Empowered to Lead

Mackenzie:

Hello and welcome everyone to today's webinar. Today we are talking about empowered to Lead, how HR and Ops can Stop Manager Burnout before it starts. My name is Mackenzie Putici from Smart Brief, a Future B2B company, and I'm excited to be your moderator for today's chat today. Now, before we dive into the topic and we get our speakers up on stage with us, I just wanna give you a quick audience console walkthrough to make sure you all get the most out of your session here today.

So first and foremost, I've already seen some hi’s, hellos, good mornings, olas. We've got California in the house, Minnesota, rainy, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Massachusetts, LA but if you haven't quite yet, found that chat tab on your right hand side, check that out. Say a quick hi, hello, good morning, hola, bonjour, aloha, whatever greeting you'd like to send to your fellow audience members and our speakers here today. And just send that good energy around to the rest of the audience that's joining ya in the session. All right, we've got some morning, good morning from Sculicon Valley. Okay, I like it, I like it. Some twists and fun here.

Now, quick reminder too, if you have any issues today with audio, video loading slides, visuals, a quick browser refresh usually does the trick and can help fix any of those issues. But if you do have any tech issues at all today that persist, feel free to reach out in the chat tab there. And myself and Jordan, who's coordinating our webinar here in the background, we'll be here to help and answer any questions that you have.

Another thing you can do is hover over your viewport, and if you do want to enable closed captions, you can do that in the bottom right. And, there's also auto translation, so if you wanna throw those captions on in a different language, you can check those out and try those out as well. Now we will be holding some time at the end of today's session for Q&A with our live presenters.

So we'd love to get your questions coming through throughout the presentation. And the place to put those is on the Q&A tab. So just hop two over from your chat tab to the Q&A and any and all questions can go in there. And we'll do our best to answer as many of those throughout the session today and through that Q&A session at the end, and make sure you get all the information that you're looking for today.

Another thing to make mention of is in the docs tab, we've got some awesome follow ups, as well as a report which will be discussing some of the findings and stats throughout today's session as well. So feel free to go in there, poke around, save those, you definitely don't want to sleep on those awesome resources that are in there and, you can definitely take advantage of that.

So again, the report there, the 2025 State of North American Hourly Workforce Report is up there. In PDF, we've got the Legion Workforce Management optimises frontline labour scheduling, which is another doc in there that you can check out and get a little bit of an overview of Legion, as well as an awesome customer story in there that you may want to take away and look at as well.

Now, if all this great information wasn't enough of a sweet giveaway, we do have a $250 Amazon gift card up for grabs as a prize on today's webinar. I'll be drawing that at the end and announcing the winner. you do need to be live and present throughout the session to qualify for the prize, and of course, you also do need to meet the prize terms and conditions, which are linked in the docs tab as well. But other than that, I think we've covered all the information necessary. Again, if you have any questions, throw those in the chat tab, but otherwise, let's get our speakers on out here with us.

I wanna introduce you to Todd Asevedo, who's the GVP of payroll time and Benefits portfolio, and chief expert of SA PS at SuccessFactors. And then we've got Kristin Brennan, who's the VP of marketing at Legion Technologies Inc. So, Todd, Kristin, why don't you come on up with me here. Welcome to the stage you two.

Kristin:

Thank you so much. Great to be here.

Todd:

Yeah, thanks for having us.

Mackenzie:

Super excited, this is gonna be a great conversation and we've got a full, full house rolling in here. So since we have so much to discuss, let's, let's dive in and, and get people up to speed on what we're gonna talk about. So, Kristin, I'm gonna start with you. I know Legion recently published a report based on a survey of almost 2000 hourly workers, and that is data that we're gonna be using to guide today's conversation. So can you provide a little more context and background, before we dive in, around that data?

Kristin:

Yeah, absolutely. I'm, I'm thrilled to be here and to share this information with all of you. Like you said, Mackenzie, we released a State of the Hourly Workforce report earlier this summer. It was 1200 hourly workers, 780 managers across retail, hospitality, a lot of industries where they just rely on hourly workers so much. And there were some key themes that really emerged from that research and things about the importance of employee engagement and the link to employee productivity.

It's no surprise that more engaged employees are also higher in their productivity. But really a few key themes stood out that really can be, addressed by both HR and operations leaders, which is what we're here to talk about.

So, kind of three key items were that employee expectations are rising. So things like schedule flexibility, instant access to wages, communications, those are no longer perks. They're really must haves. And what we see is that when people don't get those things, then they might turn to gig work instead. So it's really important that people, that employers think about that and how do they drive in a more engaging employee experience.

We also found that managers are just overburdened with administrative tasks. They are just drowning in the amount of overhead they have as it relates to scheduling, time and attendance tasks. And they're really desperate for automation to enable them to focus on what matters most, like training their teams and engaging with their teams. And we saw that the companies that are adopting AI, AI powered workforce management, modern human capital management systems are really gaining a competitive edge in today's market.

Mackenzie:

Really neat. Yeah it's funny, I, I spent many, many years as a waiter and I feel like everything was so manual and, now I've some friends that are still in that world and the changes, the apps, everything, the way they get their money, I was like, ah, I'm jealous. Like so much has changed in so little time. So, really, really interesting that, I'm sure it's in all the industries, but ways of managing, as you mentioned, have changed a lot.

