🚦 Labour shortages & productivity gaps during peak
We're on the steep incline up towards peak, which will make or break the year for many businesses. Have you stopped to properly think about your operation? Do you have enough people and are they equipped to do their best work?
Self diagnosis is pretty simple:
📉 Are order fulfilment rates dropping or lead times increasing, especially as demand rises?
🤷♂️ Is it hard to recruit or retain hourly staff? Are overtime costs or staff turnover rates climbing?
🔄 Do manual, repetitive tasks dominate employee workloads? Are teams spending too much time on unproductive activities, like searching for inventory or paperwork?
❌ Are operational errors rising (with more picking, inventory, or shipping mistakes) during busy periods?
🆕 Is onboarding of new or temporary workers taking too long, impacting agility during peaks?
If the answer is “yes” to several of these, you need to fix things ... fast.
But don't fret, there are things you can do yourself to address these in the short term:
📝 Standardise work instructions for key tasks using clear, simple guides or infographics at every station to minimise errors and reduce onboarding time for new or temp staff.
🗣️ Implement a quick daily stand-up with warehouse teams to prioritise bottlenecks and assign tasks to promote rapid issue resolution and optimise shift productivity.
🟧🟦 Use colour-coded or clearly labeled staging zones to streamline picking, loading, or returns.
🧭 Adopt a whiteboard or digital dashboard to track progress on critical orders, stockouts, and inbound deliveries in real time, increasing visibility and accountability.
📊 Schedule mini cycle counts during natural lulls, count one area or product each shift to boost inventory accuracy without a disruptive, full audit.
👕 Print and wear simple “cheat sheets” for best practices or codes which helps new staff or seasonal workers deliver faster results with less supervision.
✅ Leverage simple checklists for outgoing shipments to catch errors at the last moment, supporting right-first-time loading and faster truck turnaround.
These ideas are neither exhaustive nor are they rocket science, and a good team will be doing these kinds of things naturally, but a fresh perspective is never a bad idea.
Once you're through peak, take the time to reflect and understand where the bottlenecks are, and what will make the difference for next year.
One thing is for sure, the Zetes team are out on site helping answer all of the above. So if you don't have a partner in your corner to chew the operational fat with, my phone will be on all the way through Christmas!
