According to a business survey of the Ifo Institute, there is a significant shortage of qualified workers in the two main sectors (industry and services) throughout the European Union. In the industrial sector, 29.1 percent of companies in the EU reported a shortage of skilled workers in 2022. Countries such as Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland reported a significant skilled labor shortage above the EU average. These shortages caused a ‘war for talent’ and consequently it is of utmost importance to keep your employees on-board.
Forbes published an article in 2018 – before shortages came to their peak - on the financial impact of high employee turnover. They concluded that this is not just an issue for the human resources department, the operating units feel the pain in reduced productivity, product quality, and customer service.
To quantify the financial cost of employee turnover, there are some off-the-shelf estimation models available including the well-known Bliss-Gately spreadsheet which states: "… it costs a company between 100 and 200 percent of an employee's base salary to replace a person”. Knowing the turnover costs makes people realize that improving the employee retention has become a key attention point for organizations.
To tackle this concern, Sopra Steria has included two important capabilities into the ‘Field Service Planner – Multi Resource solution (FSP-MR) solution: the ‘Self Rostering’ and ‘Vitality’ libraries.
Unlike the commonly known Swedish model for self-rostering (which follows a rather rigid three cycles approach), the Sopra Steria model allows to specify the dynamics between employee requests and planner decisions more flexibly. The process can be configured in which both the planner and the planned employees can become jointly responsible for the planning. Therefore, your workforce will be able to steer their own work-life balance which impacts their loyalty.
The Vitality Library adds an enhanced dimension, making the best possible plan from an employee’s perspective. It aims at understanding what an “employee-friendly” plan really means, how to make it measurable, and how to achieve a good balance between an organization-optimal and an employee-optimal plan.
Bottom-line, both capabilities contribute positively to both the employee loyalty and the retention rate.
About FSP-MR
It is common knowledge that workforce planning puzzles can be very complex. Therefore, Sopra Steria offers a managed service with the Field Service planning – Multi Resource solution. The service is based on underlying technology of the best of breed DELMIA Quintiq planning software. It is a highly scalable digital solution for rostering and scheduling tasks of your field services employees.