WBCM – The Unsung Heroes of Sustainability

In recent years, sustainability has become an important talking point in the boardrooms of organizations and a necessary addition to business models across many industries – leaving them scurrying to make their brands, products and services environmentally conscious. Interestingly, companies like WBCM have pioneered sustainability long before it was a trend or a ‘corporate social responsibility’ box to tick. Established in 2003, WBCM Environmental is today the leader in the waste management and sanitation industry. After almost two decades of operations, they now provide a range of sanitation, cleaning, disposal, and odour control services to over 1000 different locations around Melbourne, Victoria. With a skilled workforce that delivers the company’s mission of quality and innovation in waste management, WBCM is a quiet force that ensures the world’s most livable city stays clean and tidy round the year.

HR Transformation with LogixOne HR

To an everyday person, cleaning bins and sanitation on a regular basis may seem like a simple task to organize, execute and manage. On the contrary, waste management is a complex task that needs to be run like a well-oiled machine with complete coordination between all levels of the workforce. During daily operations, several issues such as non-emptied bins, shift confusion, scheduling conflicts, delays, traffic conditions, the repetitive nature of the work and more crop up for a company WBCM. As their scale increased, traditional tools of business management like spreadsheets, timesheets, clipboards and unorganized IT systems proved to be insufficient for WBCM and often resulted in operational difficulties such as reporting delays, task delays, double entry related redundancy and more.

What WBCM truly needed was digital transformation. Hence, they undertook an exhaustive study to find a provider whose offerings would align with their need to grow through digitization. After scanning numerous vendor products in the market, they selected LogixOne as their key to HR digitization. LogixOne HR’s premium HR tools and applications with the unique feature of customization according to their dynamic requirements was the perfect fit for WBCM.

WBCM Specific Requirements

01.Employee shift scheduling

One might think running a cleaning company such as WBCM environmental is a simple process of assigning cleaning jobs to individual employees. However, this is not the case. Company resources such as cleaning trucks are associated to daily runs and these trucks need to be banned by typically to employees on a daily basis.

The challenge is to ensure that the available staff are properly associated with the correct cleaning trucks which in the past was done through word-of-mouth and last-minute changes leading to frantic phone calls and complicated meet ups. In addition, employees were required to physically turn up to the office on a daily basis which was inefficient.

The WBCM – LogixOne HR scheduling environment allows the operations team to very simply and efficiently associate employees to the various cleaning trucks and notify employee via the employee access app.

The scheduling calendar allows the operations team to furthermore see which employees are allotted to which trucks, which employees are on leave and so therefore are unable to be associated and any gaps that may need additional resourcing with ease.

02.Time and attendance tracking

WBCM Environmental has a range of different employees from full-time to part-time meaning staff pay can be either based as a fixed monthly wage plus overtime or based on the number of hours worked.

The original company system was to have employees complete a daily paper based timesheets and although employees were requested to complete these daily they were often not completed until the end of the week. To add to the delay, they were often inaccurate and overstated. Not to mention, the data needed to be collated into a spreadsheet for the calculation of individual pays.

By implementing LogixOne HR and having each employee track their attendance by clicking the start stop shift buttons within the LogixOne employee access app, their time is now tracked in real-time and management can easily report on the amount of hours worked by each employee simplifying the process of creating pay runs.

03.Employee mapping

Given that the majority of WBCM Environmental employees are considered as remote workers, knowing their exact physical location at all times is important for a number of reasons. One of those is to ensure employees are actually at work another is that work health and safety is of utmost importance to W BCM environmental.

Being able to locate an employee by the WBCM – LogixOne HR map means that management are able to easily locate and determine which employees are active and which ones are not and maintain optimal levels of productivity and transparency within their daily operations.

04.Employee Contracts

Given that the majority of WBCM Environmental employees are considered as remote workers, knowing their exact physical location at all times is important for a number of reasons. One of those is to ensure employees are actually at work another is that work health and safety is of utmost importance to W BCM environmental.

Being able to locate an employee by the WBCM – LogixOne HR map means that management are able to easily locate and determine which employees are active and which ones are not and maintain optimal levels of productivity and transparency within their daily operations.

05.Leave Management

In a dynamic organization like WBCM, employees depending on their contract and tenure often have different access to leave entitlements and any leave taken needs to be not only approved and tracked but also deducted from each employee’s outstandingly balance. Again, this has been predominantly managed and executed on Microsoft Excel and paper-based records.

The WBCM – LogixOne HR leave system enables WBCM to associate individual employees to different profiles and allows employees to request leave based on their allowances via the employee access Portal.

Any leave requests can be approved by management and once approved, the employee is notified, the leave calendar is updated and the leave is deducted from the employee sleep balance automatically. In addition, the employee is marked by the appropriate profile within the scheduling system ensuring that individual cannot be scheduled on the corresponding leave days. This leans itself well to creating accurate shifts for all available employees and ensuring that WBCM sticks to their daily routine of cleaning bins and sanitation.

06.Job Vacancies

In the demanding market of waste management that requires multiple employees to reach out to every corner of the state, staff turnover combined with a rapid addition of new localities means that companies such as WBCM are essentially always recruiting. The challenges arising from the constant recruitment processes are plenty and a unified and streamlined system to keep up with it without any waste of energy or resources is crucial.

