Schedule24 Standard 4.6 Now Available

DevTeam    Intellicate Solutions, Schedule24 Standard     Google Calendars, ICalendar, Intellicate, Outlook calendar, Schedule24 Standard 4.6 Now Available, Schedule24 Update, Yahoo calendar

Schedule24 Standard 4.6 has been released! We’ve finished updating Schedule24 Standard based on our customers feedback. The new version is now available to all licesned customers of 4.x via the update site. Not surprisingly, one of the most frequent requests from Schedule24 Standard customers is for breaks, and until now,  only available in the Professional edition — not any more! While working on the above, we thought it a good idea to also include and enhance some additional functionality, see below.  If you’re not yet a customer, there’s no better time to start a free trial of Schedule24 Standard, the #1 staff scheduling software for business teams.

If you’ve already got Schedule24 Standard, here is a quick guide to the new features:

• iCalendar enables shift times, assigments and vacation information within Schedule24 Standard to be sent via email to staff’s personal calendars, such as Google, Yahoo and Outlook.
• Scheduling breaks within shift times is now possible in Schedule24 Standard. Breaks can be included or excluded from hours and time calculations. Helping you see and track the ‘true’ cost.
• Advanced business reporting is now available in Schedule24 Standard choose from 15 new reports; time sheets, sickness, vacation, block schedules and many more.
• Import staff information into Schedule24 Standard from other applications  and sources. Support for Quickbooks, CSV and other formats.
• Flexible licensing only pay for what staff you schedule. Schedule24 Standard now supports as little as 25 staff per schedule and up to 400 staff per schedule. Remember, you can create and modify unlimited staff schedules within every version of Schedule24 Standard.

More information and a fully functional trial is available from the intellicate website.

We hope you enjoy using Schedule24 Standard 4.6, and look forward to hearing your feedback.

The Schedule24 Team

Intellicate Announces New “Phased Return to Work” (PRtW) Service

admin    General Discussion, Intellicate Solutions, Phased Return to Work     benefit, businesses, employee, HR, Intellicate, phased, Phased Return to Work, phased return work, prtw, services, solutions, work, workforce

Acclaimed workforce solutions provider helps businesses and employees achieve a smooth transition after a period of absence.

As budget-conscious companies look for creative ways to reduce employee turnover, cut back on training costs, and boost team morale, phased return to work (PRtW) has become a quickly growing trend. Billed as a progressive workplace benefit, PRtW is designed to smooth the transition after an employee has been out of the office for an extended period of time due to illness or injury.
With PRtW, the employee resumes his or her work schedule in increments. With approval from a supervisor, HR department, and/or physician, work hours are gradually increased over a pre-defined time frame.

In March of 2010, Intellicate added a PRtW service to their repertoire of workplace management services. As a leading provider of top-notch workforce solutions, the London-based company specializes in effective schedule management. Their flagship product, Schedule24 Professional, helps employers achieve maximum efficiency in staff allocation and management. With PRtW, Intellicate expands their offerings to accommodate this new development in workforce optimization.

Benefits of PRtW
A growing number of organizations, HR professionals, and medical providers are recognizing the long list of benefits that can be achieved by PRtW. When an employee resumes his or her workload gradually, he or she is less likely to suffer a relapse or enter a state of “burnout”, resulting in enhanced efficiency and productivity.

In a time of heightened awareness of labor rights and a surge of lawsuits, implementing PRtW helps to reduce the frequency of litigious employees and workplace discrimination claims. Phased return to work also ensures a higher level of accountability and knowledge for all parties involved.

“HR chiefs believe the note will inevitably lead to disputes between employers and staff,” says Tim Mills COO of Intellicate “Our PRtW services at phasedreturntowork.com significantly reduce the probability of conflicts.”

How Intellicate Can Help
By adding PRtW services to their offerings, Intellicate has allocated the resources and expertise to help small and mid-sized businesses manage all aspects of the process:

• Customizing a flexible but clearly defined PRtW program for each company
• Counseling employers on how to offer PRtW without compromising their existing operational policies or goals
• Balancing employee capabilities with organizational needs to minimize risk
• Creating detailed written PRtW plans for re-entry after a period of sick leave

As proven leaders in workforce scheduling strategies, Intellicate works with companies to create effective phased schedules designed to benefit the interests of all parties. Their expert HR outsourcing team provides insights and guidance along the way. “Dame Carol Black, the health expert who advocated this revolutionary approach, warned the fit-note won’t work without more detail,” Mills notes. “We’re providing the employer and employee with the kind of detail they can action together in the workplace”.

