Michael Cupps is the Senior Vice President of Marketing at ActiveOps PLC.
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It’s a time of transition in the global world of work, with many interconnected challenges facing industries. Increased stress and anxiety due to global events have yielded unprecedented struggles with employee mental health and well-being, which have led to burnout becoming a significant concern across all fields; employee burnout, in turn, has contributed to the Great Resignation, leading to a worldwide talent shortage. Now companies are trying to do more with fewer individuals—particularly as, in addition to attrition, more and more employees shift to hybrid and remote work situations, sometimes leaving uncovered roles that must be performed in-person. This trend exacerbates all of these issues (especially for the remaining in-person employees) in a cyclical manner.
These problems impact everyone, from CEOs down to the end customers. Companies can’t deliver their products to the end customer in a timely manner, which means they lose market share and make less money. Employees are unhappy. Customers aren’t satisfied. Corporations founder. So the reason companies should be concerned about labor shortages and workplace stress isn’t only because they’re thoughtful, caring employers (though clearly they should be); it’s also because these issues have real consequences for the fundamental delivery of their businesses.
What tends to happen when we hear people speaking on these topics is that the conversation ends with, “And it’s a bad situation.” Rarely do these conversations trend towards quantitative solutions when in fact, in many cases, those are the very solutions needed.
A Problem Of Inefficiency
Unfortunately, companies tend to be incredibly inefficient with their resources—particularly human capital. This is especially true of “back office” work, such as filing insurance claims or applying for a home loan, where literally thousands of people work behind the scenes to help companies manage these outcomes correctly.
What companies have done, historically, is hire more people for more clients. There are situations where that could be the right answer—but in most cases, a better answer is to optimize the time and skills of their existing employees more efficiently. For instance, some people could work exclusively with high-value clients and some people could address only claims for certain types of procedures, or loans for discrete types of property. Balancing the skills, the work, the people, and the time in the right way enables the work to get done with the amount of people a company has—without having to recruit and employ more of them, or spread existing employees too thin.
When companies forecast, plan and measure how people are doing—making sure they’re trained well, not burnt out, etc.—all this work falls under the categories of workforce management and optimization. We find that, too often, rather than optimizing employee time and skills, managers revert to a band-aid approach, be it hiring more people, blowing up or slashing budgets, rolling out expensive software that may not be necessary, or implementing process improvement systems to support employee well-being that wouldn’t have been as necessary had the workplace stress not been created to begin with. Instead, managers would be better served by relying on data-driven solutions.
Grounding Decisions In Data
The use of data isn’t simply a solution—it’s a methodology, one of capturing and applying quantitative information to employee experience, function, and outcome, rather than just qualitative insights. Particularly in industries such as healthcare, banking, and insurance, where legions of people operate behind the scenes to complete any one of millions of administrative tasks, the use of data to promote optimization isn’t only a good idea—it’s a necessity.
Some implications: When creating a recession-proof team, it is important to have facts and figures supported by data—and more granular data than last year’s "annual review.” Say, during a recession, the CFO decides to cut all expenses by 10%. Team leaders need to be able to support their team's productivity and outputs based on data, rather than opinions.
Data can also help reduce what we call "proximity bias." Despite ample evidence that employees choosing to remain remote does not have an adverse impact on productivity, at some companies, remote employees may still be judged more harshly than those in the office. If RIFs occur, these employees may be first on the chopping block. Data can defend workers, regardless of location.
Data can be leveraged to capture insights on which teams and individuals are best suited to which types of work (factoring in considerations such as skills, availability, location, and even security clearance as necessary); it can highlight shifts in demand and capacity, and provide recommendations for reorganizing resources accordingly; it can allocate workloads evenly across hybrid and remote workforces; it can analyze productivity among teams, and point to interventions that reduce burnout; and it can point to opportunities for operational transformations.
Embedding A Culture Of Data With A Purpose
Data enables companies to manage operations the right way, rather than simply reacting to a problem. This involves making decisions based on data that support the methodology of your company’s culture and expectations, and then following through on executing these data-driven solutions.
When analyzed correctly, data provides a type of holistic enlightenment to companies whose operations and culture rely on its insights. These organizations understand capacity limits for individuals and teams, know when certain thresholds are hit, and are able to view the balance of the entire organization, managing the resources to make sure the entire operation works efficiently, down to each individual unit. In short, if you’re not using data to manage and optimize your workforce, you’re relying on guesswork—and in doing so, remaining stuck on the merry-go-round of global workplace challenges.
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