- December 8, 2024 7:43 am
- California
Tana Greene
Co-founder & CEO
Since co-founding Greene Group in 1988, a national staffing company that grew to operate in more than 20 states, Tana Greene has been on a mission to help people. With over 30 years of experience in the indus-try, she saw, first-hand, the changing needs of the hourly workforce and understood the vital role technology must play moving forward. She set out to bring dignity through empowered choices back to hourly workers and provide a dependable W2 workforce for clients. Tana is a purpose-driven person with extraordinary leadership qualities. She set out to create the fu-ture workforce and is doing just that with her team at MyWorkChoice.
Knowing Your Purpose
Tana is a self-starter; she wasn’t born with the resources to be handed suc-cess. Tana speaks to audiences not only about her entrepreneurial ap-proach to business but her own life story and experience with domestic vi-olence. She also speaks about the im-portance of purpose. At 17, she wrote a goal on a piece of paper, “own my own business by age 30.” She spent the next 12 years defining what that business would be, but her purpose was clear. She wanted to help others by finding them employment. Her ad-vice to everyone is, “Never Give up, never settle! I’m what you call a serial entrepreneur and I’ve had seven start-ups. Three of those were successful. Sometimes you fail but I tell women all the time to believe in yourself, even on days when no one else might and keep moving forward.”
Tana is an active member of the Wom-en President’s Organization and serves on the board for Safe Alliance in Char-lotte, NC, and the author of Creating a World of Difference, a book about the operating principle that makes our work and lives meaningful. The first time Tana understood what connect-ing her “why” to what you “do” actu-ally meant was when she heard Orpah Winfrey describe this and share how it makes a difference in her life. This was her “a-ha” moment, and it gave Tana permission to step out and tell her story. She inspired Tana by telling her story and providing a platform for other great leaders to share theirs – which has, in turn, helped make her a better leader. Becoming your authen-tic self is so important as a leader.
Shifting the Paradigm
MyWorkChoice’s workforce has evolved, and their world has changed, yet as a country, they continue to sup-port the 40-hour workweek, with lit-tle flexibility for hourly workers. That model is broken and addressing that solves the pain points for employers and hourly workers:
Absenteeism through choice
Reliability through flexibility
“Giving workers a choice of when to work and how many hours they want to work gives workers the flexibility they’ve always wanted. This choice is empowering, and we found that when people can choose the shifts they want to work, they show up,” says Tana. “Our app-based technolo-gy puts the worker in control allowing our clients to recruit and mobilize a workforce around choice and flexi-bility. Simply put, it places the hourly worker in control.”
Using analytics, predictive modeling, and artificial intelligence MyWork-Choice identifies work patterns of a client’s current hourly employees then delivers a customized, 24/7-ac-cessible community of fully vetted W-2 employees ready to work for entire weeks, full shifts, or half shifts in four and five-hour blocks. Clients benefit from this approach because it allows for scalability and eliminates the need for overtime. As a result, po-sitions are filled for all shifts, includ-ing historically tough-to-fill shifts such as holidays and weekends.
COVID-19 only exacerbated the is-sue as workers face new scheduling concerns related to childcare and family health responsibilities. While “white-collar” jobs have benefitted from flexible scheduling for years, today’s hourly workforce has not. Through the simplicity and accessi-bility of a mobile app, workers can choose their hours based on their needs. MyWorkChoice is changing the way hourly workers will work moving forward, a shift for the entire workforce.
They transformed the legacy product portfolio to a flexible, modular ap-plication platform and implemented next-generation processes. MyWork-Choice adopted agile methods to im-prove speed to market, development efficiency, and resilience. What used to take developers months to release now takes weeks to deploy. Adding machine learning, predictive algo-rithms, and business analytics into the mix now delivers first-to-market timely and accurate labor forecasting for clients.
Additionally, MyWorkChoice inno-vated new virtual recruitment and onboarding method for hourly appli-cants. Forward-thinking organizations partnered with MyWorkChoice during the COVID pandemic—particularly essential service supply chains such as food and medical—enhanced their response scalability to keep pace with increased demands.
Client Success and Growth
GE Appliances contacted MyWork-Choice early in 2021 to help with mul-tiple manufacturing sites that we’re struggling to reach their production quota, causing significant delays at retail stores for major appliances such as stoves and microwaves, refrigera-tors, etc.
At the Roper Appliances test facility located in LaFayette, GA, the plant director explained they were experi-encing daily absenteeism of over 24% with a workforce of over 2300 em-ployees. At first, they were skeptical that our solution would work in their rural market, where they struggled to recruit new workers for the past two years.
“We started recruiting in June of 2021, and in only 9 short weeks we were able to build a community of 309 workers covering 93% of the shifts they need-ed filled. They were so pleased with the results that we are now in talks to help with their main facility in Louis-ville, KY where over 6,000 workers are assigned,” says Tana.
It’s All About Choice
By far, the biggest achievement for MyWorkChoice is being grounded in its purpose. “Early on, our mis-sion statement was to empower the working world. We got the message before the technology was fully in place. This revolutionary approach is a huge mindset change for employ-ers,” explains Tana. “Empowering the hourly workforce is both revolution-ary and a win-win for both employer and employee.” The SAAS product MyWorkChoice is rolling out soon is another game-changer. Employers will put their full-time workforce on the MyWorkChoice app and blend the contingent workforce at MyWork-Choice. For example, suppose a full-time permanent worker has to cancel a shift because they are ill or have a family conflict. In that case, they can drop the shift on the app, and some-one else within the company (another permanent employee) or a MyWork-Choice worker can pick that shift up. “When you blend the two, both per-manent and contingent workforces will be working together to eliminate absenteeism. It’s all done through our proprietary technology and our cli-ents serve to benefit greatly.”
“ Sometimes you fail but I tell women all the time to believe in yourself, even on days when no one else might and keep moving forward.”