About Intellicate
With partners in Australia and the United States, Intellicate provides software and services to clients around the world. Schedule24 Professional is a registered trademark of Intellicate. Learn more about their world-class workforce solutions at www.intellicate.com.

Payroll records for work hours is no protection

Richard Mills CEO    Intellicate Solutions, Schedule24 Workflow Management, Shift Patterns, Workforce Factors     companies, EECWTD, Employee Scheduling, European Economic Community Working Time Directive, Intellicate, payroll records, scheduled work hours

A UK company was fined £54k (including £24k costs) for health and safety breaches which directly contributed to the death of an employee in a road traffic collision. Briefly the facts leading up to the fatal sequence of events included the driver working 11 days without a break, and three days before the accident had recorded 19 hours a day. Evidence was presented to show this was not an isolated incident and involved other employees.

Opting out of legislation e.g. European Economic Community Working Time Directive (EECWTD) does not mean you opt out of health and safety issues or duty to exercise care. This catches a lot of employers out. Recording working hours for payroll is a post event process for accounting. It has nothing to contribute toward exercising a duty of care. In short a company that wishes to discharge a duty of care has to demonstrate working hours are planned and scheduled not simply recorded. Scheduled work hours can be used for payroll, but not the other way round.

The irony is companies who say they use payroll records for working hours management when things go wrong probably don’t realise these records are the first port of call for the prosecutor not the defence.

Workforce schedule optimization is not compromization

Richard Mills CEO    Schedule24 Workflow Management, Shift Patterns, Workforce Factors    

One of the inputs we spend some time is demonstrating just how big a problem optimizing a workforce schedule is. In fact it is such a big problem and so expensive to achieve, examples are very hard to find – except for the most trivial scheduling problem. So why does everybody seem to offer this as a standard feature in workforce scheduling. Well in the main it is just a lazy use of marketing words. It sounds compelling, exciting and you know ‘you only get what you pay for’. That’s why you need very deep pockets, and a great deal of time on your hands to have a better than even chance to achieve that optimized workforce schedule.

An optimized schedule is the best possible solution available. First you need know all the factors that will define the pathways to be optimized to reach a defined goal. The more factors the bigger the problem to be solved. Even a handful of factors can generate a problem space that is measured in orders of magnitude. Put another way, defining the optimization model can be harder than doing the scheduling in the first place. Second, because there may be more than one solution you need to know all the solutions that are possible. These kinds of problem can take a very large computer a very long time to do this.

Another problem is we may decide what an optimum model is for staff headcounts and how they are distributed over a time range. Alternatively there may be a series of desirable goals for a staff day-on day-off working pattern. As more constraints are added the problem becomes easier to work out but the net result is what we considered optimum for one category is ruled out as new constraints for another category of information is added.

For example, the following goals ‘had to be’ achieved for a clients workforce deployment strategy. Not because they were desirable, but they had negotiated and signed off union contracts before realizing whether it was even possible:

• between 4 and 6 consecutive work days
• between2 and 3 consecutive rest days
• an exact number of days off in a pay period
• one weekend off and one weekend working in 4
• and at least one weekend day off in 3
• reduced staff at weekends

This occupied an HR team for a period a little over 7 months with no result. Using an intelligent agent designed to understand among other things the problem space of weeks in the context of week days and weekends completed the problem in 35 minutes. Out of a problem space of unknown size 4,712 candidates were identified as possible solutions. Only 13 of those solutions succeeded for further consideration.

Contraint scheduling can be contrasted with heuristic scheduling which promises to provide very good solutions most of the time. And a lot quicker and a lot more cheaply but that can be discussed another day.

Two things in conclusion.

• Don’t agree to something you don’t understand in the context of workforce schedules, you will invariably underestimate the problem; and
• When it comes optimization you probably are not getting what you pay for.

For more information about you staff deployment strategies contact Group Senior, Workforce Scheduding at Intellicate

When it come to workforce scheduling flexibility should not mean confusion.

