- Case Studies
- Publicis Group UK
- Douglas BC, IoM
- Just Digital
- Central Trust
- John Lewis
- Siemens
- Cheyne Capital
- Blackadders
TeamSeer worked closely with our project team and tailored the product to meet our precise needs. As a result we now have an extremely usable system that has had almost universal praise and support from every level of our company.
Charles Rowett, Group HR Director, Central Trust
Central Trust saves over £50,000 in six months using TeamSeer
TeamSeer delivers and wins universal support
Summary
Sickness and absence levels at financial services business Central Trust were running at above 5% of working time, an all time high for the 700 employee company. Charles Rowett was employed in 2006 as the company’s first Group HR Director and chose to replace the company’s inefficient and convoluted paper-based procedures with software from TeamSeer. In doing so, not only was he able to strip out redundant administration procedures, he was also able to introduce a much more effective policy on absence resulting in a saving of over £50,000 in the first six months of using TeamSeer.
Introduction
Central Trust PLC Group is a financial services business providing mortgages, loans, insurance and debt solutions to the UK consumer market. The company was founded in 1987, and despite the recent turmoil in the banking sector, was able to generate profits of £2.5 million on a turnover of £85.4 million in 2008.
Sickness absence running at all time high
By 2006, Central Trust had grown substantially and employed over 700 staff across offices in Norwich, Watford and Guernsey. Unusually for a business of its size, the company had no HR function and relied heavily on manual paperwork controls by front-line managers. Most notably, at around 5% of working time, levels of sickness and other unplanned absences were at an all time high and the cracks were beginning to show – the growth of the company had been so rapid that the team leaders were struggling to manage absence effectively and there were frequent errors, omissions and instances of abuse being detected.
In April that year, Central Trust engaged Charles Rowett (formerly of Pragmatis Limited) to develop the foundations of an HR function for the Group. Rowett had many years experience as a consultant and HR director working for multinationals including Hutchison Whampoa. He identified that absence management practices at Central Trust were being driven largely from a payroll perspective – something which might have once been useful to control the pay bill but which had become totally unmanageable and inappropriate given the rapid growth of the company.
Administrative overload
“Staff were expected to fill out a yellow paper form to book holidays and a pink one to report absence,” observed Rowett. “Following approval and signature by their line manager, these forms would be passed to payroll for manual processing. With the group operating out of three locations, this already archaic system was reliant on the postal service to deliver the completed forms in time for payroll processing. There were also many incidents and problems where absences and holidays hadn’t been authorised and could not be matched with authorisation from a director.
“Payroll administration was subject to so many input problems from line managers that payslips were being issued a week before payment to allow staff time to complain and for errors to be rectified before payments were actually made. And of course some staff were abusing the system, over-booking holidays and lieu-time and not reporting sickness absence correctly, safe in knowledge that in the confusion we would never discover what was really going on.”
Rowett recognised that in addition to the breakdown in holiday and absence management, payroll was effectively dictating how people should be managed, especially in relation to when they would and would not get paid for sickness absence. “The company wasn’t looking at this issue from a people perspective, or even from a business perspective – there was a complete lack of awareness as to how badly broken these processes were.”
Winning back control over absence
Faced with such a challenge, many HR professionals might have been tempted to overhaul the entire system and introduce a full-scale HR system to integrate HR, payroll and time and attendance. Rowett’s instinct was more pragmatic. “In my experience full-blown HR systems are expensive, over-engineered and have a bias towards payroll or HR, but are rarely proficient in both. They don’t combine those aspects well and, even if they did, the management challenges involved in making it all work in the real world are huge,” said Rowett. “We didn’t have the time or investment available to embark on replacing our HR system, but we did need a simple software system which we could implement quickly to win back control over absence, holiday planning and day-to-day staff management.”
With that goal in mind, one of the payroll team researched the products available and found TeamSeer, an established software product designed expressly to manage and monitor holidays and absence in businesses of all sizes.
TeamSeer runs over the Internet and provides employees with a web-based calendar with which to request and track time off. It enables managers to approve or decline requests quickly via email with all allowance details and a full team calendar to hand. As a result, the software maintains a complete and up-to-the-minute record of all absence across the organisation – just what Rowett wanted to make payroll efficient and tighten up absence policy.
In theory this was just what was required, but there were wider implications. Rowett comments, “For years, managers had been trying desperately to maintain control, and here I was suggesting we should now give staff a system to manage holiday and absence bookings themselves! The senior management quickly understood the concept but many managers were somewhat paranoid of letting go of the old paperwork.”