So let's start with the big picture. So between labour shortages, shifting workforce expectations and continuing economic uncertainty frontline leaders are being asked to do much more, but with less the result. Managers stuck in firefighting mode, covering shifts, managing call-outs, filling schedule gaps instead of leading the teams like you mentioned, and developing their people. So these issues directly impact engagement, customer experience, and profitability.

And so, one of the stats that stuck out in the report is that nearly half of managers are worried about job security. The top reasons are economic uncertainty, high employee turnover is another major challenge with 38% saying it makes it difficult to be effective in their roles. Additionally, 31% report that their companies are actively cutting managerial positions and further feeling the anxiety about the future. So, Kristin, Todd, like, did these stats surprise you?

Todd:

Yeah, I would say no. They don't surprise me at all.

I actually don't know whether the economy is expanding or contracting that this paradigm changes. Like, we're always now trying to balance employee experience with efficiency and, and like seamlessness, right? Which impacts the employee experience, but it's really not about the customer as much as it is about making sure the data flows, right? So part of it's about the customer, part of it's about the data flow, whether we have historic low unemployment or, there it's an employer's market.

These things are important all the time. So I think that it's not surprising to see the numbers. I'm not so sure that today's economic picture changes the need to make sure that you're always balancing the employee experience with the efficiency of the data movement. I hope that makes sense.

Kristin:

Yeah, I, I totally agree. It's all about balance. And so the stats don't surprise me either. I think we've run this study for several years now, and a consistent theme is high employee turnover. And so that definitely puts pressure on managers because they're having to recruit new employees, they have to get them up to speed, coach them, develop them, hit the productivity metrics.

And I think managers have one, managers of hourly workers have one of the hardest jobs out there, so they're constantly dealing with pressure. And if you think about those that are in the retail space, they've also got sales targets that they need to hit. And when there's a lot of turnover, it's really hard to do that. It can be like a revolving door.

It's not uncommon to hear about restaurants and convenience stores that have over a hundred percent turnover. I mean, if you think about that, you're replacing every single person in your organisation every year. And so the companies that are able to deliver that better employee experience are the ones that can relieve some of that pressure off their managers and let them really focus on building their business. So it's not a surprise, but I think that managers really need some help. And, you know, that's one of the things we're here to talk about today.

Mackenzie:

I love that. Yeah.

And why don't we dig deeper in, into how we can get that help, right? Because we see that burnout isn't about individual resilience, it's about systemic pressures, these outdated systems, lack of support, and often that administrative overload that you alluded to before. And so when manager managers are burned out and you have these skyrocketing levels of turnover, it's not just managers, but for their whole teams as well, that it's taking place.

So we see this ripple effect where engagement drops, service suffers, and organisations are struggling to keep talent. And again, another stat that came out and really stood out to me was over half of managers report is spending 10 plus hours a week on scheduling, seems like a lot. And 52% reported spending an additional three to 10 or even more hours per week on time and attendance.

So question for you, Todd. Why do you think managers are spending so many cycles on time and attendance tasks?

Todd:

Yeah, It's, and it's a great question. The customers that come to us, and, and I think first of all, it's important to understand like we provide the technology for core HR and, and payroll operations, right? We see the strategic partnership with Legion as an opportunity to separate the administrivia of, of the data movement around employees and their engagement with the systems, with the strategic tasks of putting the right people in the right place at the right time, right?

So, it's a great marriage. It's also, from this perspective, it's about fixing data and I'm going to, I'm a broken record. I don't know, what do they say? Broken stream. Now, I don't know if that works, but I'm a broken record with this idea of data management, right? And this, our whole intent is to find customers and the customers that find us, they have not invested in time and attendance technology, right?

And so the idea behind time and attendance nowadays is to make it invisible and, not something that a frontline manager has to even think about so that they can spend the time making sure that the right people are in the right place at the right time.

So we try to, to make the employee experience with time and attendance kind of an after the, something that's not, it's prima fasci, it's outside your, something that you're, it's in your prefrontal cortex like you're working on, and you've gotta to deal with it because it just takes up time.

If it's not in all in one place, very easy to execute. So you can get onto the more strategic things. And, speaking about more strategic,, this is where Kristin gets to talk about scheduling, right? So, time should be just going away, as something that's a to do. it should just happen automatically, frankly.

Mackenzie:

Yeah. And as you mentioned, Todd, Kristin, can you dig into scheduling? Why is this taking so long for managers?

Kristin:

Yeah, it's taking a long time because 39% of managers are still relying on manual technologies. They're still using Excel. They might still be posting a schedule in a break room. It's so inefficient, and it makes it really hard to match the business needs with what employees want, their skills, their preferences.

I mean, if you think about a manager trying to put it together a schedule, they have to think about the labour budget that they were given. They have compliance factors. If you're hiring miners, you've got a lot of compliance considerations. Those who are employees that are 14 to 16, then 16 and over, you've got staffing rules that the company might have. Like maybe you need two people to open a store in the morning. You've got demand. How many people do you think are actually gonna walk through the door of your business that day? And so how many people do you need to serve them? And then you've got, well, what do employees want, their skills and preferences. So imagine trying to take all of those different inputs in a human brain and create an optimised schedule. It's really hard.

And then once you create the schedule, well, guess what? You're not done yet. So now you have call outs. So it's very common for people that employ hourly workers to have folks that call out, maybe they're sick, maybe they're taking a gig job because they're gonna get paid immediately that day for that.

