Competency and Training Management Archives - Page 2 of 2

Effective workforce management – recruitment

Posted on: 7 February 2022

Staff turnover is an inevitability in any business. As is, hopefully, business growth. When a business expands, new recruits are needed to fulfil an expanding list of tasks. Pinpointing the skills and experience required, however, can be a challenge. It can make recruitment difficult for any organisation. So, how can you best tackle recruitment, conducting it seamlessly for the smooth running of your services?

Understanding is the vital ingredient. It’s one thing knowing that you need to bring people in, but it’s a different challenge being able to swiftly pinpoint the skills and experience required to best serve your business needs. Having a bird’s eye view of your entire workforce can help.

Knowledge driving recruitment

If you have a central system that holds all the information on your workforce, it makes the task of understanding the skills, experience and competencies available to you straightforward. You can easily run reports and gain vital insight. In industries such as construction, transport and healthcare, core competencies are vital in delivering frontline services. For example, if you have a low or dwindling number of staff appropriately qualified to administer injections, it gives you an opportunity to react before service delivery is impacted.

Now, this can of course be done internally via training programmes as we touched upon in our previous blog. The same holistic view of training and competencies across your organisation is vital in making informed recruitment decisions, too.

Where staff cannot be upskilled internally, it makes recruitment inevitable. Using a central system can make the task easier for management teams responsible for recruitment, by being able to identify specific skills and experience that are needed across the organisation. Recruitment isn’t just a numbers game and shouldn’t be left to chance.

How long will the recruitment process take?

Another crucial aspect is understanding how long the recruitment process will take. Managers will need to take time out from their usual tasks to conduct interviews; what’s the knock-on effect of this? There’s also a cost implication in terms of not having enough staff available and in terms of the shifting of resources to the recruitment process.

Diverting resources is obviously a big undertaking, so understanding the consequences upon your resources, time and budgets is fundamental. Having a central view of your workforce will again help in this regard, helping to map out your resources and their allocation.

Post recruitment

Once the recruitment phase is completed and you have new staff signed up, what happens next? The first aspect is once again linked to your competency management efforts. If someone says they have certain qualifications, particularly in safety critical environments it is a good idea to check. Evidencing certificates and obtaining references can be completed by the new staff member, with the copies then stored against their record in your system. This means that you will have oversight of their skills, qualifications and experience for the duration of their time with you. This will help your scheduling teams in being able to appropriately assign tasks to them.

Once you’re satisfied that they are appropriately qualified, they will then need to be enrolled into your organisation and the teams with which they will be working. This process may include mandatory health and safety training for new starters. Assigning this and making sure it’s completed can be done centrally, with any result again being stored against their record. This can trigger alerts for when any refresher training might be required in future, too.

Most jobs have a probationary period, something that extends beyond safety critical work and helps to ensure that people are up to the job for which you have employed them for. Similarly, it enables employees the opportunity to leave with shorter notice if they decide the job isn’t for them.

Keeping track of this probationary period is crucial. Assessments and feedback of their work will help to make informed decisions on whether or not they have passed. Storing all of this information centrally helps to give your organisation a complete view of its workforce.

Once a new recruit is up and running, they will hopefully be in a position to fulfil their tasks in the way needed. Seeing them become a regular part of your workforce asap is beneficial to service delivery. This requires careful planning and oversight of your organisation.

What specific skills and experience does your organisation need? Who will be required to recruit? How much time will be needed? What processes are in place to get new starters up and running? All of these questions can be answered when you have a bird’s eye view of your entire workforce. By linking training and competency management, you can make more informed and accurate decisions.

CACI has recently published a whitepaper, Effective workforce management to improve outcomes across your business, which explores this topic in more detail. You can download your free copy here.

How competency management can underpin your workforce safety efforts

Posted on: 4 November 2021

Competency management may sound like a basic construct in the world of safety-critical work. Employees are hired, they prove that they are appropriately trained and qualified for their role and off you go. Being qualified and competent at the commencement of a role is only one aspect of competency management; a robust framework is required to ensure that all staff receive ongoing support, assessments, training and guidance for their tasks. Complying with safety protocols depends upon it.

Understanding your workforce

Having a central record and database of your workforce enables you to keep track of who is competent at what. In times of strain, for example where there might be a number of absentees at short notice (something we’ve seen regularly during the Covid pandemic with people having to self-isolate), it is crucial that you can be nimble in assigning tasks across your workforce to keep services running and projects on track.

A single view of competencies required for tasks and competencies across your workforce facilitates flexible decision making. Staff can be reassigned across your organisation, safe in the knowledge that they are appropriately skilled and competent for the task at hand, whilst remaining compliant with health and safety regulations applicable to the organisation. An easily accessible record of hours staff have worked, for example, must be maintained. Fatigue is a major cause of accidents in the rail sector and can affect staff competencies to perform their tasks. Jobs should not be allocated to staff when they have not had the required amount of rest or they will exceed a safe number of hours to work.