Richard Mills CEO    Intellicate Solutions, Schedule24 Workflow Management, Shift Patterns, Workforce Factors    

I often get asked the question what is it about scheduling that makes it so hard. I always answer Workflow! That more than anything is what defines good staff scheduling from bad. One problem is the format and publishing of schedules is often similar e.g. staff down the left and dates across the top – with perhaps some frequency counts at the bottom. This almost universal format is efficient, conveys a lot of information and is generally understood just by looking at it. That is why formatted spreadsheets and most staff scheduling software appear to do the same job.

However the effort and time to achieve something as familiar as the workplace schedule can be as different as ‘chalk and cheese’. It is workflow that makes the difference in the quality of workforce scheduling. If someone told you they had a ’system’ that was totally flexible, gave you complete control to do what you wanted, and above all cheap – even free – most jump at it. That’s exactly what a spreadsheet offers. However there is nothing stopping you doing something dumb. In fact you can even make a staff schedule that can’t possibly succeed look good – until someone else, usually operations, use it.

If all you are bothered about is just getting something out, and ultimately it’s someone else’s problem on the day (so much the better), that might be OK for some managers – though in a business serious about operating costs they are not managers for long.

The relationship between staff hours, costs and timing of shift patterns allied to a business requirement is complex. Without workflow you are unlikely to arrive at a satisfactory solution. Worst of all you are destined to deliver different workforce scheduling outcomes even when the problem remains the same. With workflow you get flexibility, without it you get confusion.

Night shift a causal link to significant risk factors.

Richard Mills CEO    Intellicate Solutions, Schedule24 Workflow Management, Shift Patterns, Workforce Factors    

Research has established a causal link among night shift workers and the incidence of metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome is a condition that presents a significant risk condition for high blood pressure and heart disorders among others. The research published by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) provides the evidence for what many already ‘feel’ about night shift work.

The aim of the study was to find out if night shifts actually increased risk. Development of MS was found to be significantly higher in night shift healthcare workers than in daytime healthcare workers. And it’s not about getting more sleep, which may also be associated with the syndrome. It appears the evidence is pointing to irregular sleeping patterns rather than sleep deprivation as a contributing factor.

The study was carried out on heatlhcare workers, and this study cannot be generalised to other workplace activity. However there was large participation to the study, involving almost all eligible workers and a very stringent selection criteria which ensured only subjects without any component of the syndrome were included.

The findings will have a strong impact on health policy for shift workers. Policy goals would likely include counselling staff working night shifts, appropriate medical surveillance and, if necessary, changes in work schedule for workers in case of persistence or progression.

Original research: Incidence of metabolic syndrome among night-shift healthcare workers. A Pietroiusti, A Neri, G Somma, et al. Occup Environ Med 2010 67: 5457

New research support phased return to work (PRtW) strategies.

Richard Mills CEO    Schedule24 Workflow Management, Shift Patterns, Workforce Factors    

Most agree that good employment practice for phased return to work (PRtW) after ill health or injury is a good thing. However until now, research in this area has been sketchy at best. PRtW strategies tend to be overlooked, perhaps because it is regarded as part of usual care and not worthy of evaluation. Well that’s changing fast.

With a UK Government committed to clearing over a million people off the benefits list back to work and businesses generally looking very hard at reducing staff costs, it is not difficult to see where the crosshair focus is going to fall. What is certain, simple expedients about ‘fit to work’policies, stated or otherwise, will expose a clumsy business to risk. Even the proposed ‘fit note’ to be issued by GP’s might or might not facilitate clearer defined thinking about phased return to work strategies.

The support for the principle of PRtW is probably universal. Take the case of Mrs A for example:  

Mrs A is a 55 year old administrator. She is contracted to work 37 hours/week over 5 days, mostly seated at a workstation using display screen equipment, with one or two on-site meetings to attend each week.  She is returning to work after an eight month absence for cancer.  During this time she underwent major surgery followed by several months of anti-cancer treatment. She is keen to return to work.  Her doctor supports this and writes to the employer advising that she still suffers from fatigue and would benefit from a phased return to work…

No one I know would hesitate one moment to support Mrs A back to work. However, when the letter lands on the employers’ desk it will not be a person that decides on the PRtW that leads to a good outcome. It will be policy. And while policy does not have to be complicated just about everything suggests this will be, especially when we continue to use simple expedients.

