Imagine scanning LinkedIn and finding the following job description:
Wanted: Highly educated, experienced staffing pro
Responsibilities include:
- Spending 1 full day per week manually approving timesheets
- Sending 1000s of emails to check staff availability
- Dealing with several complicated spreadsheets to fill a single rota
- Very occasionally using your training and expertise to attract new talent
Are you applying?
Thought not.
Yet that is exactly the position so many of us find ourselves in when using traditional staffing processes.
And it’s for exactly that reason a product like ROTA has so much potential to change the way businesses operate.
Necessity is the mother of invention
ROTA started life as a series of annoying problems. Running our own staffing agency, we kept noticing process inefficiencies that felt anachronistic: every one of our workers had a smartphone in their pocket, yet we were still wasting time wrestling with Excel?
There simply had to be a better way of doing things.
The platform was designed to make our own lives easier. First-hand knowledge of the traditional staffing process allowed us to properly address the root of the problem, and create a solution that people like us would actually use.
We were able to dramatically reduce the number of manual tasks involved in filling rotas, which led to substantial productivity gains. We also improved the communication channels for workers and cut the cost associated with scheduling shifts - basically fulfilling all of our original goals.
But that’s where our story gets really interesting. Because it soon became clear just how many problems staffing professionals face - and how many of them could be solved using the right technology.
The power of feedback
As staffing agencies and employers started using Rota, we asked them for honest feedback to help improve the platform. What we found was every user had their own unique challenges, and every piece of feedback contained insights that led to tangible improvements.
That led us to a core principle: staffing technology is never going to be ‘complete’. As organisations evolve and the nature of work changes, new features will be required to ensure the staffing process is as efficient and effective as possible. But we can’t assume we’ll just know when those changes occur - we have to be actively in dialogue with our users to figure it out.
A simple example is timesheet approvals. One customer recently mentioned that their team spent a large chunk of their time on these tasks, and we immediately began building a ‘mass-approval’ option to free them from such dull work. The hours they save can then be reallocated to assignments that actually make use of their talents.
The beautiful thing is that we know other customers will benefit from that innovation. Many of the problems with staffing are so deeply ingrained and widely accepted we don’t even notice them - until someone else points them out, and suddenly they’ve solved a problem we didn’t realise we had.
That’s why we like to see Rota as the product of a community. Every user has the ability to help shape our product and therefore steer the entire profession in a better direction.
Rewriting the role of staffing
This blog was intended as a way of introducing the relaunch of our product and where we are heading. But given that our platform is in a constant state of evolution and improvement, it feels wrong to pronounce a ‘mission statement’.
Every SaaS product declares its bold intentions to ‘change the world’, claiming it has the answer to some deeply important question. Yet the reality is, we don’t know the limits of what our platform could achieve.
Instead, we prefer to approach things with a spirit of collaboration. We prefer to think about our product as opening possibilities up, not closing them off. So here is our mission question: What kind of job description would you like to be able to write for a role in your staffing team?
What kind of process do you believe would best serve your workers? And how much extra value could your team bring to the organisation if they had more time to focus on the bigger strategic challenges you face?
Because it’s those questions we want our platform to help answer.
And with our existing platform and your help, we are more than confident that we can.
To discover how ROTA can help your business, book your demo today.