Central record keeping is also useful for identifying skills gaps. Where such gaps are identified, this can trigger a workflow regarding training of staff in your existing workforce and can be linked to your organisation’s recruitment efforts. This further helps to ensure that your workforce has adequate competencies to fulfil the tasks across your organisation.

Safety first

In safety critical environments, competency management can be particularly important in order to comply with safety regulations. It is vital that your workforce is regularly assessed and observed, and that where ongoing training for a role is required, it is delivered, attended and passed.

For example first aider certificates last for three years, although the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) recommend that refresher training is conducted annually. Most working environments require the presence of trained first aiders, so it is important that administrators ensure that there are sufficiently competent personnel to perform the role.

In more safety intensive environments, for example trackside work on the rail network, it is vital that all members of the workforce receive appropriate safety training and briefings to understand their equipment and environment on an ongoing basis.

Ensuring that safety briefings are delivered is crucial and then, when incidents do occur, so is the recording of them, including near misses. With a log of all activities, from briefings to incidents, it makes it much easier to gain a full view of workforce safety and to understand why incidents have occurred. This can then trigger follow-up activities such as observations, assessments and the implementation of remedial training where necessary.

Upskilling your workforce’s competencies

Having a central log of information also makes life easier for your workforce to understand their training and assessment obligations, whilst also opening up and suggesting new training opportunities to them. This helps them with their career development and helps you with broadening the competencies available to you across your organisation.

Ongoing training is a prerequisite in some roles, so using a supporting competency management software tool can help you with auto-allocation of mandatory courses and sending notifications to staff members of training opportunities relevant to them.

Where potential skills gaps are identified, you can recommend relevant courses to your workforce to encourage them to broaden their competencies, making your workforce more flexible and agile in the face of unforeseen shortfalls in staff numbers. This feeds directly into responding to short-term incidents such as self-isolation arising from Covid by equipping you with the knowledge of your workforce that facilitates quick fixes where they are necessary.

A bird’s eye view

With all competencies across your workforce logged, it is much easier to allocate relevant tasks to people in a timely and even automated fashion. A bird’s eye view of your entire workforce makes decision making much easier.

The deployment of the correct technology is crucial to this. Moving away from manually intensive processes such as spreadsheets and phone calls, to having all the relevant information made available to the relevant decision makers in an automated fashion creates great efficiencies in your competency management processes, making it simple to understand who is competent at what.

This carries over benefits to your scheduling, training and, crucially, safety protocols. It’s one thing having appropriately competent staff members when they join your organisation, but updating and upskilling their core competencies keeps your entire organisation on track in a more harmonious manner.

Having a central log of all activities and incidents also makes it much easier to schedule the necessary assessments and observations of your workforce. This central log also makes it easier to identify trends and understand why incidents occur.

Ultimately, keeping your workforce appropriately trained and competent for the tasks which they are assigned to undertake carries huge benefits to your safety efforts. If staff are being assigned to tasks for which they are not appropriately competent, accidents are more likely to occur. Having a clear evidence base and bird’s eye view of your entire workforce helps to comply with safety protocols and keep your projects moving.

For a more detailed look at improving workforce safety across the UK’s rail network, please take a look at our free white paper on the topic.

The role of rostering in workforce safety

Posted on: 3 November 2021

Scheduling your workforce goes beyond simply ensuring that tasks are being performed by certain members of staff. Of course, fulfilling tasks is a minimum requirement, but having a holistic view of your workforce, its specific skills, competencies and experience can help you to drive deeper understanding. It is also critical in understanding hours worked, where further training is required and in giving management relevant information on each staff member.

This links back to workforce safety, too. Simply by understanding hours worked and hours planned, makes it much easier to comply with fatigue management protocols for workers in safety critical environments. With real time information from out in the field recorded into a single system, overtime and over-running tasks can also be considered as and when they occur and dealt with accordingly. This includes communicating delays in good time and understanding the workforce implications on overlapping and future tasks.

Responding to short term changes

With a central pool of information to call upon, schedulers can begin to automate swathes of their scheduling, with a rules engine matching staff members to tasks based upon specific criteria. This allows scheduling and administrative teams time to focus on more cumbersome areas such as exceptions and reacting to short-term changes in the workforce.

Short-term changes have been brought sharply into focus by the Covid pandemic, with the need for people to self-isolate upon coming into close contact with anyone who has contracted the illness, or having to isolate upon receipt of notification from the NHS app. This has led to scenarios where entire teams have been out of action; something of a challenge in scheduling staff and meeting deadlines.

This was brought into focus for Northern Rail, which experienced a number of positive Covid tests across its workforce, with other colleagues having to isolate as a result of contact with them. The company had to issue a warning to passengers that services would be disrupted.