So 40% of managers are still calling and texting, emailing people to fill gaps in the schedule because of call outs. And the reason that becomes dangerous too, is that it can introduce compliance risks. It can introduce, like, people can be worried about bias, so maybe they turn to someone that they think will take the shift and, and be like, Hey, can you work later today as well? But that can create a perception of bias.

So it's interesting that 55% of managers said they think AI could really make scheduling easier, sort of manage all of this different permutations on their behalf, but only 11% of managers are actually using AI to help them with their scheduling. So that creates a real opportunity for increased efficiency and an improved employee experience as well, because schedules can match their skills and preferences. It can be done instantly, but if a manager tries to do it, it's a ton of manual work and very, very difficult.

Mackenzie:

Excellent. And I know we're gonna dig into sort of the, the why and what the solutions are a little bit later, but, to give you a question that just popped in my head is like, why, why are people not adapting this? Why are organisations hesitating? Why, why are only 11%, up on, up on this?

Kristin:

Yeah, I'm happy to start with that. I think some organisations may be like, some know they need to do it right, and they just need to, to embrace the change management aspect and get the frontline involved in helping them kind of pick a solution. They need to also, really make sure their managers and teams understand that AI is there to help them. It's not there to replace them. It's really enabling them to just automate away some of these administrative burdens and focus on what's most important.

Sometimes what we see is organisations when they're smaller, maybe, excel or manual processes, like they can get by with it, but in an organisation starts to grow and scale it, it just doesn't work anymore. So that's really when they need to start to embrace modern systems and, and modern technology. And Todd, I don't know if you have any feedback on what holds people back on the time-and-attendance angle?

Todd:

Well, from the time-and-attendance side, a lot of it is just, change management and fear of change. Because time and, and attendance is so closely tied to payroll. Payroll is one of those, “if it's not broken, don't fix it” functions. And people are not willing to jump into that to find the latest efficiency. I think we've built up a lot of latent demand over the last 10 years or so in that process, and what's available today can change, dramatically change, like what the frontline worker sees going forward. So I think it's, we're seeing a lot of reinvestment in time and attendance right now.

Mackenzie:

Well, that's exciting and encouraging, right? Because I think from those stats we look at, people are essentially giving up 13 to well over 20 hours doing the scheduling, the time and attendance. So, as we look at what else could we be doing with that time, and of course you already kind of mentioned that coaching and developing teams develop teams. So, I wanna dig into that a bit more.

If organisations were able to reduce the amount of administrative overhead, stats said that 60% of managers said they would use that time to coach and develop their teams, and 30% said they would use it to interact with customers. So, Todd, let's start with you on this. Does that surprise you?

Todd:

Yeah, no, it doesn't surprise me. I mean, we have a group of industrial psychologists that work for us and do, and do this type of study, especially when we focus them on frontline workers. And if you look at the retail and hospitality space, what we find is that these folks are the most frustrated by the administrivia of time and attendance of just the data collection of, administering the compliance component of getting an accurate payroll, right?

And, and once these people are frustrated, they have a hard time getting back to a customer facing mentality or, or disposition, if you will. Like they're, we can turn them off, just by making this a tough process or a process where there's lots of different screens or they're having to worry about compliance that should be embedded. These folks are used to working, buying stuff on Amazon and, and using e-comm on a daily basis, some of 'em provide that type of service to their customer. Why can't the company provide that to them? And so that's like, that's our focus from our IO psych folks. They're telling us, look, make a product, that, that really eliminates this part so that we can get onto serving the customer better.

Mackenzie:

I love that. I love that. And, yeah, Kristin, feel free to, to flesh that out.

Kristin:

I agree completely. If you think about company managers of these hourly employees, if, if you think retailer or QSR, nobody joins because they want to be locked in a back room, creating a schedule or dealing with time and attendance tasks, right? They join because maybe they like the brand and they wanna grow their career. So they grow for different reasons and, and focusing on the productivity of their team or interacting with customers, like that's how they're growing their business. And a couple other stats that came up from the report that I think are really interesting is that, especially in today's day and age, like productivity is really critical.

It's so important that people make every labour hour count. Our research showed that 84% of organisations would want a way to be able to capture and measure the productivity of their hourly employees.

And then 86% would wanna schedule their most productive employees at key times. And that's really important if you think about it. Like, who wouldn't want their most productive sales rep on the floor, at the peak hour so they can make sure that they're driving more sales per hour or their most productive waiter on the floor right at the dinnertime rush, right? In order to make sure that that check size is growing. So I think the good news is with AI, it actually is possible now to measure the productivity of employees based on historical data at a really granular level, and then to automatically inject productivity into schedule optimisation without, without, impacting other critical considerations like the budget or compliance. Compliance violation can cost a lot of money, so you never wanna compromise compliance, but it also doesn't need to compromise employee preferences either. Like, it can be one of the factors that gets automatically factored into creating that optimised schedule.

So I think the focus on productivity and interacting with customers is really why a lot of managers start today is because they wanna build their business, they wanna have a good customer experience, and they don't wanna be locked in a back room working on a schedule. So I think, no surprise whatsoever.

Mackenzie:

Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head with that, Kristin. People who enter into a realm of hospitality to work, want to create that experience, want to be hospitable, want to see people's faces light up and all of that. And when they're slogging and leaning over a piece of paper or their computer making the schedule, that's not happening at all. So, yeah, really good point.

