In HR but not construction?   (Fri Nov 16 2007)

So we say we're designing Accelerate HR for the construction industry. Does that mean it's unsuitable for businesses in other sectors? Of course not. Then what's so different about construction?

HR FOR CONSTRUCTION: DIFFERENT IN DEGREE, NOT SUBSTANCE

The differences are mostly only a question of degree. Things tend to change faster in construction, and the weight of data entry tends to be heavier. Let's take a couple of examples. In most businesses, staff turnover would typically be about 10% per year. But in construction - as projects begin and end - very much larger percentages of people might be joining or leaving the business. And if the project's on a tight schedule, they're got to hire those new people as quickly as possible. What does that mean for an HR database? Well in some cases, we've needed to add new features entirely - things that we wouldn't even have thought about in any other kind of business. A feature we've added to Accelerate, for instance, is a means of tracking the various hiring processes to make sure that we've not overlooked anything. Will non-construction businesses find it useful? Absolutely. If they choose to use it. But it may not be quite as high on their priority list.

COPING WITH 40,000 OVERTIME RECORDS A MONTH

When we designed the overtime entry forms last week, we needed to take into consideration that our client building the Formula 1 racetrack in Abu Dhabi has a commitment to complete the whole project less than a year and a half from now. And because of that, enormous amounts of overtime are being worked. I shudder at the figures .. but I'm told that the largely Indian workforce is pressing for even more overtime to make their stay in the UAE really worthwhile. It's not the time for me now to argue for better skills, lower numbers, higher output for fewer hours. The client knows its business far better than I do. My job is just to help them administer it better. So with potentially over 2000 staff on site soon, and most of them working overtime at least 5 days a week that means input of around 40,000 overtime records a month.

Of course the best way to cope with this is with automatic time readers, and we'll be moving in that direction shortly. But right here and now, my job was to balance the requirement for speed, ease of use and accuracy and produce exactly the data entry tool the client was looking for. I think we've come up with a pretty good solution - as you'll see if you check out the overtime entry area of Accelerate: check out the department entry view *.

Accelerate's overtime entry method is going to be great for non-construction businesses too. It's just that if you have only a couple of hundred overtime records to enter each month, it may never have occurred to you that you wanted a more streamlined system.

FREEZING BENEFITS DURING UNPAID LEAVE

Today I've been working on another area that's come up a number of times with other clients in the past, but not as a pressing need. From time to time, people go away for extended unpaid leaves. Perhaps it's someone taking an overseas degree course for a year or two. Perhaps it's a new mother who decides that she wants to extend the statutory paid period of maternity leave. (I imagine there'll be people in Sweden nodding their heads at this one - I believe I'm right in saying that a new mother can take up to 2 years off, and then has the right to reclaim her old job at the end of the period. I'd love to hear how the smaller Swedish businesses cope with that ... or from anyone who faces a similar problem)

In Middle East construction, unpaid leave is a huge issue. Most of their site-workers are expatriates who may stay away from home for 2 - 3 years at a stretch, often longer. Then when they go home, they take their accumulated vacation, and often a few months more. And employers often encourage this. If they're at the end of the project and there's not much new on the horizon, the last thing they want is for their staff to be sitting around waiting. Sub-contracting hasn't yet been highly developed here. So the best thing to do if there's a downturn in work is to let them go for extended vacation with the company's blessing. They don't want to terminate these people, because there's no knowing when the next big contract will come up and their skills will be needed again. But let them take unpaid leave.

But there's an issue here. It's easy enough to take them off the payroll for a while, but what about the time-based accruals - vacation and here in the Middle East, leaving indemnity, an amount that increases in value depending on the length of service? The employers need a way to freeze the accruals at their current levels, then restore them when work resumes again.

Because I was only asked about this occasionally before, this suspension of accruals and benefits never became a core part of my desktop system. But this time, because we're starting out with construction, it's an essential ingredient. I can think of several of my banking and hotel customers who'll be pleased to see this feature too.

So if you're into HR but not in construction, don't be put off by our headline. You're just as likely to find the tools you need in Accelerate as a construction business is. And in a couple of months time, we should be able to give you a bunch of very slick processes just because we started with construction.

* I promised a couple of posts back that I'd talk you through the design of Accelerate's overtime pages. I've decided that the easiest way to do this is to set up a demo business, and then allow you just to sign in with all the boring but essential set-up work already done. Give me a few days to add the data we need, and I'll give you a real live version of an Accelerate HR database to play with and test out.

Filed under: HR