So now what?  You start picking up whichever jobs you can.  That may mean working one, two, or three part time jobs, juggling a part time gig with a full time job, internships, volunteering, a combination of any one of these…it’s exhausting to think about, but with the right combination of organization, skill, and drive I truly believe that it’s still possible to move forward and get ahead, even if it seems like you are fighting against the gods to do so.   This is where the beauty of a program like Shiftboard comes in.  I know that I must have been a pill for previous employers, working 2 different jobs with varying schedules while also volunteering once a week.  Sounds like a scheduling nightmare.  But I was always willing to pick up shifts if I could, switch with another employee if I could, and about every month I would need to change my availability all together.   But the trick is that although people are busier than ever, they are also more willing than ever to pick up extra shifts.  Because of their complex availabilities it makes sense to let them look at what’s available and decide for themselves which shifts will work.  It saves managers time (“oh…so you aren’t available this Tuesday?”) and avoid the possibility of having to get that shift covered last minute or being faced with a no show.    “Why do I even bother writing a schedule? People end up switching and trading shifts until they get the schedule they want anyways.”  It’s true. They will.   So while Shiftboard can still be used in the traditional manager-tells-me-when-to-work-end-of-story way, it’s also nice to have the option of allowing for a bit more flexibility and input on the employee’s end without having to circle around phone calls, availability forms, etc.  If you’re working with a lot of young, mobile workers, why not try a combination of both? Strict yet flexible?

The class of 2010 has a lot to be proud of, they have worked just as hard, probably harder, than any other class.   So hats off to you class of 2010!  You did it!  And now let the job spree begin…

-Nahid

Nurse Scheduling is Going Online

A few years ago, Lauren Sabet, from the First Consulting Group did some analysis.  She found that,

“As hospitals and health care professionals struggle with a chronic shortage of nurses, Internet-based software packages are being developed that can make the staffing and scheduling process more efficient.“

They did their analysis showing, what many saw as brutally obvious but not yet clear on how to execute, that technology can help address challenges related to nurse staffing and scheduling.  I’ll add in here that it definitely does help.  At the time, they wrote six case studies profiling a variety of integrated software products, ranging in price from $60,000 to $150,000 for a 300-bed hospital, offer a range of benefits. Today, those costs have dropped for those using web-based online scheduling software.

• Optimizing staff resources and minimizing use of agencies (Shiftboard note: We have seen a lot of data and growth around the use of outside staffing firms);
• Boosting staff satisfaction and retention (Shiftboard note: We see this daily);
• Streamlining traditional management processes;
• Expanding personal accessibility, flexibility, and choices through staff bidding and self-scheduling; (Shiftboard note: we have not seen the bidding systems operating successfully, however, they could still be out there.)
• Improving control of staffing costs and potential cost savings; and
• Simplifying management of regulatory requirements.

Nurse Managers and Nurses Lead the Way

Today,  more health care organizations are taking advantage of online scheduling and staffing programs. The research findings from Sabet indicated that once nurses started using online tools, other departments began to demand them. So, in large measure, nurses drive adoption in the world of healthcare technology.

We couldn’t find updates to the analysis, but in our next post, we are going to explore some of the findings of the new FCG parent company, CSC. They created a report about healthcare costs and regulations, which includes healthcare staffing and retention, in 2009 and looking forward over the next 5+ years.

–TJ M

It is part of a large study conducted to understand the rapid change taking place in today’s workforce. The report is aimed at the people who manage or lead employees who work outside of traditional office facilities and who may be a distributed workforce — that is, hourly workers, temp workers, full timers who telecommute from  home. It could be that you have different locations and people clocking in at all different shifts and times and you are trying to find ways to let people share shifts or come in at non-rush hour times. This report (I only read the summary) covers some of the critical information you likely need to decide how to implement a plan of your own.

