How to optimize your workforce during a labour shortage
The labour shortage has put HR managers in a difficult position. Recruiting is harder, retention demands more attention, and the day-to-day work of running a team has gotten more complex.
The good news: there are practical ways to get ahead of it. From building a stronger workplace culture to using technology to reduce the manual grind, the companies coming out on top are the ones treating workforce management as a system, not a series of one-off fixes.
Here are four actionable strategies, plus a look at how technology can support each of them.
1. Build a culture people want to stay in
Ping pong tables and a beer fridge never retained anyone long-term. What actually keeps employees around is a shared sense of values and belonging.
A strong company culture gets built through everyday behaviours: how managers communicate, how performance gets recognized, what the working conditions look and feel like. The companies doing this well turn to their most engaged employees first to understand what makes the environment work for them, then use those signals to reinforce and replicate it.
A manufacturing company we worked with put their stated value of “safety and wellness” into action by adding ventilation to their factory floor during summer months. The result was a workforce that felt seen and worked more efficiently because of it.
When culture is working, employees become advocates. Most of our own team at Evolia came through referrals. A workplace people genuinely want to be in attracts more of the right people without needing to shout about it.
2. Get creative with how you compensate people
Salary matters, but it’s rarely the deciding factor in whether someone stays. Smaller companies especially don’t always have the budget to compete on pay, so the question becomes: what else can you offer?
Flexibility tops the list for most workers right now. The ability to work hours that fit their lives is something many employees actively seek out and factor into decisions about where to work. A few of our retail and restaurant clients have had real success letting employees fill their own schedules within the structure the business needs. When people choose their shifts, they show up more consistently and think longer-term about their role.
Being attentive to what candidates actually value, rather than defaulting to standard perks, goes a long way in both attracting and retaining the right people.
3. Consider partnering with other companies
Labour shortages affect most employers in an industry at the same time. Rather than spending months recruiting and training, some companies have found it worth exploring cross-company partnerships, where employees split shifts between two organizations in the same sector.
The arrangement works well for everyone: both companies fill more shifts without doubling their training overhead, and employees get closer to full-time hours. It’s a practical, human-centred workaround for a problem that isn’t going away quickly.
4. Use technology to make flexible scheduling actually work
Flexible scheduling sounds straightforward in principle. In practice, managing last-minute callouts, shift swaps, and employee requests manually on a whiteboard or spreadsheet burns through a lot of time and rarely produces an optimized result.
This is where technology does its best work. Advanced scheduling tools remove the back-and-forth and let managers spend time on higher-priority work. With Evolia, we’ve seen companies cover close to 10% more shifts without going into overtime, primarily because employees can request the shifts they want and managers just need to approve them.
The same logic applies across other workforce management tasks that staffing and HR teams handle regularly: client-to-agency communication, shift assignment, performance tracking, and payroll. Each of these involves steps that are repetitive, time-consuming, and prone to error when done manually. Automating them generates returns quickly and, importantly, without a steep learning curve.
When a staffing partner integrates their client into a shared platform, for example, unfilled shifts get funnelled automatically to the agency. The agency approves and matches from their worker pool. The client gets notified when someone’s assigned. The entire back-and-forth that used to require multiple calls and emails happens in the background.
Beyond scheduling, a well-structured worker database lets you prioritize employees for each shift based on performance and availability, not just who you happen to think of first. That kind of visibility helps you understand your actual workforce capacity and plan more accurately against demand.
Putting it together
The labour shortage isn’t a short-term problem. But the organizations managing it well aren’t just reacting. They’re building systems: cultures worth staying in, schedules people want to work, and workflows that run without constant manual intervention.
Technology doesn’t need to replace the human side of workforce management. It frees up the people doing that work to focus on the parts that actually require their judgment.
If you’re looking to reduce the administrative weight of scheduling and staffing, book a free demo to see how Evolia can help.