Gaining buy in across the organisation
Rowett realised the best way to make the change happen was to ‘show-and-tell’. “We simply pointed managers to the TeamSeer website demo and showed them how it could make their lives easier,” said Rowett. The implementation process started by running TeamSeer in parallel alongside the old paperwork for a couple of months before moving to a full-scale change-over.
“Our team leaders manage teams of ten staff, each on different rotating shift patterns and with some degree of weekend working. Heads of department can manage anything up to ten teams. They were all using multiple pieces of paper and local spreadsheets to try to keep track of staff movements. It didn’t take long for them to realise that TeamSeer would provide a complete overview of staff availability across their teams, make approving requests straightforward, and provide a undisputable record of absence.”
Having won people over, Rowett and his team worked closely with TeamSeer on the integration issues relating to Central Trust’s working practices and within a few months they were able to put TeamSeer into action across the company. All staff were given access to the system via their PCs using the same password as for their email.
“The immediate benefit was a dramatic reduction in time wasted passing forms around and transferring them from remote sites to Norwich and back again. With all relevant information at their fingertips, staff and managers could manage holiday requests and record absence in minutes,” said Rowett.
“One of TeamSeer’s most powerful functions has been its ability to synchronise with each staff member’s Outlook calendar. In this way we’ve been able to provide team leaders with a quick and easy way to find out who is on holiday or off sick simply by viewing their own Outlook calendar,” added Rowett.
Introducing new absence policy
Once TeamSeer was up and running, Rowett and his HR team were able to bring in much more effective and transparent practices that would help managers to maintain control of their staff. “Given the emphasis placed on sales within our contact centres, our sickness absence policy has to be managed well,” said Rowett. “We reduced the amount of local discretion at team leader level and implemented more rigorous decision-making in relation to sick pay and this had a dramatic effect on the short-term absence levels which had been clearly out of control.”
“Better reporting facilities within TeamSeer also enabled line mangers and the HR team to see absence data in almost real time. This enabled us to be far more aware of patterns and trends and be sensitive to genuine cases where people needed help and support.”
Payroll simplified
Where once the payroll team had to input manually all holiday and absence data, TeamSeer now produces a single report which is exported easily to the company’s payroll system. As a result there have been savings in payroll staffing. More importantly, the real benefit has been the almost complete elimination of errors. By April 2009 there were – for the first time ever – no payroll adjustments made following the issue of payslips.
The response from staff has been particularly positive, with many managers and their staff using the system not just to record time-off, but also for team planning and to avoid holiday clashes. “Everyone understands their entitlements and knows how to use the TeamSeer system – it is now being used in conjunction with transparent and fair policies on absence management and sick pay control and is working really well,” said Rowett.
Significant reduction in absence achieved
So how has this impacted on the organisation overall? Rowett summarises, “We went live in December 2008 and since then absence has dropped every month from an all time high to a current all time low. This was even more remarkable given that the company went through a significant restructuring and redundancy programme at that time. In reality, the reduction in absence has been very significant indeed.”
Financially, Rowett believes that tackling absence using TeamSeer has provided a valuable return. “TeamSeer has helped us to achieve a saving equivalent to around £50,000 so far this year as well as reducing the staffing in payroll and achieving valuable productivity gains by cutting paperwork across the business. However, from a morale perspective, the reduction of mistakes and disputes relating to people’s pay is one of the most significant benefits.”
TeamSeer delivers and wins universal support
Rowett is full of praise for the TeamSeer team and its product. He concluded, “TeamSeer worked closely with our project team and tailored the product to meet our precise needs. As a result we now have an extremely usable system that has had almost universal praise and support from every level of our company.
“Unlike more sophisticated and expensive time and attendance products, TeamSeer does what is says on the tin and at a very reasonable cost. We will certainly be looking to extend our relationship with TeamSeer as we develop the system to incorporate other aspects of staff management and control.”
Central Trust has always believed that the responsibility for people management must remain with front-line management, Andrew Turner, founder and Executive Chairman goes on to say that “where TeamSeer has helped us most, is in providing a practical, cost-effective Group-wide system that gives team leaders far more visibility of absence patterns and reinforces their full accountability for managing their staff effectively.”
Central Trust Requirements
We needed a simple software system which we could implement quickly to win back control over absence, holiday planning and day-to-day staff management.
