During our Liquid Workforce event, Deputy gathered vital players in hotel management operations to discuss how Deputy could help with improving employee retention and recruitment while significantly reducing labour costs.
Atlas Hotels, the biggest franchisee of Holiday Inn Express Hotels in Europe, owned by IHG Hotels & Resorts, discussed their road to implementing Deputy, and the business challenges that triggered their digital change management move towards automated rota scheduling.
Sub Iyer, Head of Operations - South and David Drummond, Cluster Operations Manager explained to the 20-person audience that before Deputy, Atlas Hotels struggled with:
Complicated excel rotas and duplicate formats which led to communication breakdowns
All control measures during COVID were delivered via Excel
It was time-consuming to build and amend rotas
No central visibility of schedules, timesheets and pay
Lack of reporting
Inconsistent approach
Tracking of sickness and absence was difficult
Consistent comments on engagement survey around frustrations achieving work-life balance
They were looking to:
Improve employee experience
Implement a better tool for managing scheduling
Build rotas based on structures, forecasting and business needs
Control payroll costs and improve visibility
Connect and integrate better with an HR system
Improve leave management
Since implementing Deputy they’ve been able to achieve:
Auto-scheduling - moving away from paper rotas and Excel spreadsheets.
Bespoke scheduling rules - “Deputy is able to learn from previous shift patterns and create bespoke scheduling rules that allow staff to have better work-life balance e.g the system knows not to schedule an employee in who hasn’t had a weekend off in 4 weeks,” said David.
Visibility of labour costs - “We have a weekly and daily overview of labour costs,” said David.
Auto-approval of timesheets - “This has changed our hotel managers' lives and saved them hours of time,” said David.
Auto calculation of key pay conditions - “The system automatically allocates pay conditions to staff - so night pay, Boxing Day, Christmas Day and other special holidays are automatically calculated. Prior to Deputy managers were relying on Excel and human memory to allocate these,” explained David.
Payroll control and submission - “Prior to Deputy payroll processing and submission took 3 hours and now it takes 30 minutes. Deputy’s taken away all the noise of admin work. Managers can now spend time with their team and guests, and not in front of the computer all day,” said Sub Iyer.
Reporting/analytics - “For each hotel, I can get a full suite of data such as the number of holidays taken, sickness requested and the cost of those hours,” said Sub.
Improved communication - “We’re very excited about the News Feed feature and use it daily. Historically, a lot of our teams were on WhatsApp groups. News Feed has replaced this and streamlined communication allowing us to share news and updates. You can allow comments or turn it off, and you get automatic read alerts as well to show the updates have been read,” shared Sub.
“Prior to Deputy the recurring complaints in our Employee Engagement Survey were around a lack of work-life balance. Obviously, we can’t control the external labour market conditions we’re all facing but we can control doing everything we can to make our existing employees happy. And I’m pleased to say that since implementing Deputy those complaints have reduced to 5 comments from 766 employees,” concluded Sub.
