For many UK businesses, the school summer holidays provide a welcome peak in customer traffic and so, in order to cope, they increase the number of temporary staff that they take on, before shedding them again as winter approaches.
One organisation that follows this model is responsible for managing some of the country’s most famous and well-loved landmarks.
Heritage Attractions, which owns Land’s End in Cornwall, John O’Groats in Scotland, The Needles Park on the Isle of Wight and Snowdon Mountain Railway in Wales, rely on large numbers of workers to keep their sites in tip-top condition all year round.
At Land’s End alone, the company runs a 33-room hotel, onsite café, restaurant, 4D cinema experience, exhibition and visitor centre, six retail units, a small farm and car parking facilities.
Therefore, in order to keep things running smoothly, it employs 55 permanent staff who work a variety of shift patterns throughout the year. During the peak season from July to September, however, Heritage Attractions takes on a lot of seasonal workers, almost tripling the size of its workforce.
But the staffing of seasonal attractions generates a lot of challenges, according to Martin Potter, the firm’s finance manager at Land’s End, not least because many of them operate more than one shift pattern. The hotel, for example, runs three, plus two additional ones in the kitchen and a series of flexible shifts in other areas of the site.
“Keeping track of the various hours our staff work is absolutely crucial and must be carefully managed, especially when we have an extra 100 staff working with us over the summer,” he explains. “Also, only 17 members of staff are salaried so the majority are paid by the hour, making the use of a time and attendance system imperative to the accuracy of our payroll.”
Time-and-attendance
As a result, Heritage Attractions implemented a software system in a bid to cut down on the time spent on sending and requesting information across different sites and departments. A further aim was to improve accuracy by reducing the number of administrative errors generated when manually inputting or cross-referencing data.
Potter says: “Our payroll process is much simpler and quicker. Astrow Suite easily saves us more than two hours a week – it doesn’t sound a lot but when you add it up over a year, it’s a lot of valuable time we’re saving.”
When one of the UK’s leading salad producers, Flavourfresh, doubled its workforce during the summer picking season, meanwhile, it began to experience problems with its existing time-and-attendance system as employees started clocking in multiple colleagues using a fob system.
The system also allowed workers to clock in at any time, but Flavourfresh had to manually amend the data each day in order to reflect the hours worked more accurately. As a result, it started looking for a system that could accurately record when employees were working and that would also integrate with its existing payroll systems.
In the end, it opted for a system that supported biometric fingerprint technology and implemented it at the company’s sites in Southport and Knowsley.
The new applications now enable HR to control the number of hours that staff work as well as access information at the touch of button in order to monitor absenteeism and conformance with the European Working Time Directive.
They now also find it quicker and easier to collate data at Southport for management reporting and payroll purposes, which saves a significant amount of time that was previously spent correcting data entered into the system manually.
Matt Wheeler is product and marketing director of time-and-attendance software provider, Amano UK.
