Increasing Operational Efficiency Article

Although complex and efficiently run, Operations do require workforce management. This may be just the solution to workforce planning, forecasting, and scheduling. An added bonus is the fact that your employees will be granted transparent access to staff performance, skills, and any possible bottlenecks. An Operations Excellence program is a workforce management solution that can be used to achieve the same efficiency across your organization.
People
Cross-train staff members: When cross-trained, staff members will be able to jump in to assist virtually anyone within the organization, when necessary. If you have an unusually large amount of work one week, you will always have team members who can help you out!
Coach, coach, coach: Coaching staff is an important part of being an effective leader within any organization. The leaders of your teams and departments must take the time necessary to train their staff on the skills required to complete all aspects of their jobs properly. By doing so, you will ensure the whole team is working as smoothly and professionally as possible.
Balance loads across teams: Operations leaders must monitor the work being completed by their teams on a regular basis in order to balance this workload, when required. This allows for the transfer of work between busy teams to those who may have more capacity. If this is not possible within your organization, it might also be effective to allow other teams to borrow staff members from other areas of the business, when and if they need assistance. If some teams are perpetually busier than others, this will quickly lead to employee dissatisfaction because it will breed the perception of unfair job distribution across the company. A significant workload imbalance may also drive some teams to become burnt out or exhausted.
Skills
Ensure proper skill levels and mixes: By stacking your Operations teams with nothing but experts in the field, you may be spending too much money on one area of your business. By targeting a particular skill mix within each team, you may be able to add in a few juniors and seniors who are just as capable of coaching others while also helping with complex cases. As previously stated, at least some team members should also be cross-trained in other departments. This makes it possible for teams to lend and borrow resources across teams, making everyone more efficient.
Capture and leverage learnings: Before planning the next week, it is important to review the results of the previous week. By doing so, key learnings from the week before can be used to inform future planning.
Manage team in cycles: Ad hoc or firefighting management styles often just confuse people, and that will result in lower performance. You will get better performance results by scheduling certain activities to manage Operations and teams within your organization. For example, it might be effective to use Monday to discuss the upcoming week, Tuesday to review key insights from the week before, Wednesdays to plan out the next week, etc. If a new goal each day doesn’t work within the context of your organization, participating in daily morning meetings may be just as effective in setting up a routine.
Forecasting
Monitor trends and embed them into planning: It’s imperative to ensure that your organization is the right size for the work you’re taking on, especially as the volume of work increases or decreases. Understanding trends and using them to inform your workforce planning is an important part of ensuring the size of your organization meets the demand. Failing to do this may result in backlog and lower performance from your teams.
Improve resource forecasting: Properly forecasting for the future means that you should know what resources will be in demand and when. This way, you will have less wasted resources as companies hire exactly what they need rather than hiring individuals for more positions than required, just in case.
Improve forecasting horizon: The further you can forecast the future, the more time you have to hire the resources that you need from both a skills and compensation perspective. With the proper Operations staffing, you can enjoy the benefits of operational efficiency.
As with most businesses, creating the ultimate customer experience is the end goal. However, despite what you might think, this does not begin with your company’s offerings or technology. You must put the right people in place at the right time, and in the right organizational mix, in order to achieve your goals. None of this is possible without first investing in workforce management.
Workforce management is all about monitoring customer interactions in order to inform workforce optimization. Doing so allows management teams to track and analyze how each process is working.

The workforce management insights offered by the Operations Excellence team at The Burnie Group [https://www.burniegroup.com/] is one way that your company can invest in its future. It is important to recognize where these investments should be made, not only to provide the ultimate customer experience, but also to see a positive impact across the board.

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Bruna_Simoes/2466783
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