Flight Centre Travel Group
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Key takeaways
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Hear how Flight Centre Travel Group are scaling workforce operations with Humanforce
Watch their story to learn more.
About Flight Centre Travel Group
Founded in 1982, Flight Centre Travel Group has grown to become one of the world’s largest travel organisations. Today, the Brisbane-headquartered company has expanded to over 23 countries and employs more than 5,500 corporate and retail staff in Australia.
Flight Centre Travel Group’s employees live by the company’s three core values – irreverence, egalitarianism, and ownership – and they are dedicated to opening up the world for everyone who wants to see it. The company serves a diverse range of customers, from leisure travellers to corporate clients, offering a comprehensive range of travel management solutions.
Challenges
Tom Friend, Workforce Planning Team Leader at Flight Centre Travel Group, has over 10 years of experience in workforce planning, management and rostering. He’s seen first-hand the challenges inherent in ensuring the right people are in the right place at the right time.
“Before Humanforce, each store and brand managed their own rosters using Excel or Outlook, leading to inconsistencies and inefficiencies,” he says. “It was, frankly, the Wild West of rostering. Excel is great but it’s far from a workforce management tool. There were no built-in award interpretation tools, alerts for breaches, or cost analysis features to ensure compliance and budget adherence.”
He adds that another key challenge for the team was ensuring staff were rostered according to their contract hours. There was also a lack of real-time data insights, which slowed down decision-making and workforce management tasks such as timesheet approvals.
The solution: Why Humanforce?
Linda Solway, HR Operations and Compliance Leader at Flight Centre Travel Group, oversees the HR team, workforce planning, injury management, safety, and the company’s reconciliation action plan.
She says the relationship with Humanforce started several years ago for one foundational reason: the need to automate and streamline workforce management processes, whilst also eliminating potential compliance breaches.
“We initially started using Humanforce when we introduced Travel Money Oz, one of our foreign currency units, as we needed a way to roster and pay our employees based on timesheets,” Solway explains.
“When we implemented our Enterprise Bargaining Agreement (EBA) for our retail environment, part of our obligations included being able to roster efficiently and effectively across all our stores. These employees, many of whom are part-timers, work five, six or seven days a week. Some work a Thursday and Friday night; others work shorter hours on Saturdays and Sundays. So, not standard shift times. Humanforce allowed us to roster efficiently across all our stores.”
The company’s use of Humanforce has evolved over time and has sparked some significant operational changes.
For example, while each store still manages their own rosters, the company created a dedicated workforce planning team of in-house Humanforce experts to train team leaders and optimise the system’s capabilities.
“We do this by monitoring rosters and timesheets, comparing them to contract hours, and exporting the timesheets to centre payroll for over 3,000 staff across Australia,” Friend says.
Results
1. Compliance and reporting
The previously mentioned challenge of ensuring staff are rostered according to their contract hours has been greatly improved by the usage of Humanforce. This key metric has now become what Solway calls a BHAG, or big hairy audacious goal, for the workforce planning team.
A key measure of success is ensuring timesheets match contract hours so that staff are only being paid for the hours they’ve worked.
“In a retail environment this can be tricky,” Friend says. “We need to consider 7-day trade, late night hours, varied hours on weekends, and planned and unplanned leave.”
The team uses Humanforce’s reporting tools to identify where people are over- or under-rostered, and to ensure people are working their FTE equivalent hours.
Solway explains: “When we first started with the under- and over-rosters, we had a two-hour buffer. By training our team leaders, they were able to reduce that down to a smaller period. I’m very pleased to say that Tom has got the team to an almost 100% compliance level.”
Friend adds: “Humanforce has helped us to consistently see improvements in the percentage of staff being rostered to their contract hours. Last month, we handed over to Payroll 3,000 retail employees rostered in Humanforce, with 99.64% of them rostered exactly to their contract hours or with approved overtime.”
Compliance-related issues in future-dated rosters can also be flagged. For example, alerts can be set up to show people working too many Sundays in a row, or too many hours or not enough hours. “We don’t call them roster breaches; we call them roster optimisation opportunities,” says Solway.
2. Business efficiency and scalability
Beyond compliance, Humanforce has also helped Solway and her team to scale Flight Centre Travel Group’s operations.
“Having a reliable rostering system has been crucial,” she says. “For instance, when we implemented annualised salaries 18 months ago, we were able to add 300 employees and run rosters without increasing HR’s headcount. The system’s efficiency allowed us to manage this transition smoothly.”
In addition, Humanforce’s pre-set approval rules has helped to automate the traditionally time-consuming task of approving timesheets. The benefits of this became apparent when one of the Flight Centre brands moved to a clock-in, clock-out timesheet model.
“It has dramatically reduced the amount of timesheets that have to be approved daily, reduced human error, and has increased accuracy in our timesheets,” Friend says.
Critically, the digitalisation of these processes, in addition to greater data visibility, has resulted in more cross-department collaboration. “For the first time ever, our workforce planning team are working are working in conjunction with our finance team to look at staffing numbers,” Friend says.
3. User experience
Feedback from team members and leaders has been “overwhelmingly positive”, Friend says.
“Leaders find the system fast, user-friendly, and efficient. One feature they particularly appreciate is inline timesheet editing, which allows for quick adjustments to start and end times and break lengths without opening each entry individually. This has significantly improved efficiency when making bulk changes.”
Friend calls out three Humanforce features in particular for praise:
The ‘What’s New’ tab, which keeps the Flight Centre Travel Group management team informed about updates that enhance the system
The Humanforce Work App, which enables staff to clock in and out, and for leaders to manage rosters, approve timesheets, and oversee leave from their phones
The Workforce Analytics features, which allow managers to create reports, charts, and graphs that provide valuable workforce insights, which can then be exported and shared with other departments
When asked what he would say to someone considering the Humanforce HCM solution, Friend doesn’t hesitate in his response:
“It’s the fastest, most reliable workforce management system I’ve used in my 10+ years in the field. The customer support is fantastic, and the system continuously evolves to meet our needs.”