In 2020, HM Courts & Tribunals Service (HMCTS) decided to unify its systems and processes for managing 1,650 staff at 15 National Business Centres in England and Wales.
HM Courts & Tribunals Service is responsible for the administration of criminal, civil and family courts and tribunals in England and Wales. HMCTS is also responsible for non-devolved tribunals in Scotland and Northern Ireland. The organisation works with an independent judiciary to provide a fair, efficient and effective justice system.
The HMCTS National Business Centres have several different internal operations centres including a call centre, filing warehouse, and national processing centres. Each of the environments requires different staffing, workflows and controls. Each centre had slightly different systems, procedures and rules for recording staff Flexitime; some used spreadsheets and some had no access to technology for recording at all. The systems in place were also not Cloud-based.
To modernise its workforce management, HMCTS sought a solution which would provide unified practices, modern Cloud technologies, and ease of use for the staff and managers.
Why did HMCTS choose HFX?
The National Business Centres have a large volume of staff, spread across national locations. It was important to HMCTS that they had accurate and consistent workforce management across the sites. With the pandemic and increasing home working, HMCTS had a duty of care for its employees, and understanding the workforce availability became key in keeping the justice system running smoothly.
The decision to unify systems and processes within HMCTS was an essential part of becoming more efficient and centralised; moving to the latest Cloud technology facilitated this without the need for major IT investment and helped HMCTS take steps towards its Reform Programme objective of delivering modern technologies and a digital-by-default service.
HFX’s Cloud solution Imperago was the perfect choice to facilitate unifying and standardising workforce management within HMCTS. It enables managers to view real-time information on how staff are working, who is working and at which location whether at home or in the office. Currently around one quarter of staff have been home working since the start of the pandemic.
User feedback
User feedback has been very positive, especially because the system is easy to learn and use. HMCTS managers took time to explain to staff the purpose and objective of implementing Imperago Cloud Time & Attendance and Flexitime, and this approach has paid off resulting in widespread quick acceptance of the new HFX system across the HMCTS organisation.
Staff and managers both fed back that they feel a real benefit to recording their times remotely, which allows for accurate recording both in the office and at home, reducing dual entry or manual accounting.
Benefits & Savings
Easy to learn and use: This is a key benefit of Imperago. The system is intuitive and requires minimal training. HFX gave a day’s ‘train the trainer’ course and then HMCTS prepared internally a 20 minute training video for all staff which has been more than sufficient. HMCTS receive very few internal support calls.
Cloud clocking and visibility: Although when the system was purchased nobody expected a pandemic, the system has been invaluable in enabling staff to record time worked while at
home since it is a true Cloud application and can be accessed anywhere. It also offers visibility to managers of when staff are working, helping HMCTS to
visualise its workforce whilst keeping staff safe and accounted for.
Data analysis and trends: Now more staff are returning to the office, and with many combining home and office working, Imperago has been key to understand daily what FTE (full time equivalent) goes into the office. Managers are also able to study data to see if start and finish times have changed since the introduction of Flexi Home Working. A centralised Cloud system means that benchmarking can be performed across the whole organisation to compare
data and extract trends such as different departments’ absence rates.
Standardising procedures and flexi working rules: In Stage One of the project, staff continued with their existing working patterns. Stage Two consisted of collating the real data obtained from the newly implemented HFX Imperago system and using this data to design new unified procedures and flexi rules for the whole organisation thus standardising working rules across the whole organisation. This has been part of the organisation’s approach to building a flexible and blended working charter, which embraces remote working and flexible hours, where the recording and visualisation is facilitated by Imperago.
Time Savings have been a large benefit: especially with Requests, Reporting and Approvals
Request process is now very streamlined. Staff can consult their flexi balance at any time and see how it is made up so they no longer need to ask theirmanager to understand why they have that balance. The system makes it easy to see their clocking history, corrections, and makes it simple to lodge a request for an amendment.
Reports and reporting were manual processes in the past, owing to poorly connected flexitime systems and manual accounting. Each week the managers would extract reports from a standalone computer and go through them marking up exceptions with highlighters and inputting data into spreadsheets to benchmark.
Now they have real-time office and team level information.
Also, because managers can constantly consult information in real-time and spot problems and inconsistencies early, they can resolve issues as they go along and no longer have a weekly reporting process where they are looking at historic issues for the past week which then need resolving.
The approval process is now streamlined and more accurate. The system enforces approval by the right managers, in real-time, and ensures strong recordkeeping. By setting reasons for absences and request categories centrally, HMCTS has achieved consistency in how annual and flexitime leave is managed.
The system helps to enforce consistency around leave allowances and flexitime leave, ensuring that the maximum amounts are adhered to and balances calculated correctly.
Imperago helps staff see their leave balance and record their planned leave, sharing schedules with their teams to increase visibility of working patterns and cover arrangements. There is no longer a need for individual leave records, and teams can identify where leave is possible or where shifts need to be covered.
Strategic Acquisition
Like Integra, HFX is part of the ADVT Group. Integra Workforce is the version of the group's HFX solution for Integra customers. For more information about Integra's sister company please visit the HFX website. There are more case studies for other sectors include Idverde a private sector customer that saved £2M+ as a result of HFX software.
HFX