For example, because it’s habit, we almost always think about weeks in even numbers which extends the time away from work. Because non-standard work patterns are hard to implement and maintain, it is easier to “let go” or worse still decide on a PRtW that is easy to manage rather than being any good. From the available research findings it seems the psychosocial factors are set to be the greatest obstacle to PRtW than the medical factors.

First, feedback communication will modify the habit of rounding up weeks in even numbers reducing the time away from work and alienating the employer. Second, access to working patterns which can be integrated into standard working practice, and which facilitate PRtW strategies for a range of biomechanical or medical factors can be made available. When validated by an occupational physician they can form part of policy robust enough to help reduce time, costs and even the kind of uncertainty for Mrs A we do have power to do something about.

Consensus about the importance of employer’s policy on PRtW was also found to be weak among those likely to be involved. This is not unsuprising given what policy is available is ambiguous and relies largely on individual opinion; and in particlular, there was strong disagreement that advising on PRtW is primarily a management/HR function.

Therefore communication can quickly breakdown when implementing PRtW, especially when ownership is either claimed or thrust onto one group (e.g. it must be an HR problem), or process  excludes another (e.g. their manager).  Research has consistently demonstrated, unless measured, managers expressing a policy about what they say they do often bears little resemblence to what they do in practice. PRtW may be a strategy waiting for HR to take the lead. The workplace is being re-defined by market forces, government policies and labour laws. PRtW is a people thing and that alone is a good enough reason for HR to get this right.

The author of the original research Dr Matthew Mills BM BS MRCS(ed) AFOM is a Consultant Occupational Physician at Premier Occupational Heathcare.

Use it or lose it – Lyons v Mitie decision on annual leave.

Richard Mills CEO    Intellicate Solutions, Schedule24 Workflow Management, Shift Patterns, Workforce Factors     12 hour, 24 7, AXA Corporate and Benefits, companies, employees, Intellicate, Schedule24 Professional, Schedule24 Workflow Management, scheduled work hours, shift pattern, staff, work

The UK Employment Appeals Tribunal (EAT) in the case of Lyons v Mitie found the employer is entitled to require sufficient notice from staff to take holidays, making it the employees own problem if they do no use their annual leave. This brings much needed clarity to a thorny problem. There is a big difference between scheduling leave and recording leave. If you don’t know the difference this will help get your management straight.

Some years ago a colleague – a very conscientious hardworking staff member – was boldly declaring she enjoyed 50 leave days a year! Naturally as everyone else only had 25 days leave a year I wanted to know what was going on. She pointed out somewhat dryly that she enjoyed not only her own 25 vacation days but a further 25 days at work when her boss was on vacation. As her “boss” I had to admire this stoical point of view.

We are approaching that time of year where many are thinking about vacation and holiday. It is also the time managers get caught out when discovering key personnel are away presumably enjoying themselves. Of course “key” redefines itself at this time. It won’t be the first time the absence of the quiet conscientious worker in a “small” part of the process brings the whole system to a grinding halt. In the main “weightier” process is brought into sharp focus as auto-responders hit the network heralding re-alignment of project schedules and business goals. They also reveal the staff who could keep things on course also “jetted” out a few days earlier. Workplace tension increases, blame culture kicks-in and the unstated implication of the “I’ve already paid my deposit” riposte is uttered in hushed tones over the water-cooler.

When staff encounter large chunks of leave, “ring-fenced” several months, if not a year earlier, for popular holiday periods they feel aggrieved. Facing little pity from others who got their vacation schedule sorted “in good time” only makes resentment worse. Nevertheless managers learn to live with a few irksome weeks of leave “grabbing” and figure out how to make up later. Eventually the popular holiday periods are out of the way, staff get back and settle down to business. If only it was that simple. Staff who have worked all through the holiday period now take their banked vacation for an out of season group soirée. Vacation and leave scheduling can be an all round year nightmare.

Poor vacation or leave scheduling can raise staff temperature that will keep them warm right through the winter months and into the following year. If that isn’t bad enough it can be more serious for the business. Missed deadlines, extended time to market and frustrated customers. Without a proper system of vacation scheduling managers may learn to ignore staff resentment, or even the wrath of senior management. Few managers however can learn to ignore the pincer grip of both.