A number of factors are cited for this remote work/telecommute/flexible trend:

1. Fuel prices
2. A proliferation of connectivity devices
3. Employee demand for work-life balance

Here is the summary on flexible work program trends.  Look to the right for the 2009 Survey Briefs section and the above title and click, “Read It.”

If you want simply to read the summary about this survey, click to the Future of Work blog post on the same topic.

This is a blog and site worth bookmarking.

With over 2 million readers a month, it is an honor to be included at Mashable.

We are eager to see the next updated edition of the Online Business Toolbox, too.

In the Pharmacy Staffing world, we have been watching Welborn Relief Agency, a Seattle-based pharmacy temp staffing agency, grow in a crazy economy. It is always fun to see your friends and customers succeed. We’re glad to be a small part of it.

You can click above to read the full case study, but here are a couple of highlights:

•  They saved on overhead expenses by scheduling online.

•  Welborn managers now have powerful reporting and quick visibility into scheduling activity.

View all of the Shiftboard customer success case studies.

-TJ M

Talk to a small business owner, or anyone running their own P&L today, and the talk will be about available capital and cash flow.  It won’t be about Miley Cyrus, although she is the one who keeps that biz owner’s daughters demanding new clothes.  Nor will it be about Iran, that is CNN’s or the State Department’s problem, but certainly not theirs.

So let’s talk capital and cash flow instead.  Remember what I like about staffing companies.  They are about the least capital-intensive business you can find.  Which is a darn good thing in an economic environment when even Fortune 500 companies cannot borrow money.  Our staffing customers were smart enough to eliminate the need for a lot of capital based on the business they chose.  Amen to that.  You gotta love the entrepreneurial ingenuity of this country.

Word on the Street

What we hear from our staffing customers, just as you already know, is that they think a lot more about cash flow.  People sometimes ask me questions about being an entrepreneur, which I was once in a past life.  I tell them that you know all you need to know about being an entrepreneur or small business owner when have had the feeling in your gut of not having enough cash in the company bank account to make your next payroll.  And you find a way to get it done.  That comes down to cash flow, my friends, and I know I am preaching to the choir here.

One tricky issue about the staffing business, however, is that there are just not that many dials to turn in terms of improving cash flow.  You can work hard and be diligent on A/R collections, of course.  And you can stretch your staff a bit on payroll timing, but in general that is a very short term strategy because contractors really don’t appreciate banking the company.

One Secret to Improving Cash Flow

So what secrets do the best staffing businesses I talk to keep about improving cash flow?  Here’s one.  They have a relentless focus on developing a rock-steady client base.  And the thing they work on more than anything else as a means to that end is being EXTREMELY RESPONSIVE on client requests.

Let’s face it.  Your clients are always testing you.  They always want better, faster service.  And when the call to ask if you can fill a shift next week, or a couple shifts the week after next, we all know what they are going to do within a minute of hanging up the phone.  They are going to call a competitor or two and ask for those same shifts to be filled from that competitor.  Because ultimately they want someone, anyone really, to fill those shifts fast.

Which ultimately is why most of our staffing customers find us.  They started out being really responsive to that open shift by sending an email or SMS text to a list of 10 staffers immediately to see who could fill it.  As one staffing company owner explained to me over coffee one day, “I had 8 people want the shift.  So I confirmed one and then had to send 7 a note saying you didn’t get it.  Then I had 20 staffers, and I had to reply with a ‘no’ 15 times for every open shift.  Pretty soon I could not be responsive to customers or with my staffers via email anymore.  Too many messages.”  So we provide real-time response to confirming shifts, anytime, anywhere via the internet.  In short – online scheduling.  Some of our staffing customers give their clients limited access to our system, so that the client can check online to see when shifts are filled.  Short response time is an embedded part of the scheduling and business processes that flow through Shiftboard.

A Competitive Advantage for Staffing Agencies

The more responsive our customers can be with clients, the more steady their business is and the more often that client calls their firm first.  Thus, we come full circle back to cash flow, because clients that come to you first inevitably give you more business and more predictable cash flow.  And you better believe you will need it, because Miley Cyrus has all sorts of new fall and winter fashions your kids just can’t live without.

