Bankstown Sports Club scores with Dayforce

Imagine your perfect night out. Would you prefer to enjoy some authentic schnitzel and a cold German beer? Or would you like to walk the cobblestone streets of Italy and find a quaint pizzeria? Perhaps you would prefer a family-style Lebanese meal in a bright and airy restaurant.

Surprisingly enough, if you travel to Bankstown, Australia, you can experience all this and much more at the Bankstown Sports Club.

Just southwest of Sydney, Australia lies the bustling and diverse suburb with just under 35,000 residents. Bankstown Sports Club is located in the center and has been a staple of the community since 1958.

“At Bankstown Sports, we're very much motivated about the customer experience and making a difference for our community,” says David Watt, Bankstown’s People and Culture Manager. “We always aim to provide a service experience for our members and guests that is memorable for them – one that lasts and one that makes them want to come back and enjoy themselves time and time again.”

Bankstown Sports Club is a not-for-profit organisation that was originally created as a communal meeting place for local sports teams. While still serving this mission, Bankstown Sports Club has grown into a wide-reaching hospitality business that offers entertainment, a variety of unique dining experiences, and space for large gatherings and functions. As a not-for-profit, all revenue generated from these activities goes directly back into improving the facilities, programs, and operations of the organisation.

Bankstown Sports Club is highly involved in its community. “We've got approximately 48 sporting clubs that we're affiliated with, and we’ve helped fund their operations through the years,” says Rod Dearsley, CFO at Bankstown Sports Club. “We've got a charity that leases space from us called Little Wings. We've also got the Bankstown district nurses that we support, and the Bankstown district aged care. And we do a lot of work with the schools around us to support them.”

The Bankstown Sports Club even offered up their grand ballroom as a COVID-19 vaccine center during the pandemic.

Serving the fluctuating needs of an always-on business

Bankstown Sports Club employs 520 staff members across its restaurants, event spaces, facilities, and corporate office. The company also operates certain aspects of the organisation 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This diverse set of employee roles and the always-on nature of the business creates a fair bit of complexity when it comes to workforce planning and forecasting. It must account for last-minute staffing changes to ensure the business can continue to serve its customers and the community.

“Because we're 24/7, a lot of people don't want to work those overnight shifts. We also have a lot of people that call in sick,” says Dearsley. “And so, I was trying keep enough staff on the floor to make sure we can operate efficiently and effectively and have that high level of customer service.”

Bankstown Sports Club, however, had five different systems for rostering, payroll, HR, training, recruiting, and onboarding. This created duplicate work across the HR team, limited their visibility into important data, and restricted their ability to manage the workforce efficiently. “Labour is our biggest expense, and it wasn't getting managed effectively. We had multiple systems that didn't integrate with one another. And it just wasn't working very well,” says Dearsley.

Bankstown Sports Club needed technology that could bring all areas of HR into a single solution and give the team real-time visibility into reliable workforce data.

Taking the guesswork out of operational planning

When Dearsley was looking for the right technology for his team, he says Dayforce stood out. “The biggest benefit that I saw was that it was one system. The information wasn't put into three different systems, three different times. It was entered once and then flowed through. And it just made so much sense that this was the path we needed to take to help our business,” says Dearsley.

Bankstown Sports Club selected Dayforce for payroll, workforce management, recruiting, onboarding, performance, and learning.The company began its implementation of Dayforce in January 2021, with the support of both Dayforce and its implementation partner, Enforce. Learn more about Bankstown Sports Club’s implementation experience here.

A single-system foundation for Bankstown Sports Club gives them access to reliable data in real-time, allows them to keep labour costs in check, and eases compliance adherence with complex awards.

“With the data available, everything just becomes seamless. Employees know their starting times, finishing times, and break times. By using data, we can identify the peaks and troughs in the business during employee shifts so that managers can work out when their breaks are and guide the staff by using that data,” says Dearsley. “We're achieving the labour percentage and the labour cost that we believe is right for the trade that we've got. Long-term, we'll be able to hit our goals from an efficiency point of view.”

Bankstown Sports Club is giving managers more power, as they can now access rosters and time sheets on the go to ensure the business is always operating smoothly and efficiently. This means as an organisation, Bankstown can more closely monitoring labour costs.

“We’re looking to reduce our labour costs. We’re putting the onus back on managers to get the right forecast. We’re making sure they understand their business rules and getting that right mix of the lowest labour costs they possibly can while keeping those high levels of service for the customers," says Dearsley. “They're actually starting to see that any decision they make, from someone finishing early or staying back, is coming through in their cost.”

Delivering visibility and engagement

Since going live in October 2021, Bankstown Sports Club has received great feedback from employees. “I have spoken to a few staff over the last few months. A lot of them love the platform and the visibility that they've now got compared to what they didn't have,” says Dearsley. “The adoption of Dayforce has been really high.”

Employees now have access to everything they need through the Dayforce mobile app on their phones. They can check their schedules, swap shifts, submit for vacation or sick leave, and communicate directly with their manager.

And with more real-time data on shift coverage and absence tracking, Bankstown can achieve better workforce planning and forecasting in order to keep operations running smoothly. For example, Dearsley noticed that there was a trend of employees calling in sick for overnight shifts on Saturdays. “On a Saturday night, we can lose 15 shifts, which is 10% of our workforce just like that. And so, we want to make sure that we've got enough coverage there.”

His proposed solution to this challenge is to offer a shift premium in the form of higher pay for employees who work overnight shifts. This may be a way to entice employees to take a less desirable shift, and in turn will solve Bankstown's coverage challenge. “That's part of the data that we've been able to get out of Dayforce. We're trialing this program now to see how it works,” says Dearsley.

The company has also seen some impressive results from a payroll perspective. Bankstown only has one person processing payroll for all 520 employees. Now, with Dayforce, this payroll specialist doesn’t have to check and approve every single employee’s hours – they simply scan for anomalies. “The actual payroll function has gone from being a full day of processing to just a few hours,” says Dearsley.

Continuing to grow together

As Bankstown Sports Club continues to improve its operational efficiency and its use of Dayforce, Dearsley is looking forward to his continued partnership with both the Dayforce and Enforce teams.

“As we continue to grow, as we continue to learn and interact with Dayforce, we're excited by this ongoing partnership with Dayforce,” says Watt.

“We would not have achieved what we achieved in terms of go-live without their support through those first couple of weeks,” adds Dearsley. “Since implementation, we're still using the support of Enforce on an ongoing basis. They've been a great supporter, and we will continue partnering with Enforce into the future to assist us with the challenges that arise.”

Bankstown’s next project will be configuring and testing Advanced Scheduling in Dayforce, to give them even more visibility into their labour costs, rostering needs, and employee availability.

“We've got a better grasp on maintaining and overseeing our labour cost. Once Advanced Scheduling comes in, that will help us drive that labour cost down even further,” says Dearsley. “Once we’re rostering more efficiently, we could save 2% or 3% on our bottom line, which is about $1 million annually. It's a very significant amount.”