So Todd, let's dig in a little bit more about the tech and how it works and what it can do for people out there. And so I wanna ask you, Todd, how do you see the advancement in technology impacting time and attendance and HCM technologies, and are there similar productivity boosting enhancements people should be expecting?

Todd:

Well, absolutely and this is where we're really focused on supporting the strategic components, like what Kristin just talked about, from a core HR perspective or master data management, again, there's that word data. We're really trying to make that invisible to the frontline leader, and transparent to the frontline worker, right?

So getting back to the type of people that go and help customers, buy more, have a good experience with the brand, they are not wanting to get bogged down. So the operations folks that are supporting them need to remove those things, and we need to help them to remove those things. So we're looking at any kind of capability that allows the, AI driven forecasting and scheduling to flourish and then because of the tight labour market, it's the flexibility that's now in the marketplace with shipping bidding and self-scheduling and mobile shift swapping and things like that. We need to support the data in the right place at the right time so that legion can support that front frontline operation, compliance and labour laws should be really abstracted completely from the frontline leader and the the worker just to know that they're compliant, just kind of out of the box, if you will. Integration with the other systems.

This is where, when people say, where does employee experience breakdown from a technical perspective, it's when data doesn't go to the right place at the right time. And so making sure that your onboarding environment and your offboarding environment and everything in between is connected with the data that it needs. And that includes the scheduling environment where skills and tasks and all those things are right there ready to use in the same page.

And also moving analytics from looking backwards to looking forwards into the future predictive insights. I think these are some of the areas that, from a core HR perspective or that system of record that we're helping support, the kind of advanced scheduling capabilities at Legion to remove those barriers from an operation perspective.

Mackenzie:

That's exciting. Kristin, why don't we dig in a little bit deeper? cause I feel like now, now you've piqued everyone's interest, Todd, let's look into the AI element and then the role of, of how that will work and the change management. So, this work technology can, can make that real difference. AI driven workforce management tools can automate a lot of the administrative burden and things like generating optimised schedules, handling those shifts, swaps and predicting staffing needs based on demand. So, Kristin, talk us through kind of what the next 12 months holds and how you see AI impacting your role.

Kristin:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, we'll start with, so going back to the data and what the managers and employees saw us with told us with regards to their perceptions of AI. So, top answers we asked how they saw AI impacting their roles in the next 12 months, and top answers were 55% said they thought it would make scheduling easier because it can handle that hard stuff. Take all those inputs and automatically create that optimised schedule.

I can't tell you how many customers I've talked to you that before Legion, they tell us about being almost like buried in post-it notes with like, “Hey, I need Tuesday off, I'm going on holiday”. And, and even some companies with, they have more minors, parents getting involved saying like, “Hey, my kid can't work this day because we're going on holiday”.

So, really streamlining some of these administrative tasks, So if you can sort of automate that repetitive process through AI, So, as Todd said, if you think about labour laws and compliance, they can differ by jurisdiction. So I'm in California, San Francisco will have different labour laws than Palo Alto, for example, and then even different labour laws in Chicago. So for someone to keep all of that in their head, it's impossible. So you really need AI that's gonna take care of that and enforce those rules.

And then 36% said it would improve communication with employees. So it holds a lot of promise in our study of very, very small percentage thought that AI would take their jobs because a manager's job is not going away anytime soon. You need that human interaction, that customer experience, but you really want them focused on what matters most. And so AI has that potential to make them more efficient and enable them to focus on what matters most to their business.

Mackenzie:

Thanks for sharing that. I think, the data speaks for itself. I also think a lot of these things are felt. And, and so I think the data just helps really back that up and, and helps what people are, are probably already feeling, get validated.

And so I wanna dig into kind of what I asked you before, but what advice you would both give companies trying to get buy-in, they're looking to embrace AI, they're looking to modernise their human capital management processes. How would you suggest organisations to get that buy-in, and how would they approach the change management process?

Todd:

Yeah, I mean, I'll take that one around. I tell you what we've been talking a lot about research data and what we're finding when we call these customers, and I'll give you a little bit of anecdotal data, I get to talk to a lot of retailers in my role, probably some of the most recognizable brands, which is why I can't use a branded coffee cup, right? So the one thing that they tell me over and over again is that their frontline managers, their frontline workers expect them to have this technology. They expect when they show up for work, they expect this AI to be running. And they also call out scheduling in the top three of the use cases that they expect.

So, which I think is interesting because there's, like 26 processes in HR alone, that's outside of a company's normal operations, there's more processes there. There's all kinds of processes an employee can be aware of expense reports, for instance, they call out scheduling. And I think that's an opportunity and also, a mandate for, from employees from those frontline workers that they need to go and invest in this technology because their future employee is expecting this technology from them.

Kristin:

I totally agree. And when I, I think about just adding to what Todd said, I think about it from two different aspects. So the first, how do you get buy-in maybe at the corporate level? I do think that building a business case, so I'll just throw out a little bit more data, but we did a total economic impact report with Forrester Consulting, and they found that with Legion, companies achieved a 13x ROI, I mean, that's incredible. For a company with 10,000 employees, it was almost a $14 million benefit over three years. When you look at the NPV, and, and if you think about it, it came from a few key categories.

