14 SCS:MANAGING LABOUR RESOURCES JULY/AUGUST 2009 SUPPLY CHAIN STANDARD
www.supplychainstandard.com
This is the time
when the supply
chain really
matters;
managers with
the right mix of
skills, vision and
nerve can
identify and
deliver efficiency
improvements
and cost savings
which may make
the difference
between success
and failure.
Motivation
Managing an efficient and happy
workforce is a matter of good
communications, a strong team ethos
and a great deal of flexibility. But in
these tough times how do you keep staff
motivated for the task? NICK ALLEN
Recessionary pressures are taking their toll on the
labour market. When companies cutback, inevitably
this means a reduction in headcount and that
creates a difficult situation for both management and staff.
But is the knee-jerk reaction of cutting staff necessarily the
right approach?
Nick Weetman, director at consultants Davies & Robson,
sees that on an operational level there are some obvious
ways of avoiding the need to make redundancies.
“Reducing labour costs by adjusting potentially inefficient
shift patterns and minimising overtime working is one way;
another, as we are seeing in UK manufacturing industries,
is the introduction of short-time working.”
Where there is a requirement to take people out, decisions
aboutwhereandwhentodothisneedtobecarefully
considered at the earliest opportunity. “Taking out the wrong
people, or the right people but at the wrong time, can damage
a company’s long-term competitive position,” says Weetman.
“They need to think ahead to ensure that they emerge from
the recession stronger and not weaker than before.”
When it comes to management, it is perhaps more critical
than ever to have people with the right skills in these testing
times. “Companies need to spend time, and in some cases
money, to make sure their people are up to scratch,” he says.
“This is the time when the supply chain really matters;
managers with the right mix of skills, vision and nerve can
identify and deliver efficiency improvements and cost savings
which may make the difference between success and failure.”
Weetman is of the view that, “too many companies believe
that a ten per cent reduction in activity can simply be offset by
a ten per cent reduction in headcount.” But he points out,
“this fails to take into account that they still have 100 per cent
of their fixed overheads.” In a recession, as in a growth phase,
companies need to re-engineer their assets to reflect actual
activity levels. By thinking laterally companies may be able to
redesign or perhaps redeploy underused resources.
Craig Willoughby, operations director of Consilium, the
logistics and supply chain consultancy division of Wincanton,
believes that it is important to, “identify and drive through
enhanced ways of working that are good for the employer, as
much as they drive efficiency, and good for the employee, as
much as it makes their task more realistic and achievable.”
In recent years the emphasis has been squarely placed on
retaining good staff. “This will not necessarily change just
because of the present business climate, you always want to
have well motivated, well enthused staff who are keen to do
their best for your business,” he says.
According to Willoughby, “the best way of doing this is to
make sure there are good communications with the staff – and
that’s not just at the shop floor level, that’s from senior
management down to the operational workforce.”
These days, the way that both staff and employers like to
organise themselves is to incorporate high levels of
flexibility into working practices. “The key is to have people
that are trained to flex between different jobs,” he says.
“Some businesses look to have fully flexed multi-skilled
staff right across their operation, whereas other companies
will have people who are trained for perhaps two or three
jobs within a large warehouse or logistics operation, where
they will flex between those jobs only.”
Goal setting
Many companies are more focused on productivity but,
says Willoughby, “not in an aggressive way, in a positive
way,” by implementing good productivity
measurement standards that provide really good
targeting for the teams. You get a broad mix of
approaches across the board. “They often align
with bigger picture issues within the way staff
might be managed overall; for example, the
introduction of technologies such as voice
picking which can be used to tie in with well
measured and accurate KPIs for staff
achievement and performance. This can
be used to drive enhanced productivity,
greater teamwork and better goal
setting within the staffing,” he says.
On the subject of annualised
hours, or banked hours as it is often
known, Willoughby sees that there
are both pros and cons. “It works
well for some businesses and not so
well for others. It may give the staff a
shorter day when they know they don’t
have to be there, but they have the knowledge
that they are going to have to work a longer day
later on in the week or month.
“I’ve seen some businesses where the work pattern is so
biased to one end of the year, particularly around Christmas,
that annualised hours are hard to achieve. It’s all about the
specific challenges of the operation,” he says.
“When it comes to absolutely flat profiling, where you are
looking at four on, four off, or three on, three off, that’s good if
you’ve got a very solid forecastable volume throughout the
year, where you are going to need a consistent number of staff.
But this doesn’t work so well in an operation subject to big
peaks and troughs, for instance, in a big food retail warehouse,
on say, a summer’s day when there has been a big spike in
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