London Waste

LondonWaste uses Kronos for effective absence management

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About LondonWaste

Since its formation in 1994, LondonWaste has developed into one of London's largest waste management companies operating out of nine sites in London and a further four sites across the country. The company handles over one million tonnes of waste a year, employs 450 of its own staff and manages an additional 300 contract staff. With an annual turnover of around £50 million, the company offers a broad range of services including recycling, composting, waste treatment and disposal.

The challenge

Before its implementation of Kronos, absence management at LondonWaste was fairly unsophisticated, with no centralised data available to enable analysis of absence information. With remote locations to manage and 75 different pay rules to consider, the organisation was concerned that employee absence was not being monitored in a consistent manner, the system was prone to errors and it was impossible to spot absence trends or compare absence levels across each site.

"We had an entirely trust-based system in place, where employees would log their own working hours," explained Mark Beattie, Head of Information Technology at LondonWaste. "This did not give us an accurate picture of staff timekeeping and no meaningful management information could be provided on lateness trends, absence levels and holidays taken."

"With 450 of our own employees and 300 contract staff working 24/7 over 13 sites, it's becoming increasingly essential that we have complete visibility to our workforce." Mark Beattie, Head of Information Technology, LondonWaste

The solution

Kronos was first installed in 2001 when all employees, including Directors, started recording their working hours by clocking into the Kronos system. LondonWaste saw a number of immediate benefits.

Business benefits

Lateness and absence were spotted immediately across all LondonWaste sites and now managers take the appropriate action straight away to manage any potential understaffing problem. Immediate visibility to late or absent staff is essential when employees are working remotely and 24/7 on a 45 acre site, as it’s difficult to spot a missing employee and therefore impossible to take any action to replace the staff member.

LondonWaste also benefits from the availability of Kronos reports to pinpoint absence and lateness to see exactly when periods of absence are occurring and if any patterns are emerging.

This information from the Kronos solution provides a useful background document to an employee's overall attitude to work – an employee being considered for promotion and with an exemplary Kronos attendance record would be considered differently to an employee with a history of absence and lateness for example.

Employees are also able to view their own Kronos information to check that they have not mis-clocked or forgotten to clock. The result is that, with employees checking records alongside the accuracy of the Kronos system, there are very few disputes over attendance.

"The introduction of Kronos moved us from a highly manual timekeeping system managed at each location, to a situation where we have centralised information on absence levels, holiday balances and overtime, giving us an accurate and unbiased record for every employee." said Mark Beattie.

The latest generation of Kronos' Workforce Central^® suite has been in place now for over four years and in order to continue to generate maximum benefits from the system, LondonWaste has decided to invest in Workforce Analytics™ from Kronos. Workforce Analytics will take absence management to the next level, enabling the company to manipulate the Kronos data and create detailed reports and analysis.

Workforce Intelligence with Workforce Analytics

Commenting on the decision to add Workforce Analytics, Mark Beattie, Head of IT at LondonWaste said, "With 450 of our own employees and 300 contract staff working 24/7 over 13 sites, it's becoming increasingly essential that we have complete visibility to our workforce and that we have the capability to measure and benchmark the performance and productivity of each of our locations. It will be particularly interesting to have just one view of absence levels across our entire organisation. The workforce intelligence provided by Workforce Analytics will enable us to do that."

LondonWaste anticipates a number of additional benefits from Workforce Analytics including the ability to measure the total cost of lost time such as lateness, absence or simply the few minutes of lateness per day allowed by the company and therefore not deducted from salary. The ability to easily analyse individuals, groups of employees or entire locations will also provide LondonWaste with valuable insight into the factors that affect the performance of a location, for example, is a high absence rate at one location the result of a handful of employees being habitually late or the entire workforce being late occasionally?

Mark Beattie concluded, "It's easy enough to get to the end of a month or year and take a snapshot of how the business has performed – which location outperformed the others? Did the salary bill exceed the budget? How much more did we spend on overtime etc, but the hardest part is figuring out what workforce-related factors affected these results or what we could have done to change the outcome. Workforce Analytics will enable us to continually analyse the workforce-related contributory factors, such as absence and overtime, and help our managers to uncover opportunities to improve workforce performance and control costs."