So schedule optimisation, making sure that they're making every labour hour count, it came from manager productivity. So think about that time savings, we've reduced time manager spent on scheduling by 50% or more. Some have reported 75% decrease in the time it takes to create and maintain schedules. A reduction in compliance risk, right? So think about the penalties, the fines, managing compliance, and then a 5% increase in retention for a large organisation.

Again, that can be huge because as Todd said, the employees now expect a modern experience, right? And if you are not giving it to 'em, they're gonna go someplace that will. So they want schedules that match their preferences, they want that flexibility. People have lives outside of their job. And so you can really, people will often use optimised scheduling and easy to use mobile app as a recruitment tool, and they're on their careers page. So those are some of the ways that I would get buy-in from, from your company perspective. But then you also have to get buy-in from your teams.

And that's where my advice would be, that you get people in the field engaged in your project, enable them to help you pick the technology, get them involved in piloting the technology, really like they become champions and ambassadors for the new technology. So maybe you start with a proof of concept in one region or one division, and then you take that success and grow to other areas. And I think the key is that you really approach it as the AI is there to enable the managers and their teams not to replace them, it's to make them more efficient.

So I would build kind of the business case for your organisation, and then from a field standpoint, I would get your teams involved, get champions to help you with that change management process, but make sure their voice is heard and they feel like they're part of that process.

Mackenzie:

Yeah, absolutely.

Todd:

Lemme I'll, I'll just add one thing too. What we've seen is that when you bring those, workers into the selection process, and then they're part of the pilot team, and then they can kind of sell their peers in the space on the efficacy after they've seen it, right? So they're kind of the early evangelists.

But what we've seen is like an unintended consequence is that those folks also then understand how important the accurate data that they put into the system early in the process, things about employee skills and capabilities and all these other things that most frontline workers are like, look, I just gotta go out to the floor, right? I just gotta go to work. They start understanding how those early data elements can, make a really nice process at the end work for everybody. So we see accurate data coming in the front end once those employees are bought in.

Mackenzie:

Really nice. And okay, we actually have a question, I'm not gonna ask it quite yet, but it came in around how ops and HR can collaborate. And I want to kind of dig into that overall collaboration, practically across HR, payroll and ops. And we've talked about the systemic drivers of burnout and how managers often, kinda get stuck in firefighting mode. So let's talk about some solutions.

And what I wanna ask to both of you is how can HR, payroll and operations work together more effectively to reduce that burden? And where do these innovations like instant pay fit into the picture?

Todd:

Yeah, and I, I'll take, I'll take that one that looks, instant pay is a great example of, and it's called instant pay or early wage access, or earned wage access, or there's, there's a bunch of daily pay, some people call it Uber, you the Uber pay model or this no longer fad. It's definitely part, it's becoming part of the culture, in lots of countries that we're doing business in. It's a great place to see HR data and payroll data and operations data come together. And I think from a practitioner perspective, it's the employee experience creators where there's a gap in the data, like in and or in the processes that happen. And EWA is, or instant pay, is a great example.

I think the stat that always blows me away, is because it is very high, is at 70% of frontline workers, I think retail hospitality, are willing to move organisations to become avail to this, instant pay capability, right? 70%.That’s how important it is. And the greatest thing about it is, from a company who's trying to make employee experience, at the forefront of what we do, eliminating a predatory lender to us is like the, that it hits home, right?

So this idea of look, people worked it, give them the money, and when combined with financial wellness, I mean, it's just, awesome now where it could all come together. and where can go bad is if I'm just adding one more app, right? With EWA, because this app fatigue is real, right? We're hearing it all the time. We can't have all these apps going just to, to maintain an employee on the floor. So the fact that Legion has bundled it in to the single scheduling capability is really a huge, adoption boost and something that's gonna keep that app fatigue. We're not gonna be some someplace else in the organisation may be causing it, but it's not gonna be us.

Kristin:

Yeah. And I agree with Todd completely. It's interesting. We asked a question about earned wage access when we first did our survey like several years ago, four years ago, probably now. And only 2% of people said they would quit jobs to go to a company that offered it. And, and as Todd said in his, research is 70% now, so that increase is just astronomical.

And it is really important to financial wellness, if you think about hourly employees, the wages still aren't high, right? And a lot of people are working more than one job. They need more money just to pay their rent to buy groceries. Just the basics. So I think it's really important to improve financial wellness and financial stability for these hourly employees.

But there's one interesting operational aspect that we haven't talked about. One of our customers, Aldo Group, they found that when they introduced earned wage access, not only was it good for the employees, it was actually great for operations. And this is an example of HR and ops are partnering and working together. They actually improved clock-in performance by 72%. So if you think about it, what the rule was that if an employee clocked in and clocked out on time, then they would be eligible to get a portion of their earned wages. And in the past, people would forget to clock out on time, but now that they actually needed that sort of clock hygiene in order to get access to the wages, it drove a 72% improvement. So that's just an example where something was really good for the employees, and it was really good for the employer as well by driving greater operational efficiency. And if you think about just, making sure people are clocking in and out on time, there's not like an extra five minutes on either side, like that extra time starts to really creep up in terms of labour costs. And so it's just a great example.

And I agree with Todd that in today's day and age, people don't wanna wait for two weeks for their access to their pay, right? They just worked a shift and they should be able to get it immediately in the same app that they used to view their schedules. And so it can also incentivize people for picking up open shifts as well, saying like, Hey, you could get paid immediately and, and showing them how much they'll make if they were to take the shift. So it's just a great example of how ops and HR can partner to improve efficiency, but also deliver that better employee experience.

