Safe Work Laboratories

Background

Safe Work Laboratories are one of the leading drug and alcohol testing service providers in Australia. Safe Work Laboratories offer NATA-accredited testing and lab analysis, consulting, educational workshops, and certified training – before the pandemic saw the opportunity to expand into PCR tests for COVID-19.

We spoke to

Luke Loucas, Finance Director, Safe Work Laboratories

Challenge

Prior to Humanforce, Safe Work Laboratories relied on manual workforce management for their 160 employees. Governed by an EBA, the manual process created challenges for the mixed employee base of permanent and part-time staff as well as in-field collection staff.

“All of our collection staff are employed on a casual basis who use their motor vehicles to go out to jobs, for site testing,. This could take the form of routine testing or post incident testing.” said Safe Work Laboratories Finance Director, Luke Loucas.

As COVID-19 became a serious concern in early 2020, Safe Work Laboratories saw the opportunity to pivot and apply their testing capabilities to COVID-19 testing. Safe Work Laboratories had acted quickly, scaling up their casual employee workforce to cater for additional testing requirements.

Implementing an efficient, cloud-based rostering system was crucial. The system also had to allow managers and team leaders to schedule available job roles to staff with the suitable qualification requirements. Safe Work Laboratories also needed the system to be flexible, giving managers who were working from home or in another area, the capability to make any changes quickly and from any device.

Safe Work Laboratories required an automated system that could seamlessly integrate with their payroll provider. It also had to be scalable for the significant increase in employee numbers without negatively effecting the resources of the payroll department.

Solution

Safe Work Laboratories engaged Humanforce to support their complex workforce management requirements - eliminating the long manual process of filling out timesheets, resolving errors and correcting discrepancies.

“Pre-Humanforce, the process was extremely time consuming with significant duplication data entering timesheets to the payroll system. Where it took us probably close to a day for all data entry, it’s now instantaneous after approval, as this is directly integrated with the payroll platform” said Mr Loucas.

Humanforce has also improved the accuracy and frequency in tracking and monitoring rosters and schedules as the collection managers, approve on a day-to-day now.

Results

• Implementation of scalable, structured error-free workforce management system

• Ability to grow employee base without needing to increase resources in the back office

• Reduced time for timesheet data entries and resolving queries

• Increased efficiency of payroll backend

• Improved employee engagement, accurate record-keeping of employee shifts