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Harnessing Technology to Stave Off the Great Resignation

Labor is the greatest challenge facing employers today. We've all seen the rapid increase in vacancy notices in front of shops, restaurants, and factories. More recently, the Omicron variant has been wreaking havoc on the already depleted workforce. It’s bewildering that there can be so many vacancies when nearly every employer seems to be offering increased pay, additional benefits, and even signing bonuses.

Despite these improvements in hiring packages, over 20 million workers quit their jobs in the second half of 2021. Some commentators have described this trend as the ‘Big Quit,’ and others call it the ‘Great Resignation,’ or the ‘Great Reshuffle.’ While there are some signs that the rate of people quitting their jobs has declined, it’s still harder than ever to find and retain good workers. Plus, experts are predicting another significant resignation wave in 2022, as more businesses finalize their back-to-office plans.

Today we’ll explore how organizations can make more effective use of technology in the ongoing fight against no-shows, high churn rates, and worker shortages. Specifically, we'll look at Shiftsmart and Neostella, two companies offering innovative solutions to these frustrating problems. 

Shiftsmart and Breaking Work Down to the Shift Level

Shiftsmart arrived on the scene in 2015. Its innovative workforce management software promising to connect hourly workers with vacant shifts in a range of industry verticals and roles. Their tech-enabled systems accurately match employers with available and suitable workers. They've also been especially adept at understanding the needs and wants of the modern worker, offering them greater flexibility and control over their schedules. 

Today, the Shiftsmart marketplace supports 500,000 workers in 50 nations, who enjoy greater convenience and control over where they work, how many hours they commit to, and how fast they get compensated. Using the same system, employers are equipped to closely customize their staffing needs, drastically reducing turnover.

Shiftsmart’s customer list today includes Circle K, Deloitte, and Airbnb. Not surprisingly, this popular marketplace matching service has attracted great interest from investors, receiving significant funding to expand its scheduling features.

Shiftsmart is popular with employees and employers alike. Their solution empowers employees the ability to control their own schedule, while the Shiftsmart app makes it easy to build a profile and get started quickly, making for a smooth user experience.

Shiftsmart also helps employers expand the total size of their labor market by breaking work down to the shift level. The chance of finding someone to work a four-hour shift a couple of times a week is much higher than persuading someone to commit to a more demanding 40 hours per week, in a position where they are likely to be receiving payment every two weeks.

What’s especially appealing to organizations is that they can use the platform with their own labor force; they are not limited to Shiftsmart’s pool of workers. The company is now looking into scaling its verticals, including contracts and audits, retail and international logistics, as well as launching new verticals such as healthcare.

Neostella Technologies and the Automation Revolution

Automation is often overlooked as a solution to worker or talent shortages. Today there are a host of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) specialists that promise to address that problem conclusively, powering businesses to new heights as they do so.

The main promise of automation is to streamline manual processes with digital alternatives, harnessing technology to cover the most tedious day-to-day tasks (including low ROI jobs like data reconciliation, order tracking, accounts payable, and onboarding).

Neostella, a global consulting, implementation, and development service firm, is one company leading the way in robotic process automation. They aim to free up teams so that they can concentrate on higher impact work. To that end, they have built highly tailored RPA integration strategies for contact center automation and mortgage process automation, as well as sectors like manufacturing, banking, insurance, accounting, and nonprofits.

Whether you prefer cloud-based or on-premise hosting, Neostella uses advanced software ‘bots’ to handle repetitive tasks in a highly scalable way as your business expands. Therefore, there is no need to worry about how and where you will recruit extra employees as your workload increases. You also have the added reassurance of 24/7 support.

This process is often termed Document Understanding (DU), which combines RPA and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automatically extract and interpret information from a variety of documents. The bots can recognize, read and understand an array of objects – including checkboxes, tables, signatures, and handwriting.

That capability means that DU can handle contracts, invoices, and onboarding papers with ease. What is interesting here is that far from seeing automation as a threat, McKinsey & Company has found that 30% of modern workers are keen to learn RPA skills. In the same report, the analyst firm discovered that close to 60% of workers believed they could eliminate around six hours of redundant work each week using RPA.

With Neostella, you can use existing models, train your own AI models (useful if you’re working with larger amounts of data), or use a simple form extraction method when handling fixed-format documents such as bank or tax forms. If you are dealing with lots of unstructured information, Neostella can provide a more customized solution that works effectively for your circumstances.

Monotonous work, like validating invoices against purchase orders, and the associated manual data entry tasks, can be a real headache. It’s time-consuming and often causes delays in payment to vendors. If you upgrade your invoice processing with RPA, you can process accounts payables much faster, vastly reduce errors, allocate manpower to other jobs, and benefit from improved cash flow management, all using your existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.

Interested in exploring how AI and automation can help lighten your workload, increase operational efficiency, and improve customer and employee satisfaction? Contact us today to schedule a call.