Mackenzie:

That's a good point. If you're like, "I have the day off, but if I go in, I'm immediately gonna get X amount of dollars in hand". That's like incentivizing.

Kristin:

Yeah, definitely incentivizing for sure.

Mackenzie:

So a question I'd come through, from the audience, from Paul, he's asking, how should ops teams best collaborate with HR to embed burnout prevention into scheduling, staffing, and workout design, not just policy.

Kristin:

Yeah, I think that's where you really need to partner and say, what, what is causing the burnout? Is it that they're spending too much time on scheduling or too much time on, sort of manual time and attendance tasks or correcting, time sheets, et cetera? Like how can they work together to improve the efficiencies? And I, and I don't mean policy, I truly mean taking out things that don't add value to an organisation.

And so we have examples, for anyone who's going to HR Tech, I'm gonna just give a little plug. We're actually doing a talk with Five Below where their HR and IT teams partnered together to improve efficiency by streamlining scheduling, time and attendance tasks, and providing instant access to earned wages. So, if anyone's going to the show, please, check out our session. But I think it is a real opportunity for that collaboration.

And again, it's not just policy, but looking at where, where is their sort of overhead and friction, and how can the teams partner together to sort of select the technologies that will let them streamline and automate away these administrative tasks. And Todd, I don't know if you have some thoughts on that as well.

Todd:

No, No. I mean, I think you said the very last thing you said is all I was gonna say, just it's like we should eliminate the, automate the, the things that should be automated, from a time and 10, like if we're talking about what happened in the past or what, like a planned absent, that should all be eliminated. Like there's no reason to have an employee be bogged down with trying to figure out clock in, clock out, geolocation. All, all of that stuff should just be second or rote.

Mackenzie:

I love that. So I, I do want to dig into more audience questions, but before we kind of formally transition into that, I think there's been a great conversation so far, and I'd like to just see if you have any sort of final words of advice for, for the audience out there, or, if you have any kind of key takeaways you really wanna like punctuate and say, like, if, if you, if you remember anything from today, this, what I'd say is the most pertinent,

Todd:

Well, I I would say, the, you, you don't, you don't have to wait for a project to start, right? Because a lot of people feel like, this is great information, great advice, I believe it, but then who's gonna be that change agent in the organisation that's gonna go out and create a project and, and get the justification done? And I, we don't have time for that, or somebody's gonna do it, but it's not gonna happen until second quarter of next year. and I just, I just need to move on to, I, there's no, what, where do I start? Right? And we always ask customers, look, start with your data, and there I go again, right? If they were playing a drinking game, data's the word you all, yeah, we're all gone already.

So, get your data in order, understand the movement of that data. This is the underpinnings of the foundation of effective ai, right? So when we ground AI, we're doing it on the data. If it's bad data, we have bad grounding, we get hallucination, right? That's kind of a glimpse into how the AI works. We need to have the right data.

You can do that without a project. You can do it today. It's gonna impact your operations immediately, even if you're using old technology. So go in and delete things that don't, are no longer, an option in a pull down menu. make sure that the data is flowing from one to the other. And that kind of brings some strategy into the mix, right?

Do you have a master data management policy or governance around how the data flows? Are you using multiple applications in the back office to handle the same master data, right? If I have, HR from one company and payroll from another, and time and attendance from another, and, that is you eventually run out of thumbs, right? You need to consolidate that process in one suite of applications where the data model is the same, and then let the vendor do the work, and then you can focus on like the true variable here, which is that strategic scheduling component.

So I think that's a long range version of it, like eliminating other, languages from the back office. But the first place you can start, and you can start today, is just looking at the flow of data from when an employee is attracted at the front end through onboarding to how they move through, the lifecycle of their employment and, and where are those gaps and identifying where we need to solve for those gaps. And the end process is, or one of the end processes that's highly impacted is the scheduling capability, because without the data in the right place at the right time, the AI can't do its job.

Mackenzie:

Hmm, yep.

Kristin:

And, and I guess for me, my words of advice for folks would be many that are facing economic uncertainty or tariffs, what's it gonna do to my business? It's tempting to say like, “Hey, I need to increase my prices”, or “I need to cut costs to deal with it”. But there really is a better way through AI that, with AI powered workforce management, automated HCM tools, that you really can optimise labour efficiency and employee engagement at the same time traditional workforce management solutions, they were some, they were never about the workforce. There was something done to the workforce, but it was all one sided. The equation, which is optimising labour efficiency, Legion has actually founded with a mission to turn hourly jobs into good jobs by optimising labour efficiency and employee engagement simultaneously.

So by investing in sort of AI powered solutions, organisations can give their employees that schedule flexibility, that financial stability, modern communications, a single application that they're craving, while also making sure that they're optimising the efficiency of their labour. So, it is possible to do both at the same time. And in order to try it out, like I agree with Todd, I would also recommend that A POC is a great way to get started, and to recognise the value. You don't have to wait for a huge project, but start building that business case, try to do a small POC and the results will be so clear that then it just makes the next steps kind of a no-brainer.

