Following the general election, zero hours contracts look set to remain a feature of UK employment legislation. Originally brought in to circumvent the ‘12 week rule’ for agency staff, they have attracted a high level of controversy. On the one hand, many businesses claim zero hours are vital to their competitiveness and agility. But for the worker, opponents argue they can be an inhibitor to social mobility and disadvantageous.
Regardless of whether you are an advocate or critic of zero hours employment as a route to obtaining flexible extra resources, warehouse operations will always need the ability to access extra workers quickly to cope with seasonality. Currently 10% of companies in the wider transportation sector admit to using workers employed on zero hours contracts, although they are less common in logistics. This is most likely because, their high service level obligations make it unlikely that the zero hours route could work in practice. In a logistics environment, where errors are extremely costly, operators need to demonstrate a high level of conscientiousness and this is less likely to be achieved with zero hours workers, for whom there is no financial security or guarantee of another day’s work.
This is clearly a very different situation to employing agency staff. From experience, although agency workers are hired to fill demand on a casual basis, they have been provided by a specialist agency, with a vested interest in providing a reliable, effective boost to an existing workforce. This means they have already made their own investment in the individual, ensuring he or she has the requisite skills to deliver the service required before recommending them for a casual position.
So in the end, taking a short-term approach with zero hours can often be a false economy. In particular for picking operations, hiring workers on a zero hours basis creates the perception that workers responsible for picking are low on the list of logistics priorities. Whereas in reality, they are key people in the supply chain process and integral to achieving reliable service levels and high quality.
Given that it is now unlikely zero hours contracts will be abolished, logistics companies considering this option should consider the importance of investing in a suitable WMS training programme to support a flexible workforce. This is true regardless of whether workers are employed directly on a zero hours basis, or temporary staff sourced through an agency. A reliance on using short term zero hours or agency staff and the need to achieve a faster learning curve for new starters, can be a big justification for an investment in a WMS. Introducing automated procedures and paperless working built around menu driven transactions or a structured voice application that delivers instructions in a logical manner is much easier and faster for an incoming worker to learn than interpreting paper documentation. It also helps to avoid the bad practices associated with manual, paper driven processes.
When selecting a suitable WMS from the outset, this decision is often based on a preference of what a system needs to provide ‘out of the box’ and whether it is intuitive. Another important decision-making factor is whether the solution under review provides the ability for the user to make adjustments directly, without being reliant on the software provider. For example, having the flexibility for a user to fine tune the way instructions are presented makes process improvements quicker to implement, training of new operators more straightforward and saves running costs.
Where a company already has a WMS implemented, the focus when considering the training requirements for new users should be on ensuring that the WMS is providing logically structured user defined menus, that can be followed intuitively. In addition, there are some other steps that companies can take to enable casual workers to become fully operational more quickly, without the need to invest in wearable technology. These can include the following:
– Create ready reckoners and laminated training materials, so that staff can refer back to instructions.
– Assign temporary staff to focus on specific activities and keep the introduction of new functions to a minimum. Then, once they are comfortable with an area and used to navigating through menus, then they can move onto more complex operations.
– Appoint a go to person or ‘super user’ to support casual or zero hours staff and enable them to get answers to questions quickly.
However a warehouse chooses to fulfil their short term requirement for additional staff, workers need to be able to hit the ground running because they will only be employed for a short time and you want to be sure they can become fully effective as quickly as possible. Having technology in place to guide them through operational processes and minimize paperwork goes a long way to improving efficiency and quality of work. If this isn’t available in the short term, providing easy to use training guides and applying proven learning strategies will help balance the additional complexity they encounter.
Authors
Haydn Costin and Eric Carter are warehouse technology experts at Indigo Software.
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