The weather in Southeast Asia plays havoc with businesses, but specifically with restaurants and retail businesses every rainy season.  It is common that businesses don’t open, close down early or operate with less staff than required.  Today is no exception in the Philippines.

A weather storm has been on its way towards the Philippines for the last couple of days and as government, businesses and citizens prepare to deal with the consequences of the storm (read: massive flooding) I wanted to take a moment and share how PayrollHero is working to use data to help businesses cope with challenging weather systems.

As an example, take these three restaurants that are side by side in Fort Bonifacio; Da.u.de, TokyoTokyo and Wildflour.  The first 2 are closed and Wildflour is open but closing early.

Now there are many reasons why businesses close during storms.  Staff can’t make it to work, staff need to deal with issues at home, road flooding, Government advisory, etc. While it is good to keep that in mind, what I’m referring to here is using data within a restaurant or retail business to better understand your staffing needs.

Wildflour is quite busy today (which is normal for them) but if you look at the options for people who want food in their specific area, they are the only choice because they were the only one open today.  They are closing early, which the manager said was because they wanted to give the staff enough time to get home as many come from far distances.

What is the cost of being closed on a day like this? two days? three?

If you could find a way to be open, what is the profit? especially if your competition is closed?

So what does this have to do with PayrollHero?

When we first built PayrollHero we saw the trend of how weather effects employees time and attendance as well as how employee commute distance effects their time and attendance.  We decided that we could use data and see if we could track the correlation between those items and employee attendance.

Within every PayrollHero account there is an “Analytics” tab (beta) that shows management as well as employees how their time and attendance stacks up against their colleagues.  But one part of the analytics is built specifically for situations like this.

Weather
PayrollHero pulls in the weather for your office location and showcases it against employee time and attendance.  The idea is to give you an accurate idea of how weather effects your business.  Here are a couple examples:

As we continue to expand on the data, the idea is that PayrollHero can help you anticipate how the upcoming weather will effect your workforce as well as enable employees to make travel decisions based on the weather.

Imagine if you could call extra workers in to replace workers who have not even called in to say they can’t make it to work.  

Commute Distance
The other data set we work with is the employees commute distance.  PayrollHero knows where the employee lives, as we need that data for payroll, but we use that data to correlate how far away an employee lives from their place of work and how that distance effects their time and attendance.

Employers and employees can see the data and the idea is to help them both make better decisions on where to live, where to work, etc.
There are many companies in Southeast Asia that pay a proximity bonus to employees who live closer to work as the employer knows that the closer they live, the less likely they are to miss work due to traffic, weather, etc.  In PayrollHero, we show this data to help everyone make better decisions on where to work and where to live.

Imagine you knew a storm was coming in and you could contact workers who live close to work to take the shifts so that you can stay open, keep your employee safe (ie. they don’t have to try and commute via flooded streets) and profit when others are closed! 

Interested to learn more?  Contact us as we would be pleased to setup a personal demo of PayrollHero. (signup here for a free, no obligation personal demo)

#StaySafe