Mackenzie:

That's lovely. And, and yeah, I think that's really good advice, right? Especially in larger organisations, this can seem super daunting. You have probably all these legacy systems, all this data. So if you can start with one team, one use case, one something to get it rolled out and then kind of extrapolate out from there, that's great. And question from, as if I were the audience, Todd, if someone has all this data and it is daunting and they don't feel like they want to start, does the tech help? Does the tech help clean the data? Or is that something that you guys offer, in terms of some of that onboarding process to, to really make sense of it all, and, and get that kickstart?

Todd:

Certainly. Well, I mean the, our partner ecosystem is really the first place to lean in that, in that process of “does tech help”? The other part of where tech helps is, I mean, I always think of master people ask me like, this master data management was a huge topic back in the PeopleSoft, early SAP days, where we had all this digital data coming in and how do we organize it and make sense of it, and also kind of certify where the data's coming and where it's going and who can see it along the way, right? We have those governance tools, as a suite vendor, we make sure that there's no leakage of that data and that the governance processes are auditable.

And so the short answer is yes, technology does help. It's designed to help you need a good partner to come alongside and, and help along the way because they've done it before. Most partners are keyed in, like there's very specific partners that work directly with retail and hospitality organisations. Because there's some special requirements there. It's one of the reasons that we're so excited about the partnership with Legion, because we don't know them as well as our ecosystem and our partners like Legion, right? Whether this is what they do. And I think that from a, “where's the help”? It's getting the experts into the room, in your industry.

Mackenzie:

Kristin, anything you want to add to that?

Kristin:

Yeah, I think, I agree that I think that it's rubbish and rubbish out. So you need to make sure you have high quality data. There's lots of ways to, to address that. We also have, for our customers, we help them. We have a data science team that can also help and has done a lot of innovation around, even when you don't have data, like for, for our example, like it, it starts with predicting demand. When you think about creating an optimised schedule, it starts with predicting demand. But what if you have a brand new store and you have no historical information?

So we've built some capabilities that can help people actually sort of create and model data where data doesn't exist. And, and so, I think it's cleaning the data, augmenting the data, but also then helping people where data doesn't exist so that they can start with a demand forecast by location. They, like, we can even tell how many cups of coffee a chain store will sell every 15 minutes. So pretty impressive, that feeds into creating an optimal schedule or a labour plan. And then we match employee skills and preferences with business needs.

But, I agree with Todd. Data is just foundational to enabling that all to come together.

Mackenzie:

Great. This is really good. Okay. I'm gonna keep firing some questions in our last sort of 10 minutes at you both. So feel free to either claim one or tag one or, obviously if it's quite obviously pointed to one or two, one of you two, we'll we'll go from there. But anyway, the question I've got is how do you balance giving employees more scheduling flexibility while still meeting the business demands? Is this a common problem?

Kristin:

I'll start with that. I mean, it's a very hard problem if you're trying to do it manually. It's almost impossible, right? And that's where I say that we use really advanced demand forecasting techniques. So we analyse historical information, we take, we syndicate third party data, like local events, weather. So we'll know if there's a football game and that's gonna impact a local convenience store. So all of that information gets taken into account and we create a very precise demand forecast in 15-minute increments.

And it can be based on transactions, traffic items for sale, et cetera. So you start with a demand forecast. From there, we create an optimal labour plan that tells you, like, “how much labour do you need?” and what are the skills you need to meet that demand. And then that can automatically be matched with employee skills and preferences, budget constraints, et cetera. We actually have a 96% match rate between business needs and employee skills and preferences. And preferences are things like, “I wanna work on Saturdays only until noon”, or “I can work Tuesday, Wednesday these times and other days more times” I, “my ideal shift length is eight hours”, or maybe it's six hours. And we enable employees to update their preference, to input their preferences into the app and then update those preferences at any time. And then we have that 96% match rate between what the business needs from a labour standpoint with what the employee's preferences and availability is, which is really high.

Mackenzie:

That's really cool. I mean, frankly, because I think, sometimes it's just easier to say like, a shift is eight hours, right? But now maybe someone's like, yeah, six is great, or five, but you also don't wanna shortchange that employee. So having all of that data easily at your fingertips, it's quite a game changer.

Kristin:

Absolutely, and imagine doing it all automatically versus manual, right? A manager trying to figure all that out manually. It is just near impossible.

Todd:

Yeah. I remember working at Disneyland when I was much younger, obviously, and I can't, Ima, nobody ever asked me what I wanted or what I cared about, and I can't imagine how they would've collated the data and used it auto automatically, even if they had asked me. We were using paper time cards, we were getting paid in envelopes of cash. So times have changed and the workers are expecting this. So that, that, I think that's huge.

Mackenzie:

That's really neat. So, kind of a fun question. What lessons have you learned from workforce changes that didn't go as planned?

Kristin:

Todd, do you wanna start with that or, I'm happy to.

Todd:

Oh, yeah. I mean, I've got scars from these. And I think, what the lessons I learned was, and Kristin already covered this, was to do a proof of concept. Bring in a small team of people that are actually doing this job. Let them vet your proof of concept. Let them prove that concept, and get their honest feedback and take that honest feedback to change the system so that you don't fail on a large scale when you're up on stage and everybody's watching is not the first time you wanna be reading your script.

Mackenzie:

Hmm.

Kristin:

Yeah, I agree completely. I think getting the field involved in changes and, and building those early advocates and change agents, that's just so important. I think when you think about a field, they don't necessarily, there's so much that gets handed down to 'em. They want to be involved and they might know the business better than some of the folks at the headquarters. Headquarters may think they know it, but they're not the feet on the street. So if you can actually involve them, and then I think there are a lot of different parties.

