Author:Goedele Geeraert- HR Magazine Source: HR magazine July 2008 _

Process-based assessment of workload

Companies are on the look out for an optimal balance between their strategy and its feasibility on the work floor. Workload assessment and calculation form an instrument to arrive at a better mutual tuning of processes, means and people. HR plays an essential role with it.
Text: GOEDELE GEERAERT- PHOTOGRAPHY: U&I LEARNING

A company that decides to map the time management of its employees can do this as a result of various questions: Are we working efficiently? Do we need more personnel? We would like to expand, but how? The concrete quest for an answer differs from organisation to organisation. Starting point is always the assessment and calculation of the workload, from which the availability of means and people for certain processes can be analysed. Peter Willen of consultancy bureau Mbius distinguishes between workload assessment and process-based assessment of workload. The workload assessment gives you an insight into the actual time management of a person. This may be via the multi-moment recording, at which you ask the employee to register at regular times what he is doing. It comes down to define the activities you would like to register in such a way that they are clear for the employee and at the same time sufficiently detailed in order to analyse them appropriately. Terminology such as sales, office work and prospection often are too abstract to be able to draw sensible conclusions from your workload assessment. They have to be further specified: how much percentage of the office work is spent on meetings, on finishing a file, on coaching of employees? Simultaneously you mustnt go into too much detail because then the registration process becomes too complex". Workload assessment provides an insight into the actual activities and time management of an individual employee. Process-based workload assessment goes a step further. You can calculate the actual workload but at any time it also allows for assessment of additional staff needed. How many people do you need in a particular context? And what if that context changes, for example by further developing certain activities or cut down on them? Peter Willen: Process-based workload assessment is determined also by the strategic objectives. Which are your objectives and which processes do they imply? Those processes comprise diverse activities to which you allocate a time component necessary to carry out the assignment properly. An employee has to deal with a file to raise funds, to be subsidised. Therefore it is important to know how many subsidy requests he has to work on, which assignments he has to perform with it and how much time those tasks require. The time component is a standard time which may be defined in different ways. Peter Willen: You can measure your activities based on registration systems. In a client contact centre for example, you can define how much time is needed for each interview. Another method is to have an activity timed by the employee himself or by an external observer who records the time by stopwatch. A final method to define the standard time is that you have the time estimated by a representative sample of people within the company. Based on their answers you search for the value which recurs most and you make a first estimation, about which you give feedback to the employees involved. You start from a first estimation which is reviewed if anomalies would be detected". Important with the estimation of standard times is an accurate classification of the products. Peter Willen: The time which is needed on average to deal with a file, may vary very much. For an employee at the

office of the public prosecutor, treatment of a fraud dossier will take more time than a traffic dossier. Then the question arises: is the process of dealing with a dossier unequivocal for all products or -dependent on the product - are diverse activities carried out to which you have to attribute different standard times"?

(Picture U&I LEARNING)

Raf Vandenbussche (UZBrussels): Workload assessment behind the scene makes little sense. Each project will be made or broken by the dedication of your employee.

Not behind the scene

Via workload assessment a company gets an insight into the time management of its employee, via processbased workload assessment one gets insight into the need for personnel. Based on those data, an organisation can adjust its working by readjusting activities, adding some or cancelling them, by reviewing functions, by reorienting assignments, by newly defining tasks. HR forms a vital link in the feasibility and the application of those proposals for improvement. At the Academic Hospital Brussels (UZBrussel) three cases are running at which workload assessment is performed with a view to process improvement. Raf Vandenbussche, Personnel Manager at UZBrussels, confirms the vital role of HR with the implementation of improvement proposals. The workload assessment is a first random indication. But behind a process-based workload assessment lies a method by which you will define your future processes. The aim is that everybody wins: you would like to work as efficiently and effectively as possible without losing sight of your employees. They have to be satisfied as well and possible changes in their job have to be experienced as an enrichment, though you know that this is not always possible. HR has to see to it that processes as well as people are streaming. HR has to see to it that improvement proposals are supported by everyone, has to follow that basis and has to pick up drop outs. Communication is the core word. Raf Vandenbussche: Workload assessment behind the scene makes little sense. A project is made or broken with the engagement of your employees who are open-minded for the implementation of possible improvement proposals. From day 1 we have engaged everybody in the workload assessment: we have explained why we did it, how the assessment would be conducted, what we wanted to achieve. During the process we regularly gave feedback. At a certain moment the employees were so much into it that they even devised an own name for it. Then you know that the project is successful. Once the improvement proposals are launched, you have to provide certainty to your employees via your communication: either they can keep an interesting job or you can reassure them of alternatives such a mutation to other jobs, additional training, etc.

Peter Willen also really believes in an integral method with which the operationalisation of the processes run parallel with HR and vice versa, because they fall back on the same frame of reference, namely the process and the workload involved. A company that sets out the processes and adjusts them without thinking of personnel planning, risks to be bogged down in unfeasible plans, far way from an integral HRpolicy. HR also takes an important position in the realisation of your staffing policy into a workable operational plan. Defining staff numbers is done purely strategically, based on the quantity of assignments and of the calculation of the number of full-time equivalents needed. HR translates this on a tactical and operational level by taking into account other aspects and questions such as: Which timetables will we use? Who will be working where and at which location? Which colleagues can carpool together? Who would rather like to work in the morning or in the afternoon? ...

Flashing light
There is the acceptance of the workload assessment and calculation project; there are the conclusions and the implementation. But what after that? Raf Vandenbussche: It is our duty to keep on following up the project in the long run and to provide feedback. HR has a sort of flashing light function whereby it remains alert for deviations of the designed route in any field: a person in charge who isnt in to it, a turnover, an ineffective reorganisation of functions, etc. The added value of process-based planning of staff can only be seen a year later. But the conditio sine qua non is that you keep on following it up consequently. Therefore it is of vital importance that you get acquainted with the method, the approach and the way to look at it. You have to learn how to handle the tools of workload assessment as well, that you are engaged in the processes so that you consciously integrate the knowhow in your organisation and that you think according to it. If you conclude via process description that some functions have to be defined in another way, that much more flexibility or multi-functional use of knowhow is needed, then this is a signal for training and recruitment as well. In this way your process-based workload calculations will get a general HR-impact. Finally workload assessment also provides HR the possibility to be critical of oneself. Raf Vandenbussche: The process implies that you possess all kinds of data which you have to take into account at the assessment. Then you are faced with the fact that some data, for example about absenteeism or days of leave can be registered or dealt with in a better way. Workload assessment also gives HR the opportunity to look critically at its own way of working from a distance and to see where improvements can still be made.
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