Retention and recruitment of shift and hourly paid employees in the UK and Ireland
Introduction
The Work Tech Group and its subsidiary companies have been providing cloud-based HCM tools to employers for over 10 years. The Group owns, fastP.A.Y.E is an Earned Wage Access and Financial Wellbeing App for employees. ShopWorks, a cloud based Workforce Management Software and Time and Attendance Software and provides workforce management consultancy. SolvedBy.Ai provides AI powered Sales Forecasting Software and Business Forecasting Software.
As the world’s economies deal with the consequences of lockdown, recession and supply chain issues we often hear that retention and recruitment are big problems for our customers. As a customer-driven organisation, we are always keen to understand our customer’s issues and try to help with solutions. So, we decided to survey our customers on these issues and put our HR Analytics team to work on the data we hold to see if we could understand the issues more. This white paper summarises what we found and our thoughts on what an employer can do to make their situation better. We have included some case studies on how our customers have sought to solve their problems and how we have helped in this process. We also produced a podcast which discusses the white paper and provides additional insights. This can be found via your favourite podcast app under “Workplace Wellbeing Podcast: Meeting your staffing requirements in difficult times”
This white paper focuses on the UK and Ireland, although we have customers around the world, we have the most data on UK customers and our data scientists felt that we could get more meaningful insight using Artificial Intelligence if we focussed on the region with the most data, as a result, our customer survey was only sent to our customers in the UK and Ireland.
Part One: Understanding the Problem
The WorkTech Group Employer Survey:
We carried out a survey of our customers to understand the numbers behind their challenges with staffing, and despite having listened to our customers tell us how tough things are in 2022, the results still shocked us. The survey was completed by 35 of the UK and Ireland’s largest employers of hourly paid and shift workers in October 2022. Together they employ over 50,000 hourly paid staff and shift workers. We believe the findings are represtentitive of the UK and Ireland Labour market.
The key findings were that nearly 72% could not fill all the shifts they needed, and 55% said they couldn’t meet their recruiting needs with leavers outnumbering joiners. We found some innovative alternatives to dealing with the problem, some of which we are helping our customers with and which we will discuss in more detail in this white paper.
Some of the best feedback came from conversations that were sparked by the survey, the next time we spoke to some of the customers, they shared with us anecdotes and examples of just how tough it is out there. From speaking to our customers, we can assure you this isn’t a made-up issue to generate social media content for our marketing team; this is the biggest issue for employers of hourly paid staff. As our survey showed, 100% of our respondents felt it was a major issue.
Download the White Paper below to see many more interesting findings and statistics and suggestions on how you can overcome staffing challenges in difficult time…
