Exclusive interview with HMV, Rituals and Quinyx on the frontline workforce

Released earlier this year, Quinyx’s annual report “The State of the Deskless Workforce”, shows that the impact of insufficient workforce management practices, such as poor scheduling and demand management, have had severe repercussions on frontline employees (that includes healthcare workers, lorry drivers and supermarket cashiers, warehouse operatives, shelf stackers and restaurant staff).

In fact, 2.7 billion workers worldwide are diskless – that’s equal to 80% of the global workforce.

The deskless workforce is often categorized as hourly or shift employees. They are the lifeblood of our economy and operate on the frontline every day. They are a vital part of the success of any organization and the importance of motivating and supporting them successfully cannot be overstated.

In this exclusive interview, UNLEASH spoke to senior leaders from Quinyx, Rituals, and HMV to consider the toll poor processes around workforce management can have on employee turnover and poor satisfaction levels.

The importance of making employees a priority

According to Quinyx’s report, “Higher employee retention and an engaged, less stressed workforce is fundamental to business performance. Yet, deskless workers are not being heard, and do not have the tools available to manage their own schedule.”

The pandemic has exacerbated these failings of poor workforce management for so many organizations, leading to extremely high turnover and poor retention within industries that are largely deskless. As an example, statistics in the report indicate that 54% of the deskless workforce would consider leaving a job because there was a negative work environment.

Speaking to HMV, where approximately 85% of its 1000 employees are deskless, we heard about the efforts it had made in the past, that has enabled it to ride this wave of upheaval and uncertainty.

Rupert Banning-Lover, Central Operations Manager at HMV discussed with us how they had, prior to 2017, used an internally developed rota tool, that, whilst it did the job of allowing managers to create rotas, was quite time-intensive and didn’t have any functionality to manage employee requests, which all was managed via pen and paper. Additionally, the rota was communicated via printing it off and displaying it, after which point, it could quite often and quickly go out of date.

Rupert shared that in 2017, they recognized that they needed a solution that brought them into the 21st Century and something that pulled all their scheduling communication into one place. This is when they decided to work with Quinyx.

We are now in a place where it is really straightforward to show store colleagues and management how to use the platform to the best of their ability.

Rupert Banning-Lover, Central Operations Manager at HMV

Sharing his experience of what their processes are like now, Rupert told UNLEASH that their employee engagement has really excelled, as well as the efficiency of managers in the business. Additionally, he considered the added benefits of the communications tools, especially during times of rapid and uncertain change, brought about by the pandemic.

The need for efficient practices in a rapidly growing organization

Rituals, an organization that actively prides itself on celebrating its teams’ successes and highly valuing its meaningful moments together, as a team, is a great organization to put under the microscope with their workforce management practices before their shift to Quinyx.

Ann-Christin Breuer, HR Specialist at Rituals shared her thoughts and experiences as to the impacts of poor practices:

First of all insecurity and uncertainty of data accuracy can arise when there are no clear regulations or tools for efficient workforce planning. And of course, when it’s related to payroll, that is always a sensitive subject. Secondly, it is very labor-intensive in terms of planning and managing the workforce, as well as the difficulty of adjustments and corrections at a later stage. And finally, it can result in a clear lack of control across the organization, especially when data ownership is shared.

Ann-Christin Breuer, HR Specialist at Rituals

Similar to HMV, before Rituals onboarded Quinyx, their tools were archaic and ineffective – resulting in these issues that Ann-Christin considered with us. Ann-Christin shared that in 2016, shop managers were still using Excel spreadsheets to manage their workforce’s working hours, including overtime and unsocial hours.

Now, with Quinyx’s tools in place, Rituals are much better positioned to achieve smarter employee scheduling, creating an efficient schedule for their respective stores. Additionally, “as a cloud-based scheduling application, Quinyx has enabled workforce data from local stores be available to Rituals head office in real-time.”

Keeping employees engaged is crucial

Quinyx certainly practices what it preaches. Toma Pagojute, CHRO at Quinyx explained that employee engagement has always been a top priority for them. The HR team uses pulse surveys regularly to understand the lay of the land, and then shares the feedback with the organization, making sure they close the feedback loop and maintain transparency with their employees as to the actions that are being taken off the back of the surveys.

No organization has been immune to the impacts of the pandemic though. Toma shared that Quinyx saw “a lot of fatigue, blurred lines between work and home, lack of social interaction, and physical and mental wellbeing suffered quite a bit.” In their aim to mitigate these challenges, Quinyx added some additional questions to their usual pulse surveys – things that were more personalized, like asking individuals what were they doing on their holidays. Toma also explained that they have been hosting virtual social events like onboarding days and Christmas parties, as well as weekly yoga sessions and “watercooler” sessions.

Another method that Quinyx has undertaken to manage their workforce and ease their struggles, especially in this difficult period, is to initiate a “Home Allowance” scheme to support employees to get the tools and utilities they need to work from home effectively, for example, things like office chairs or laptops.

If you want to find out more about the value of introducing a modern workforce management solution that can handle staff rostering seamlessly and encourage engagement, then get in touch with Quinyx today.