An Ontario Regulating Body Needed Help
The Challenge:
The small department was responsible for coordinating onsite inspections and keeping track of certification statuses within a highly regulated healthcare sector. There were 5 staff members and a manager who had all recently started working remotely due to COVID-19 restrictions. Staff frustration levels were extremely high as evidenced by an inordinate number of employee complaints to Human Resources. And the management was struggling to effectively supervise employees and forecast staffing requirements in a new ‘remote working’ environment. Ongoing efforts to implement timesheets provided little useful data and only exacerbated employee frustration levels.
A 1-month formal assessment utilizing online surveys, structured phone interviews and group calls were conducted by 2DaysAMonth. This assessment corroborated the above situation and found the following specific areas of opportunity:
- There were no quantified business objectives that could be used to effectively plan and monitor the work
- Status meetings were mostly ineffective in identifying and resolving issues
- TImesheets were onerous to complete, highly inaccurate, and largely ineffective in providing meaningful data
- Staff productivity was calculated to have dropped from 43% in 2017 down to 33% in 2019
What Changed:
2DaysAMonth worked closely with the department manager to implement the following changes:
Staff created their own weekly plans for the following week using Outlook. They took into consideration the amount of work they expected to complete. As well as non-working activities such as team meetings, training sessions and other ad hoc activities. These were reviewed in 15-minute 1:1 calls with the manager every Friday afternoon. They gave clear visibility into each employee’s weekly plan despite the remote work environment
All staff attended a 15-minute morning daily stand-up call led by the manager. Referring to their individual weekly plan, each staff member quickly reported on the following:
- Any variances between the previous day’s accomplishments and their weekly plan
- Any anticipated variances between their current day’s plan and their weekly plan
- Any Risks or Issues for which they needed support from the manager
- Daily productivity tracking was established using the following sources of data:
- Completed deliverables as tracked in the department database
- Paid hours based on observed staff attendance
- A staffing plan was created for the following fiscal year based on the following:
- Observed and planned productivity levels
- Forecasted volumes of workload
The Results:
- Complaints to Human Resources dropped to almost zero due to objective Key Performance Indicators, and the short-interval Issue resolution put in place
- Backlogs of department requests and subsequent cycle times virtually disappeared due to effective planning and control of workload
- Management identified the opportunity to reduce staffing by 40% with no impact on department throughput