I thought I would work my last list bottom up – starting with #5, just for kicks.  Hey, it’s Father’s Day, so I’m calling the shots.  This whole notion of the footloose nature of a staffing firm’s assets is more than a little unsettling to any number of small business owners and larger firms with whom we work.  And the tricky thing is that the issue is the same if you are staffing caterers in the hospitality industry or highly trained physicians in healthcare staffing.  Why is that?  Well, start by getting under the hood of anyone who works at a staffing company.  Working at a staffing company is inherently less stable employment than having a steady W-2 job at a company.  So virtually everyone at a staffing company, any staffing company, is trading off stability and taking somewhat higher employment risk for some other reason.  What reason?

FLEXIBILITY.

That is my premise after 18 months of talking to hundreds of staffing companies.  Almost every worker at a staffing company is explicitly making a decision to trade off stability to gain flexibility.  Let that thought simmer a bit in your mind.  Stir it around, take a long whiff.  Because you know what I hear from far too many staffing executives?  Their contractors do it for the money.  They can get paid more on a per hour basis than working a W-2 job, so they jump to staffing.  I beg to differ.  First of all, because a staffing contractor usually doesn’t know if they are working tomorrow or next week, many of them actually do not make more in aggregate each year in a staffing business.  So a few of them do it for the money alone – maybe 10-20% max.

But we are talking about the general mindset of a very broad set of workers in a very large set of industries.  And those workers are opting for flexibility.  Trust me on that one.  Maybe that worker is a single mother that can’t be at work first thing in the morning each day.  Maybe that worker has a spouse that works odd hours or travels for long stints.  Maybe a child has an illness that requires attention at differing times.  Maybe it is someone working 2 jobs.  Maybe they couldn’t stand a commute, or couldn’t afford it.  But if you think about your workers and start gathering some information in bits and pieces, you will find way more often than not a personal issue at home that is demanding more flexibility than a W-2 job can offer.  Keep noodling on it.  Ask around.

Why do workers needing flexibility matter so much to us here at Shiftboard?  Well, to start with, this is a trend in the overall workforce of the nation that is going to be growing for as far as the eye can see, so we had all better understand it.  The good news is that if you run a staffing business, you are going up the learning curve on this issue far faster than, say General Electric or Dupont.  Which means that if you think really hard about it and why it matters, you can capitalize on it.

But on a day-to-day level it has mattered here since our founder Bryan built the first version of Shiftboard software back in 2003.  His first customers were staffing RNs and CRNAs (certified registered nurse anesthetists – just so you don’t ever need to wonder again why they are called CRNAs for short).  Those are some skill-sets in very high demand.  So his first customers wanted a way not only to schedule their workers, but also keep them from walking down the street to a competitor.  To keep their workers, they felt they had 2 options:

1. Pay them above market wages – in which case that business won’t be around long.  And besides, based on my premise above, it would not matter that much to most workers anyway.

2. OR be easier to work for.  How?  Capitalize on that notion of flexibility that workers in staffing value so highly.  Milton Friedman would say they derive high utility from additional flexibility, but remember that I don’t talk to him often.

So what did Shiftboard enable for those first customers?

What we still do today.  Our system allows workers to select and confirm some of their own shifts – on the web, any time of the day or night, in real-time.  We call it bottom-up scheduling.  Workers like it, because they have a little more control of their schedule, which allows them to schedule themselves around whatever personal issues drove them to needing the flexibility in the first place.

And guess what?  Since your competitor doesn’t offer that option, your firm just became a better place to work on the issue that matters most to a contractor or hourly worker.  Those key assets of yours just decided to stick around a few more weeks, or months, or years.  Dang!  This combination of both a lemon AND a lime in the club soda I am sipping really does have the kid’s synapses firing.  Maybe its a little different way to think about your business, eh?