So making sure that you've got the right people involved in the decision, whether it's HR, operations, IT, coming together to make sure that things integrate well with our, what's already in your environment and that the field can take it. And then I think educating the field and getting these early adopters to be the change agents to sort of win over the hearts and minds and be the ambassadors for people that may be a little bit slower to adopt new technologies and really reassuring folks that, hey, this is here to enable you and to help you. It's not here to replace you.

Mackenzie:

Right? Hmm. well actually that queues up another question I had in the queue. So for employees or managers resistant to change, how do you build trust in automation?

Kristin:

I'll start there. I think sometimes it's showing them how decisions were made. So, if we recommend a certain schedule, “how did we come to that”? So we actually found when Legion started, we didn't provide as much, I guess transparency into the decision making as we do now, because we found that managers actually need to be able to trust the systems.

And we believe it's very important to enable managers to take back control at any time. So if you think about it, it's like schedule automation in some ways it's like a self-driving car. If you're in a self-driving car, like you can grab that steering wheel at any time and take back control, well, we enable that as well. And I think that does help with building in trust for automation when they can see how decisions were made that they can still add their input.

But then if they make changes to a schedule, we'll definitely flag it. If they were to introduce compliance issues and we have a schedule score, so they could actually see if they make changes to the schedule, did it cause a degradation in that schedule score? Did they introduce compliance risk? Did they go over the budget or if they, if they actually improved the schedule, because there's still some art and manager know-how, but if it improved the schedule, then our system will actually learn from that and continuously improve.

So I think sharing how decisions were made, making sure that they still feel like they have control and can take back the wheel at any time, and then just the education process about, Hey, it's here to help and it's not here to replace you. Those would be my recommendations.

Todd:

Yeah, I mean, I would just add, I mean, you said it when you said the word transparency for me, what I've seen effective in the field with organisations is taking the resistant people, and digging into that resistance. Usually it's risk, they're risk adverse and they want to be a hundred percent accurate. Now I'm thinking about payroll people, and, and those time collectors and absence, time not worked.

The folks that are focused on that, if I can automate a process, but at the same time allow them very easy transparency where they can click another button or even on the side of a screen, see where that show me the math. Right. I think that gets them the feeling that they can take the risk. And we see that deployed over and over again when we design our software. We design it with the idea of transparency in mind nowadays.

That is kind of a key criteria. It's part of that balance between flexibility automation and employee experiences. There's, it's gotta be underlined with the, the transparency of how the math is done.

Kristin:

Yeah. And Todd, just speaking of payroll people, it is National Payroll Week, right? So shout out to any payroll people that are out there on our webcast.

Todd:

Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Congratulations to all the payroll people that are out there.

Mackenzie:

Congrats indeed. okay. We may only have time for one more question.

I have a couple questions that came in around sort of keeping up productivity, in some higher stress workplaces or in high turnover workplaces, and how ops leaders can protect the mental emotional capacities of the managers, as well as, how does Legion quantify the ROI of burnout prevention, to include productivity, morale, and customer experience?

So, yeah, that's a bit of a mishmash, but if, if you picked up what I was trying to put together there, Kristin.

Kristin:

Yeah, I think we did in a few ways. So, I mean, quantifying things is that you can track hours per sale and, or sales per hour and things like that. There are quantifiable metrics, in a retail setting. So we can absolutely track that. We can track the impact on attrition. So there's definitely a cost of attracting and retaining employees.

So when you give employees, schedules that match their preferences, it can, we saw in the Forrester study a 5% decrease in attrition when managers are automating some of these routine tasks, you can see an improved efficiency and productivity capture there. So we actually have models to help people sort of quantify the value, and we'd be happy to assist anybody that’s interested in taking that next step.

But I also will say that just in terms of avoiding burnout, automating away the routine, making sure that you're automating, automatically creating those meal breaks and rest breaks that your frontline staff needs and are, you're obligated to provide. So those are compliance factors as well, but those are all important factors also to just reduce burnout.

Mackenzie:

Beautiful. And I know we're, we're basically at the hour, so I'm gonna let you two go, but, Todd and Kristin, any sort of final sign off, or if anyone's really excited, they wanna get in touch, learn more, where should they go? What should they do?

Kristin:

Yeah, I'll start. So, I, my, my final sign off is that you can optimise labour efficiency and employee engagement simultaneously with AI powered workforce management. You can visit us at legion.co. We have free demos, proof of concepts, so we'd be happy to get in touch and engage with all of you.

Todd:

Yeah, and I would say, again, happy Payroll Week. Thanks for reminding me, Kristin. And, visit us at HR Tech. We're both gonna be there, and happy to sit down and talk to you. If you can't make, make HR Tech, get, reach out to our websites and learn what we're doing to help customers achieve the efficiency that we've been talking about for the last hour.

Mackenzie:

Awesome. No, that's been great. Honestly, I've loved picking your brains. This has been a really great conversation and I feel like we could keep going and there's more questions, but, really great chat today and, I'm sure you'll get a lot of follow ups from this. So again, Kristin, Todd, thanks for being here. I'm sure things will change over the next months and years. So, maybe we'll do this again in a short period.

Kristin:

Yeah. Thanks for having us. It was a pleasure.

Todd:

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Mackenzie:

Take care, you two.