Being caught like this need not happen. Good vacation or leave scheduling involves planning ahead and that much seems obvious. It is the context of other business goals and workplace scheduling that is often missing which leads to these conflicts. Simply recording a vacation balance against a staff leave entitlement is not good enough. All that does is tell you when someone can’t have anymore vacation or leave. Similarly the easy to use 10% rule doesn’t really help. The vacation or leave criterion can be met but a combined absence from the same key group can still paralyse those left behind until staff get back.

The following suggestions hammered out of workplace experience can make a big difference for the manager assailed throughout the year with vacation and leave conflicts. First make sure it is your job. There is a simple test for this. Do staff put vacation or leave requests to you for approval? If the answer is yes it is your job, if the answer is no then it isn’t. The practice of submitting leave requests through line managers that do not approve leave is a confusing and useless practice. Managers who manage approve leave. Summer is approaching so get it sorted at the next management team meeting.

Get a vacation schedule in place
You need to align your vacation scheduling alongside other information about staff organization and workplace schedules e.g. departments, teams, shifts, and assignments. It doesn’t have to complicated and will provide a proper context for approving vacation or leave.

Make sure public holiday dates are flagged well ahead of time
These are traditional magnets for leave requests. They often get overlooked, especially by staff that don’t have children of school age around providing a constant reminder about the annual holiday schedule. When staff suddenly “discover” they have an “extra day off” it is commitment, for the manager it is inconsiderate. A pity when you are working just as hard simply not to notice.

You need to know how many staff are requesting leave at the same time
The only thing going for the 10% rule is it’s easy and has the appearance of fairness. Ironically it is usually present when there is nothing else. Looking at dates is useful, knowing which days of the week is better. Dates are used for records; days are used for planning, so use both to get proper context. If you must use a 10% rule be prepared to be flexible. There is nothing more frustrating for staff than to be denied a vacation or leave opportunity that does not impact the business.

Identify leave requests as first round and second round choices
When it comes to vacation or leave at popular times of the year staff want to know they are being considered. A system of first round choices followed by second round choices enable more staff to enjoy some of their vacation during popular holiday periods. Staff will often work out arrangements with colleagues before even involving you. What hurts is when they don’t get considered at all and fall victim to some ill-thought out “seniority” policy, or 10% rule that can be both inflexible and unfair.

You need more than an outstanding leave balance
A simple calculation about leave taken and leave outstanding is not that useful. You need to track both leave that has been taken, and when leave has been scheduled but not yet taken. This will avoid a rush of unplanned vacation and leave requests toward the end of the year as time runs out. Hard working staff just may not realise how much leave they have left. Even if they don’t thank you they will understand the sense of what you are trying to do.

View vacation and leave status by defined group
For a manager it is more important to view vacation or leave status by department, team or job groups rather than by individual staff. Even when the overall number of requests is within limits approving staff leave from one particular team or job group can severely impact the rest of the business.

Make it a routine not an anniversary
You need to have access about the status of vacation when you need it. It should be part of your weekly if not daily management routine. Not two or three times a year when it is already causing a problem that takes several hours if not days to sort out.

Vacation is important and for many it is special. It doesn’t just affect the staff themselves but the people they plan vacation and leave with. Vacation and leave scheduling directly affects how staff think, feel and perform for the organization well into the following leave year. On the other hand don’t expect staff to point out the reasons why their vacation or leave shouldn’t be approved. As a manager you may not please everybody all of the time when it comes to approving vacation and leave schedules, but you will earn respect when making better sense of it.

Tell Me Again What You Do, Exactly?

Richard Mills CEO    Schedule24 Workflow Management, Workforce Factors    

I made a passing comment in my post “Anatomy for Business Success” about business being in one of four states. This generated a number of emails asking what the four states were. I was of course speaking in the context of staff supply at the operational level. Put another way, using a well known phrase or saying, it is about having ‘the right person, at the right place, at the right time’ – though how one defines “right” in any one of those contexts is a complex combination of no problems.

One HR professional told me all workforce scheduling is about is standard supply and demand. I agree. I also think with a 30% satisfactory outcome in most cases we are not very good at it.

