News
How Businesses Can Tackle Increasing Workforce Demands
30th May 23
For many years, we have become accustomed to low inflation and low wage rises. But now we are facing an entirely different economic position and, for businesses, this comes with varying workforce demands.
Many factors have combined to create a tight labour market where it is difficult to recruit for various jobs. Additionally, high inflation is fuelling demands for wage increases.
For many businesses within retail and hospitality, national minimum wage increases have driven up labour costs significantly for those whose workforce predominantly consists of minimum wage employees.
We always recommend reviewing your processes on a regular basis (otherwise, how will you know what’s working and what isn’t?) But if you haven’t done this for a while, there has never been a better time to reassess things.
How can my business tackle workforce demands?
When reviewing your processes, you should aim to:
- Prioritise – Concentrate your time on the things your customers value most – these are the things they are most willing to pay for
- Minimise – Reduce your lost time and the amount you spend on unproductive tasks. Reassess when your team is needed most to ensure they are only present when required
- Optimise – Revise the time you spend on essential tasks by looking to eliminate, simplify and automate as many tasks as you can, ultimately freeing up your precious people resources to carry out the tasks that only they can do
Call in the experts
There is a fine balance to be struck between managing costs and ensuring you have enough staff during peak hours. If resources are too tight when you’re at your busiest, it’s likely you will lose sales as customers go elsewhere for a better service.
You need a high level of precision to successfully get these marginal calls right, meaning you therefore require a good basis for calculating the resources you need. This could include understanding how long it takes to carry out individual tasks via a time and motion study, calculating your workload in a tested workload model and using workforce management solutions to plan how resources are deployed by 15-minute intervals.
Whatever your industry, we work with businesses across a range of sectors. Click the links below to discover more about how we help:
When times are tight, every penny counts. To have complete confidence that your business is operating as it should be, call in the experts. Our in-house team of business process improvement consultants have over 50 years of cumulative experience, and we understand how businesses can boost their productivity.