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 Resource Manager, 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.

Responsibility, Engagement, Maximizing, Outcomes, and Endgames – just doesn’t cut it anymore!

Richard Mills CEO    General Discussion, Intellicate Solutions, Schedule24 Workflow Management, Shift Patterns, Workforce Factors     AXA Corporate and Benefits, Corporate Pensions, Intellicate, Maximizing Outcomes, Schedule24 Workflow Management

Things have got a little tight in the corporate pensions space. A recent call and exhortation went out for employers to be more responsible about helping employees understand and value what provision is available to them in the workplace. Paul McMahon, managing director, AXA Corporate and Benefits advanced the usual ”stimulus-response-chain” about employer responsibility, employee engagement, maximizing, outcomes, and endgames.

Citing an experiment Axa ran which put people through a week surviving only on the state pension of £95.25 – I think it was an experiment - not unsurpringly enabled them to discover people obsessed about two things money and food.

I find the hallmarks of responsible employers are also similarly obsessed about two things, running a business profitably, and meeting staff payroll. To be fair it’s McMahon job to create a market and many might agree with his conclusion:

 “Now while that isn’t an appropriate method to apply across whole workforces, there is a need for greater creativity to find the engaging and interactive communications programmes that will break the cycle of opacity and inertia that too often prevails when it comes to long-term financial management.”

…if you can find anyone that could understand it.

The AXA £95.25 experiment was cited as the most influential they ran. They actually ran a more influential one in 2009 that smashed profits by 82 percent down from 5.6bn euros to 923m euros, quickly followed by axed jobs (no pun intended) and a bar on withdrawals from once high-flying funds.

Well that’s one way of breaking the “…the cycle of opacity and inertia that too often prevails when it comes to long-term financial management.” I think it has broken it down very well.