Every organization has an operations function, whether or not it is called ‘operations’. Operations in some form have been around as long as human endeavour itself, certainly a lot longer than HR. The term embraces all the activities required to create and deliver an organization’s goods or services to its customers or clients. And at the heart of operations lies a demand for management skill to schedule and deploy staff resources efficiently and effectively – whatever size of business.

One popular story in folklore tells about the day Larry Ellison (Oracle’s CEO) after listening to a stream of consciousness from one of his employees about what their job was, retorted “You aren’t building something, and you’re not selling something. So tell me again real slow – what is it you do?”

For the operations manager people are a key transforming resource (they create and deliver things). This is where the greatest gains in efficiency and effectiveness are achieved. Workforce scheduling is an essential part of the operations function. It is not an IT problem and not even an HR problem. It is an Operations problem. When operations managers’ dismiss workforce scheduling as part of their management skill, their ability to deliver efficient and effective operations is compromised and will make even a 30% satisfactory outcome look good.

And the four states? First we need to quickly define what we mean by efficiency and effectiveness. Efficiency measures the amount of time and cost required to achieve a goal; and effectiveness measures the goal to be achieved.

Here are the four states with their respective likely cost-benefit outcomes:

1. A business with more staff at higher cost will be effective but not efficient
2. A business with fewer staff at higher cost will not be effective or efficient
3. A business with more staff at lower cost will be both effective and efficient
4. A business with fewer staff at lower cost will not be effective but efficient

The Operations Managers’ ability to delivers the planning, co-ordination and control so often squeezed out by business re-engineering will by and large determine which of these four states the business finds itself. Even though it may find itself in one state, does not mean it has to remain there.

That’s why one of the first things I do, is deliver workforce scheduling to the Operations Manager’s desktop – the power behind the corporate throne. Once you enable the operations manager to have more say about how they deploy their human resources (hiring and firing – well OK that is an HR problem), a rapid and significant improvement to the business will follow.

When you think of work schedules think patterns not words.

Richard Mills CEO    Schedule24 Workflow Management, Workforce Factors    

I have been saying for some time that it not the hours you put-in and more about when and what you put into those hours that makes the difference. Industry commentators, media and politicians have exhorted flexible working and how beneficial it is to health, life and pursuit of happiness. Certainly the past 10 years has seen an overwhelming tide of comment about work life balance, flexible working and “retention of talent” (to clinch the argument if there is one), as employees seek liberation to do “better things with their life”.

It seems the economic downturn continues to redefine flexible working into something quite different – and I suspect reflects more accurately the realities of staff supply and demand. Just like the eternal nature-nurture debate in the domains of biology and sociology (or any other …ology for that matter), economics has its own business-job debate. Is a business there to create jobs? or do jobs create the business?

Having just completed a recent workshop involving both employers and employees I was impressed by the united consensus of both to have choices and the freedom to decide those choices themselves. Whatever the business-job debate once people know the choices and the means to decide they always sort it themselves.

To my mind it is not a question of one or the other – both are evident. Moving too much one way, as in any discipline, creates problems. Perhaps current thinking about flexible working is now moving back toward the business interest, after finding itself too far over to the multiple and independent interests of the job holder.

The Copenhagen Post commenting on the sweeping changes for extending shopping hours highlighted the different views about pay that always arise when working extended or unsocial hours (another convenient albeit meaningless term I confess to use myself). And this in turn is always followed by flexible working issues, as sure as night follows day – or is it day follows night.

The Danish Chamber of Commerce on the one hand ’…wish for the agreement includes increased flexibility in work scheduling – especially in the retail area, where there is a real need for better access to weekend employment’.  And on the other, HK Privat, which represents about 35,000 office and warehouse workers believes flexibility in work scheduling is a crucial right employers will have to have when considering the difficult times for business as a result of the financial crisis.

Just about everybody agrees flexibility in work scheduling is crucial to business and important to staff. Around 80% of disputes are about flexibility in work scheduling. And they drag on for a long time. The reason? In almost every instance I have been called there has not been a tangible work schedule capable of being operationally assessed by employer and employee alike to be seen (spreadsheets! – don’t make me laugh). When it comes living our lives are made up of patterns, and work is no different.