Our Five steps to better workforce management
A recent survey of Australian FIFO workers found that only one in four believe their roster is sustainable beyond six months. More than half say their roster is already causing burnout or cannot continue without change. Western Australia alone has more than 50,000 people working FIFO rosters.
This is not a pay problem. It is a workforce management problem.
Mining and construction businesses run on people, equipment and time. When any of these are poorly managed, the cost shows up in overtime, fatigue, compliance risk and lost productivity. Here are five steps to fix that, and how TOKN Technology helps you take each one.
1. Smarter workforce planning
Manual rostering leads to mismatched skills, unnecessary overtime and burnt out teams. When you match the right people to the right jobs, you improve utilisation and reduce fatigue risk.
RosterPro builds this into your daily operations. It schedules shifts based on availability, skills and compliance requirements, so your roster reflects real demand instead of guesswork. You get fewer overtime blowouts and a workforce that is used efficiently.
What to do: Look at where your overtime is concentrated right now. If it is not tied to genuine demand, your rostering process needs a digital fix.
2. Capture time accurately
Manual timesheets are slow and error prone. Every mistake in time capture becomes a mistake in payroll and labour costing, and those mistakes add up fast across a large workforce.
Timesheet+ replaces paper timesheets with mobile clock in and clock out, plus automated approvals. Your payroll team gets accurate data without chasing anyone down, and your labour costing reflects what actually happened on site.
What to do: Move time and attendance onto a mobile system your workers already know how to use. Automated approvals cut out the manual sign off step that slows payroll down.
3. Strengthen safety and compliance
Fatigue, long shifts and heavy machinery intersect daily in mining and construction. That is exactly why competencies, inductions, pre-starts, risk assessments and incident reporting need to be tracked properly, not managed on paper.
TOKN builds compliance into the daily workflow. Competency checks and pre-start assessments happen as part of the job, not as a separate task someone has to remember. Expiring tickets and licences get flagged automatically, before they become a problem on site.
What to do: Check how your safety and compliance data is tracked today. If it lives in spreadsheets or paper forms, you have a visibility gap that needs closing.
4. Empower your field teams
Field workers often work in locations with no reliable signal. If your systems only work online, your teams are working blind for large parts of their shift.
TOKN’s mobile apps work offline. Workers can manage jobs, complete inspections and forms, and log field data without a connection, and everything syncs the moment signal returns. That means the decisions made back at head office are based on what is happening now, not what happened hours ago.
What to do: Check whether your current field tools need constant connectivity. If they do, your data is only as current as the last time someone had signal.
5. Connect your workforce systems
Disconnected systems create duplicate data entry. When your workforce platform does not talk to your ERP or payroll system, someone is manually re-entering the same information, and every manual step is a chance for error.
TOKN integrates directly with ERP and payroll systems, including MYOB Acumatica. That means workforce data flows through your business automatically, with no duplicate entry and no gaps in visibility.
What to do: Map out where your workforce data lives today and where it needs to end up. If the same information gets entered more than once, that is where integration should start.
Bringing it together
Workforce planning, time and attendance, safety and compliance, field enablement and system integration are not separate problems. They are connected parts of the same operation. A poorly planned roster drives up overtime. Inaccurate time capture distorts labour costing. Disconnected systems slow down every decision that depends on good data.
TOKN Technology gives mining and construction businesses one platform to manage all five, so you get complete visibility and control across your workforce, not five separate fixes bolted together.
If your business is still managing rosters on spreadsheets, chasing paper timesheets or entering the same data into multiple systems, this is where to start.
Get in touch with the TOKN team to find out what the right WMS looks like for your business.