By leveraging the vacancies module with inside LogixOne HR, WBCM Environmental can create job openings to fill various roles as their bandwidth within the state grows, specifically when adding more truck drivers and cleaners. Vacancies are then published directly into the WBCM careers page so that prospective candidates can efficiently apply and be tracked using LogixOne HR.

07.Performance Reviews

Quality, innovation and customer satisfaction are at the top of the list for WBCM and has long been part of their mission. WBCM ensures that their services go beyond just cleaning and sanitation, they encourage their employees to maintain positive customer relationships. Hence, beyond the quality of the cleaning services, employees are required to maintain optimal performance levels and overall productivity.

Managing the performance of remote workers spread widely across 1000 locations can be a huge challenge. Without an efficient performance review system, productivity decreases or stagnates, customer dissatisfaction increases and employee accountability is diminished.

LogixOne HR system provides dynamic performance review features to WBCM where they can allot various objectives or milestones for their employees to strive for and reward them accordingly. Additionally, top managers and employees can engage in constructive conversation in the commentary box about performance progress or any issues faced during the tasks. Employees track their performance reviews on the LogixOne HR App which encourages and motivates them to maintain optimal performance levels through all their monotonous tasks. This has proven to be a useful way to integrate remote workers into the organization fully and make them feel like they are part of the entity.

08.Incident Management

With multiple trucks and employees servicing thousands of locations locations across Melbourne, WBCM managers and senior level authorities have the difficult task of monitoring and remedying any incidents that arise during day-to-day operations in remote locations. Various workplace incidents need to be reported as quickly and accurately as possible for the respective authorities to examine and advise further actions in accordance to the health and safety regulations of the company and government.

LogixOne HR’s comprehensive incident management solutions empowers WBCM to have complete control over their workplace incidents from any of their locations. With the power of the platform, no matter how far away, WBCM employees can record incidents details such as nature, location, type of incident and more and upload images that can provide more clarity on the issue. Then, the related authorities are notified so they can investigate and respond with the necessary corrective actions and then track them until completion. This is an effective way to feel confident about facing operational road bumps when expanding to new locations.

09.Payroll Calculation

WBCM with its top management employees and remote workers of both casual and part-time arrangements across 1000 locations in Melbourne requires an efficient payroll calculation system that is automated, easy to use and error free. LogixOne HR is the perfect payroll management solution for an organization like WBCM as the LogixOne HR time and attendance calculation module combines both time attendance and leave that WBCM then enters into Xero accounting system to calculate the payroll of their employees. With the LogixOne HR Employee Web-portal and App routinely tracking attendance and leaves of their staff and recording it directly into the HR platform, the payroll process for WBCM is just one click of a button.

10.Customization

Each company’s scale, ambition, concepts, brand and technical requirements are unique and LogixOne recognizes that. With predominantly remote workers, WBCM’s configuration of LogixOne HR requires modifications that cater to that. Additionally, as they are in the sustainability and waste management industry, their applications must mirror that in terms of layout and theme. LogixOne HR provides immense flexibility in all its features so companies like WBCM can curate their own version of LogixOne HR platform with features, designs and tools that they need for their HR practices. This includes complete customization of all HR features listed above and tailor-made applications. LogixOne HR’s flexibility gives our clients like WBCM the feeling of owning the platfrom versus just using a third party software for their HR management. We integrate them into our platform the same way they aim to integrate their workers into the organization.

What a Day Looks Like For WBCM Employees Using LogixOne HR

A day in the life of WBCM employees starts with them checking their shifts for the day on the Employee Web Portal or Employee App and additional details such as truck allotment, location, task requirements and more. Once at work, they begin their day by clicking ‘START’ within the Employee Access App thereby tracking not only their time but also their physical location. As and when they complete the cleaning, employees can notify the managers and record the task completion by generating invoices.

WBCM managers can perform their duties of monitoring the performance of the staff, solving any workplace incidents and managing the team using LogixOne HR’s performance review, incident management and employee management modules respectively. They are also able to review future shifts and employee allocations to these shifts.

Additionally, if there is a requirement for new staff, then LogixOne HR’s talent acquisition module comes in handy. The HR team can post vacancies to the WBCM careers page and seamlessly receive job applications from interested candidates and process them through WBCM’s own onboarding processes.

Essentially, the workforce of WBCM Environmental now function seamlessly with all remote workers well-engaged in the operations and senior level managers and authorities have full access and control with the help of LogixOne HR. With the power of LogixOne HR’s complete digital transformation, WBCM Environmental has wind beneath its wings to tap into newer territories.

High level outcomes for WBCM Environmental

  • Far more efficient employee scheduling ensuring employees are aware they need to be.
  • Improved payroll and wage calculation given employee attendance is tracked automatically from the employee access app.
  • Simplification of contract renewals for both full-time and part-time employees.
  • Risk mitigation and OHS improvement leveraging LogixOne HR incident management tool.
  • Improved employee performance and job completion rates by maintaining regular performance reviews.

WBCM Environmental is a complex business and as such places a high degree of compliance on the management of our employees. We have many factors to consider with respect to our employees from hiring, to onboarding, contract management, leave, attendance, scheduling, performance reviews and even incident management. The LogixOne HR platform and employee applications tick all the boxes for us. It has significantly reduced the risk in our business as well created efficiencies such as reduced employee wage bills and employee performance improvements.

We are very happy with LogixONE and now LogixONE HR!

Trevor BurnsWBCM Environmental