24/7 Workforce

I was reminded the other day how easy it is to forget the importance of management skills in the workplace, especially in light of all the software around claiming to totally transform and propel our business light years ahead of the competition. A question posed by Leeanna in her blog presenting sound advice was: "Will Call Center Management Software Improve Your Business?" and it occured to me this question is paraphrased a thousand times a day by business managers along the lines of "...does software improve business?" Well one should think so.

In the main software will always bring some benefit because it will introduce a system, and any system means a more structured approach how we go about things. Thinking that software will transform business into profitability and generate happy staff and happy customers is misplaced. It is management skill that does that. Granted software should help them do it better and usually faster but that is as far as it goes. Even with the aid of a computer system, absent management skills will always fail the business.

For example, flexible working - even the Queen gave it a mention in her speech to Parliament - has driven workforce scheduling to the top of Government and Corporate agendas. The familiar mantra associated with ERP, CRM, HCRM, and Call Centre Software to transform a business into overnight success now surges ahead of workforce scheduling software in much the same way. And the experience will be the same. Rapidly diminishing returns with expensive and sophisticated systems that are consistently out performed.

Let us be clear, even good software applications will not improve or save the business if management skills are absent. Worse still, where software is used to mask the absence or replace the management skill you will get a disaster - however many feature boxes you have managed to tick. And you need to know the difference if you want to avoid automating a mess.

Workforce scheduling software should augment or boost management skills not replace them - anymore than spreadsheet software can replace the financial skills of competent accountants.

The point of all this? In my experience good managers with no technology will always beat poor managers with good technology, and good managers with good technology will beat them all.