When it comes to successful human capital management, many businesses have had success with new SaaS technology to help automate the acquisition and the aspects of managing their workforce. However, when it comes to optimizing the human performance of the organization on a day to day basis, many businesses still find themselves making “gut” decisions and often running blind.
For service businesses – who employ more people than any other industry in the US today – the costs of having to manually manage and optimize their most expensive – and valuable – assets are diabolical. With the prevalence of spreadsheets for scheduling, more and more people are having to manually juggle their changing priorities in a way that’s wasteful – both time consuming and costly – which consequently affects productivity and revenue.
Fortunately, a new, operational approach to managing and optimizing a workforce – oriented around the work that people need to do for clients – is desperately needed, and thankfully now, exists. Advances in automation and machine learning can finally provide both managers and individuals with a dramatically improved experience around scheduling, skill matching and optimization of delivery. Known as Service Operations Automation, this people-centric model ensures the best people are optimally assigned to the right work, and through increasingly automated and real time tracking, the technology can help teams and their managers make the right decision in a dynamic workplace, with confidence.
Beyond the optimization and profitability benefits, the outcomes for both team members and clients of harnessing this operationally focused approach to HCM are tremendous. Service businesses and teams depend more than almost any other industry on their human capital, because the people aren’t just the most valuable part of the operation: they are the operation! Because people are resourceful, but not always reliable, being able to connect the right people, at the right time, to the right work is critical to delivering great, profitable, fulfilling work for clients. Being able to adapt to change, work with flexibility, and easily assign work based on the skills of your people is how you operationalize HCM and bring it from the HR department to the center of the engine of the company.
One of the key benefits of Service Operations Automation (or ServOps for short) products – like Accelo – is that they ensure both the managers of teams or projects and the people who are doing the work stay on the same page; for effective collaboration and streamlined workflows. For example, with ServOps systems, managers can see when their people are overloaded (or underutilized), and the people doing the actual work can access a real-time stream of relevant updates, feedback, and budget estimates on that specific client work.
The ability to synthesize both schedules and workloads in real-time across the organization helps team leaders more efficiently manage their humans. Being able to assign the right person to the right job – based on their schedule for any given day, week or month – ensures that quality work gets delivered without any burnout, every time. In service businesses, where people are your most valuable assets, it’s important to identify over-utilization before it results in crisis. It’s also just as important to automate redundant tasks that drain service professionals of time that should be spent doing the work they love – the work that brings in revenue. In a nutshell: investing in your people is the same as investing in the longevity of your business.
In non-service businesses, where people primarily perform an important but supporting function, using traditional HCM software may be suffice. But in client service businesses, it’s a little different; the people are responsible for all value creation; they are the factory with the world’s most perishable inventory – time, and they work under high levels of uncertainty and variability each and every day. Therefore, having access to ServOps technology that supersedes the functions of traditional HCM software – like having automatic time-tracking, built-in timesheets and billing, and intelligent resource scheduling – is necessary for successful human capital management. Why? Because employees are real people that should be invested in and managed in a way that improves value to your business.
In summary, ServOps technology exists to connect the right people, to the right work, at the right time – with ease – so that they can thrive and flourish professionally by delivering successful client outcomes that are personally and economically fulfilling. At the end of the day, if you have smart and capable people doing work they’re not skilled for, you’re going to face significant attrition and attention pressure, and the productivity of people – not to mention the quality of their work – will suffer tremendously.
Company Description:
Accelo is a Service Operations Automation platform that streamlines and automates service operations in small-tomedium businesses. Accelo boosts profitability and reduces chaos by providing its users with an all-in-one platform to view, manage and work on all communications, sales, projects, tickets, retainers, invoices, payments, and more! Now, service professionals can finally access the right insights and tools they need to work and scale with ease.
Our Success & Service:
Accelo doubles profitability, increases utilization, and boosts productivity – all while keeping service professionals and teams less stressed. By giving service professionals one place to run their entire operations, we’re able to recover lost time and automate redundant tasks to get people back to doing the work they love!
About the Author
Geoff McQueen is the Co-founder and CEO of San Francisco based Accelo. A serial entrepreneur and investor, Geoff focuses on solving real-world business problems with technology, most recently through Service Operations Automation (or ServOps for short), a new technology category that helps small and medium businesses double their profitability by streamlining and automating their day-to-day operations.