With a holistic view of your workforce, it’s much easier to see who is available to step into a role, based on their experience, qualifications and other tasks they are expected to perform. This helps to create a more fluid and efficient scheduling system that also enables you to put safety front and centre of the whole process.

It also helps to understand who has been in contact with whom, which can further help with workforce safety regarding Covid. If necessary, like Northern Rail, having a complete understanding of the workforce enables swift decision making as regards the need to amend timetables and cancel services. Having flexibility in such times is crucial to being able to make the right decision for the safety of the workforce and the smooth running of services.

Who can fill in where?

Competency management also has a big role to play here, in tandem with scheduling. It enables schedulers, where necessary, to consider personnel from other areas of the organisation who might be able to help with other tasks. Having the support of a system with a holistic view of your workforce also removes the element of human error in assigning tasks to other people.

This rounded view of competencies and skills can also facilitate the reintegration of staff members who have been isolating or have been off work. Where a colleague has stepped in to cover their tasks, they can be reassigned to other teams. Their return to work can be planned in, ensuring that appropriate protocols have been accounted for and that they’ve supplied things such as a negative Covid test before returning to work.

Rostering solutions to help

In these highly complex and fluid scenarios, a robust rostering solution is paramount in order to keep projects moving and to maintain workforce safety, with the need to be able to adapt at short notice and make best use of available staffing resources.

The deployment of a rostering solution facilitates the central recording and all-encompassing view of the entire workforce. With aspects such as auto-scheduling and auto-allocation of tasks, it frees up schedulers’ time to work on exceptions and deal with issues as and when they arise. As we’ve seen, it helps to be in a strong position to react to unforeseen circumstances.

CACI’s Cygnum software is designed to do all of this. We help transport operators to schedule their workforce and understand their resources, bringing scheduling, training and competency management together in one place. This helps to not only schedule and understand workforce patterns, but to implement training and move staff around to fulfil tasks as necessary.

Our white paper on improving workforce safety in the rail industry further explores the ways in which technology can help organisations to maximise workforce efficiency whilst implementing high safety standards. It is free to view here.

Effectively managing your fatigue management process

Posted on: 26 August 2021

Fatigue management protocols are commonplace in labour intensive industries which require prolonged periods of physical or mental exertion. If you’ve got engineers or drivers keeping services moving, their working hours need to be carefully monitored in order to ensure that they don’t become fatigued, thereby impairing their ability to perform to the best of their abilities. Providing appropriate rest breaks during shifts and ensuring that they get enough time to rest in between is paramount. So, how can management teams effectively manage this process and ensure that workers are getting enough rest and adhering to your company’s fatigue management protocols?

The role of management

The role of management is fundamental to ensuring that fatigue management procedures are in place, first and foremost. There are usually industry standard guidelines depending upon your sector, for example the number of hours a train driver can consecutively drive for, or be on a shift for, is closely monitored to best ensure that they are in good condition to drive.

More broadly, where safety critical work is being conducted, there is a requirement that there be a 12-hour break between one shift ending and the next one beginning.

Putting these procedures in place is one thing. Enforcing them, however, is another.

The role of technology

Technology can make the process of establishing and adhering to fatigue management protocols much easier for management teams. If your workforce can sign into and out of shifts via their mobile device, then real-time, archivable records can be kept with notifications established where infringements occur.

This enables management teams to better understand the shifts undertaken by the workforce and to take action where required.

Furthermore, by linking your fatigue management protocols to your workforce management structure, you can understand the circumstances of each worker to better combat fatigue. For example, you could link a team member’s domestic address to their shifts, better understanding their travel commitments to get to and from the location of work.

This may not sound important, but Renown Consultants were fined £450,000 by The Office of Road and Rail, with £300,000 in costs, after two of its workers were killed in a road traffic accident on the way home from a shift. Fatigue management protocols had not been adhered to and the two workers had to travel a significant enough distance home for this to prove fatal.

A holistic view

Understanding your workforce and the shift patterns of your workers is crucial to implementing an effective and robust fatigue management framework. Deploying all the information available to you and considering all the aspects will also help in implementing and maintaining your protocols.

Setting shift patterns and rosters is one thing, but then monitoring how they are conducted is another. Receiving real-time data from out in the field gives you a plethora of information.

Not only will it reveal how many hours are being worked, but it will also offer performance indicators where projects are concerned. For example, a set number of hours will be assigned to complete a given task – if this timeline is not met, understanding why is important.

Your fatigue management protocols can plug in to and interact with the rest of your processes in this way, which can help in revealing strengths and weaknesses in your processes to inform other decisions. You will also be able to identify where work is unlikely to be completed within the allocated time, in advance. All the while, you will be able to enhance the safety of your workforce.

Cutting corners with workforce safety is unacceptable and fatigue management is a central component of that. Understanding your workforce’s shift patterns and linking them to their external circumstances can play a fundamental role in ensuring that you have a robust and manageable fatigue management framework in place.

Capability: Competency and Training Management