank a good work schedule higher than their salary when it comes to the importance of enjoying their job.
The generation now in the workplace place a greater value on flexibility and have completely different demands on expectation on working life than we’ve seen previously. Yet, these hourly workers are the ones least likely to get flexibility.
The key to unlocking this flexibility is using technology to create, communicate and change schedules. Quinyx Founder & CEO, Erik Fjellborg, told the audience we should all take responsibility for the digital employee experience and we should make it a priority to meet the needs of our workers. He invited the audience to see challenges as opportunities and to lead the way in creating a ‘best in class’ flexible employee experience.
2. Build heroes
Lisa Ekström, Speaker, Coach and Founder of Kamoja, taught us how to build results by building heroes. We see heroes everywhere - whether in movies, in video games, or even in the workplace. Lisa told us how, by setting aside time for structured reflection, we can become heroes ourselves and help others fo the same.
Through the simple act of trying to be the best version of ourselves we can help others around us do the same thing. We’re all heroes in our own story and we all have the power to make those around us too and create an environment where people feel empowered, engaged and like they are contributing to a greater whole by making a difference.
3. Embrace your ‘bing bang boff’
We love ‘bing bang boff!’ If you’ve never heard the expression before, then take 2 minutes to watch this video and listen to the brilliant Belynda Maquis-Mondesir from London City Airport. So what is bing bang boff? It’s the art of making things simple and everything working as it should do with minimum effort.
Michael Spiers, Chief HR Officer at London City Airport, told us how they embraced technology to reduce the errors they were seeing in scheduling, payroll and overspend on overtime. By getting the basics right first, they are now in a position where everything they need is one place. It really was a simple as bing banf boff!
4. Do things differently
Whatever industry we’re in, it’s easy to do things a certain way because that’s the way they’ve always been done. At Workforce Management Day, Jeanette Tax, HR Manager at Swarovski Benelux and France, told us how, by being prepared to do things differently, Swarovski have been able to give more to their workforce, 80% of whom are Millennials or Generation Z. They provide a work environment that offers personal development, control and freedom. And they do this by using technology and software.
You can listen to this webinar and find out what happened when Swarovski brought mobile tech into the workplace.
5. The future is here
At Quinyx we never sit still. Our mission is to create a smiling workforce and that means having a product that makes people smile too. Carl Geijer, Product Manager, Quinyx, showed us a demo on the latest Quinyx functionality, as well as providing insight into Quinyx's product strategy. We listen a lot to our customers and their wishes, so Neo (Quinyx’s new interface and operating system) is to a large extent based on user needs. With Neo, the user experience will be smoother, slicker and faster, helping our users do more in less time. You can find out much more about the development of Neo here.
If you’d like to find out more about Workforce Management Day, as well as checking out some more great content and videos from the day, then please visit our special ‘WFM Day Hub’ (NB: most of the content is in Swedish!)
Alternatively, why not download are Ultimate Guide to Workforce Management and see how better workforce management practices could benefit your business.
