Are you responsible for workforce management in your organisation and still using spreadsheets to keep track of your contractors, visitors and their information?  Are you looking for a better way to manage your workers and visitors?

You will be surprised at how many organisations, both small and large that still use spreadsheets to manage their contractor lists, and their information.  We receive a huge volume of enquiries on this topic and so we have created this blog to help you understand how to transition to a digital solution and implement a  better way to manage your workers and keep them safe, as well as compliant.

Spreadsheets are the right place to start

The benefits of spreadsheets are that they are cost effective, simple to use and easy to adjust to your changing business needs.  Using spreadsheets to manage your workforce is the best place to start and for collating this information.  Having this information held centrally also helps when transitioning to a digital platform and will make planning the implementation much easier.

Maintaining information can be a huge challenge

With the evolving nature of your workforce spreadsheets and other forms of fragmented data present risk with an increased possibility of human error and greater exposure to non-compliance. Keeping information up to date and accurate increases the time and administration to maintain the spreadsheet, and that is why shifting to a digital solution is paramount to maintaining your workforce information.

When information expires such as insurances or licence records, spreadsheets aren’t intuitive enough to notify individuals that need to know.  You will have to search for this information or build complex rules in your spreadsheet to track upcoming expiry dates.  This is not ideal, out of date insurances for your contractors not only exposes your contractors but also the hiring client if an incident, damage or death occurs.

Using spreadsheets to maintain your workforce information centralises the management of this information to a select few who do not always have the latest information.  The benefit of shifting to a digital platform is that it can shift the responsibility to others.

Sitepass allows contractors and individual workers to login and access and maintain their own information.  This shifts the responsibility away from a few central administrators or the contract managers to the contractors, workers and staff to maintain their information.  This is a vital shift in accountability and shares the responsibility of  keeping information accurate and up to date.

Whilst there are cost benefits to using spreadsheets, upgrading to a better solution that can reduce administration and keep information up to date, should be a must for all businesses if this protects them from risk of liability, or by an individual being injured or killed because they were incorrectly hired for a job.

Migrating to a digital solution

You have decided to migrate away from spreadsheets to a digital solution to manage your workforce, visitors and contractors.  What should you look for? What considerations need to be made, and how will you transition to the new platform?

Understanding your business requirements

Before procuring a solution, you need to understand what your business requirements are for your chosen  new platform.  What are the business objectives, who will manage the solution, and what functional and non-functional criteria do you need the new platform to meet?  Gathering this information is the first stage in looking to a better solution than using spreadsheets.

Current vs future requirements

It’s easy to get carried away with your business requirements and add requirements that complicate and narrow the solutions available.  Understanding how to replace the spreadsheet should be considered the minimal viable solution that contains the core components that have been identified as necessary. Once this has been defined, then this should be  core to the procurement of the solution.  Future requirements should not be omitted yet they should be secondary to addressing the current need.

Budget and available investment

Investment will be required when transitioning to a new platform.  This could include licence costs, training, implementation fees, hardware purchases and potentially recruitment.  Your available budget will help you to determine what requirements will be necessary to begin with.

Your budget will also determine if you decide to move towards a client or contractor pays fee model.   There are pros and cons with each option. INX Sitepass can support both contractor and client pays, and the table below will help you to determine which option may be better for your business.

Internal process changes

The introduction of a new platform within your business requires a change management plan.  Consideration for who needs access, and changes to exiting processes, training requirements, roll out strategies and how to provide support and capture feedback are fundamental to the success with a new platform.

Setup and solution design

If you are using a spreadsheet to manage your workforce information, this will help when starting to design the new solution. A new platform bring allows an organisation to change its current processes and ways of working, and consideration for this shift and impact to existing processes are important in the setup and design of your new system.

Engaging your external workforce

Your contractors and visitors are the core user of the solution, and they need to be engaged early in the process to ensure they can feed into the setup, requirements and overall usability of the solution.   We have seen when external users are included in user acceptance testing feedback is received that makes the necessary changes to make the overall experience better.

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If you are looking for a solution to get you started, ask us how INX Sitepass can benefit you and your organisation specifically and aim to replace and upgrade from your spreadsheets.

 

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