People Insights That Drive Better Actions

People Insights That Drive Better Actions

There is a minimum requirement when it comes to H.R.: you must have proof of right to work; written contracts; work time directive awareness; constant compliance etc.. However, mistakes happen, things get lost, and valuable time is therefore wasted — especially when recruitment, sales or deliveries are your focus. After all, supporting employee retention and growth is only growing in importance. Getting your people processes right is a golden opportunity that can drive a real impact on the bottom line — meaning employee insights become pivotal. 

Knowing behaviours of managers and teams drives insightful actions; and understanding why they occur brings the following questions: 

  • Are you aware of breaching working time directives?
  • Which sites have more sickness?
  • Are certain employees always late?
  • Are some sites improving or worsening their absentee rates?
  • Do you have a consistent trend of high employee turnover?
  • When are your new starters finishing probation?
  • Are you exposed to fines for missing key employee information?

The list continues. People management issues aren’t only about team members, it’s about managers too. No people manager should be expected to keep track of H.R. related issues via pen and paper; it can limit success and drain valuable time. Every working time directive breach could result in a fine — the stakes are high, especially when it comes to young workers. In a situation where employee turnover is much higher in one site compared to another, it can’t be ignored. Is it management, culture, or failed probations? Insights are required to investigate. 

Still, with the investigation, the focus must remain on positively influencing the bottom line of business financials, whilst simultaneously managing teams effectively. High staff turnover has a huge cost on businesses, not just in the cost to replace and retrain, but the lost skills and opportunity cost.  

Insightful data drives informed actions. For example, how can you be prepared for audits if there is no record of working time directive breaches? Using data to track behavioural trends for employees and sites is becoming an increasingly reliable tool to identify potential areas of problems. 

Those who are doing well on this are using the insights that their data brings, tracking trends and taking faster actions to prevent costly issues. Understanding sickness trends, absenteeism, WTD breaches, lateness and more are all indicators of where you need to focus your energy. In essence, knowing which sites or managers require further support or investigation.

 If you would like to know more about data giving you the right insights to reduce your staff turnover, please book a demo below: 

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Hospitality Industry Continues to Experience Shortfalls in 2022

Hospitality Industry Continues to Experience Shortfalls in 2022

The first full week of 2022 saw hospitality sales fall by 30% compared to the same week in 2020. 

Drink driven like-for-likes fell by 32.5%, whereas food sales were down a lower 27%. 

London sites are continuing to experience worse like-for-likes than sites outside of London, with sales in the capital declining by 36% on 2020 levels. 

S4labour’s Chief Innovation Officer, Richard Hartley, stated: “Speaking to customers, the availability of staff to meet sales has been a real issue for the sector. In some instances the demand is there, however the limit on available employees appears to be reducing opportunities for businesses. Hopefully as restrictions are eased, more staff are readily available and consumers gain more confidence.”

Key Festive Dates Suffer Significant Sales Slump, following a Difficult December for Hospitality

Key Festive Dates Suffer Significant Sales Slump, following a Difficult December for Hospitality

Hospitality sales for December were down 12% compared to December 2019.

Both drink and food sales experienced declines, with sales down 11.5% and 13% respectively.

London sites’ sales were hit the hardest as like-for-likes fell by 23% on 2019 levels. Non-London sites also saw downfalls, however by a lesser figure of 10%.

As for specific dates, London’s sales dropped on all occasions on 2019 levels:

  • Christmas Eve sales down 38%, with drink-led sales down 40%
  • Christmas Day sales down 23.5%
  • Boxing Day sales down 25%
  • New Year’s Eve sales down 11.5%

Non-London sites, however, were much less affected on specific holiday occasions — Christmas Eve saw food driven like-for-likes increase by 3.5% while Christmas Day’s overall sales were down 11.5% on 2019 for sites outside of the capital.

Richard Hartley, S4labour’s Chief Innovation Officer, said: “December has been an incredibly difficult month for the sector yet again. As we enter further into the new year, it is important that no more restrictions are imposed on the sector.”

Christmas Hospitality Sales Take a Concerning Decline

Christmas Hospitality Sales Take a Concerning Decline

The Christmas period saw hospitality sales decline by 30% when compared to 2019 levels.

Sites within London experienced a 50% decrease in sales on 2019 levels, whilst sites outside of the Capital saw their like-for-likes drop by a lesser 26%.

Week-on-week sales were also negative, with sales falling by 18% compared to the previous week.

These figures are from businesses that had at least a 14-day trading period over Christmas — meaning closed sites’ sales during Christmas are excluded. If closed sites were to be included, the sales figures would reveal even larger declines.

Richard Hartley, Chief Innovation Officer at S4labour, said: “The festive period is critical for the sector, and these figures spell concern on current consumer confidence. With this, it is vital no further restrictions are put in place as many businesses are struggling to survive.”

Hospitality in London Suffers 30% Decline in Sales

Hospitality in London Suffers 30% Decline in Sales

As Christmas uncertainty begins to continue, data from S4labour shows sites within London are down 30% on last week’s sales.

The week-on-week decline was experienced by the whole sector too, however non-London sites saw their sales drop by a smaller 6.5% on the previous week.

Sector like-for-likes were also in decline, with the Capital again suffering as sales fell by 16% when comparing the same week with 2019.

Richard Hartley, Chief Product Officer for S4labour, said: “The announcement of Plan B and rumours of increased restrictions have clearly damaged consumer confidence heavily, and with Christmas fast approaching, the industry has a challenging time ahead”.

System Update 17.12.21

System Update 17.12.21

Following several weeks of investigation and updates with S4labour, we have have summased the fixes that have been put in place inorder to support system stability and performance.

The Login Procedure

On Monday morning, the system was being hit with 600 – 1000 login attempts per second, over 100 times more than any typical day of the week. This led to hundreds of thousands of calls to the server every minute, resulting in slower system performance and on occasions causing the system to crash.

We are still investigating the cause for this volume of login, given the recent announcements from other SaaS businesses in recent month, it is likely to be a bot attempting to breach our security procedures. The good news is that, while the system has suffered performance and speed issues, all of the security procedures did their job and kept S4labour secure.

However, we have and are continuing to implement a number of significant architectural changes to both improve the security of S4labour and ensure that system performance is not impacted in the future.

Server Duplication

As well as increasing the server capacity by 50% for the main system, we have added an additional server, dedicated to the login process. This will mean that any impact that login demand may have on S4labour, will not impact on anyone who has already logged in. This will also mean that, if demand remains high, and the login server needs resetting, users already logged in will be unaffected.  

CAPTCHA

The introduction of the CAPTCHA on Thursday the 16th of December will significantly reduce the impact a bot could have of draining server capacity going forward.

Login Control Procedures

The login process is controlled to allow up to 30 logins per second. This combined with the CAPTCHA will mean that the login server cannot reach maximum capacity, but there is a possibility of a 3 second delay between logging in and being let into the system at peak demand times. We will be monitoring server load closely and should the system near CPU capacity, we will update this control appropriately. This may slightly increase the time it takes to get into the system by a few more seconds. However, we now have the ability to do this very quickly and with no disruption to anyone already logged into the system.