Hi everyone!
As I sit here in the ‘peace’ (that rarely exists within my household with two little monkeys of 4 and 7), and think about what you might like to know, the first thing that springs to mind is that it’s definitely been a busy few weeks of late so how can I narrow that down…
- We’re actively building up for Iona and backfilling across the existing fleet to make sure our fleet have the right people in the right places. This is in addition to managing the people impacts of the Fusion project.
- We’ve responded to a number of ERO’s and operational issues for example re-planning logistics for Oceana’s redeployment and managing crew arrivals/inductions in Carnival House one Saturday due to a late ship arrival on a crew turnaround day.
- Our Maritime People team have been working on a root cause analysis of why gaps happen onboard and impact on team strength. The aim is to work collaboratively with Maritime & People Team stakeholders to tackle these at source.
- Our Shore People Operations team are preparing for the launch of My HRPortal Phase 2, regarding functionality relating to recruitment.
- Our ER team have been busy supporting many people change initiatives as well as planning for Brexit!
The most exciting one for me personally… is a change programme within People Services, in collaboration with our fantastic Shared Services colleagues in Technology. We’re working together to build a more efficient and robust service that can be scaled for our future needs. It will improve our employee and crew experience and the working environment within People Services.
Why does this excite me?
I’m full of admiration for the work that every person in People Services does every day to look after our employees and crew, for which I am very grateful. However, the team is really constrained by its complex and highly manual processes, which rely heavily on individual knowledge. We don’t have the technology we need to support an agile and responsive service.
To bring it to life with a few examples:
The planned rotations for our c.15,000 crew all require manual input. Then throw in a number of unexpected disembarkations or ‘no shows’ for various reasons (e.g. sickness, compassionate leave) which create gaps that we need to fill, often by moving around the existing workforce. Currently there’s no way to see the impact a decision to fill a gap will have (e.g. a domino effect to other’s plans or on costs). Add in numerous different data sources, monitoring, reporting, resourcing and training compliance processes on spreadsheets… as I say, it’s manual!
All this, in turn can have unintended consequences on the employee experience, crew wellbeing and manning costs.
The teams do a fantastic job giving the best service they can despite these constraints. But we want to give them the tools to deliver even better and, in turn, give our crew an improved experience.
So, by undertaking a full review of our processes, we’ll have a clear understanding of where we are today verses where we know we want to be. From this we’ll create a full roadmap for change to improve our operational capability, which we can then start to embark upon in 2020!
This is an exciting time for the teams and I know that the efforts across Shared Services will make this project a success. By working better together we can deliver and improve our employee and crew experience.
Thanks again to everyone for your continued hard work.
Bye for now,
Heidi