Let’s wrap this puppy up with some facts, which would be factoids, except that they are true:

•  A lot of our customers still do plenty of top-down scheduling, where the scheduler tells workers when and where to work.  But even a little of the other way around make big differences in worker satisfaction.  And as you get used to it, you will in our experience at least double your scheduler’s productivity, which reduces a huge overhead cost in staffing companies as you grow.
•  Well over 30% of the shifts on our system, thousands and thousands of shifts a week, are confirmed by workers between 7pm and 6am the next morning.  When your scheduler isn’t working.  But when a worker is off and has time to search for other work.  FLEXIBILITY
•  Fully two-thirds of all the shifts on our system, across all of our customers, are confirmed bottom-up by workers.  That is the trend and a growing expectation of flexible workers in most industries.  It was a trickle that is quickly becoming a flood.

My advice, whether with Shiftboard or any other way – think hard about that trend.  Get out in front of it.  Because not only do you need to move faster than GE or Dupont, but also that competitor down the street.

What do I find so interesting about staffing companies

1. They are great entrepreneurial businesses.  Virtually anyone with the guts to do so can start a staffing company out of their own home with just 2 items: a telephone – check that, a wifi connection – and a business skill that is in demand somewhere.

2. Virtually every business skill under the sun is in demand somewhere.  That’s pretty cool, because it means a staffing company can appear at any time, almost anywhere in markets ranging from babysitting to veterinary medicine to jet engine repair.

3. Staffing companies are some of the least capital intensive businesses going.  All you need is a couple of folks, likely starting with the owner/operator herself, with the skill in demand, and a client or two.  That means they are ideal businesses for times when capital is really tight . . . HINT: capital is really tight right now.

Staffing companies are entrepreneurial

4. Staffing companies fill a key role in the labor market, allowing larger organizations a lot more flexibility in their labor pool compared to full-time staff.  This is especially true in times of uncertainty when companies don’t know how many full-time staffers they need.  I know this because Milton Friedman and I were just having a chat about macro-economic theory a few days ago.  Actually, that’s not true, Milton has not bothered to chat with me in years.  Rather, I have chatted like you probably have with scores and likely hundreds of business owners or department directors over the past year that are trying to manage a P&L.  Inevitably, hiring a contractor from a staffing company is a more flexible approach when they just don’t know how much demand they will have or if their budget will be cut next quarter.

5. Here is an item you won’t hear too much at the next staffing company trade show – the entire business is almost always dependent on a group of contractors who can walk out the door basically at will.  Well, that adds a bit of a complex dynamic, doesn’t it?  If for whatever reason the staff has had enough, the only billable assets in the company can find another home right down the road.  I don’t like feeling the screws tighten any more than our customers who operate staffing businesses, but this particular dynamic becomes even more acute in markets with a shortage of certain skills.

We work with a lot of businesses in nurse staffing, pharmacist staffing, dental staffing – all of which are up close and personal with this shortage of skills.  Let’s circle back to item 5, but not so early in the morning when everyone is heavily caffeinated and uptight, because opening our minds may uncover some real business opportunities here.

One last thought.  Over the past couple of quarters, I have begun to think of every business services company I come across as a staffing company.  We work with courier companies, which are really driver staffing companies delivering boxes.  We work with virtual call centers providing interpreting services or IT expertise, but in reality they are staffing companies with telephones.  This viewpoint helps me to boil every business service we are working with down to its essence very quickly – a business skill in demand and a wifi connection (you peeked back up at the list, didn’t you?).  Boiling things down to their essence makes us better at improving our core online scheduling software and adding more value to our customers.

I am just getting the juices flowing here on staffing and business services.  Just delving into that 5 item list is going to keep my keyboard warm for the next few weeks.  Stay tuned.   Either that, or go rent “The Last King of Scotland,” because my limited familiarity of Uganda is tapped out.