When considering how to support a thriving workplace, your organization must think beyond automation and focus on becoming predictive, responsive, and actionable. Though the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are far from over, your organization can stay ahead of the competition by continuously executing strategic business pivots both quickly and efficiently. You’ve brought your employees back to work safely, you’ve retooled with on-hand resources, and you’ve created a business strategy that will set your organization up for future success. Now that you’re ready to move forward with your new business strategy, you need the confidence to know that you’re executing down the correct path.

A workforce management solution that uses emerging technology can help you strategically predict behaviors, evaluate your approach, and take immediate action to refine what is or isn’t working for your organization.

Here’s how machine learning, artificial intelligence, and chatbot technology in your workforce management solution can help you step into the future and execute new business strategies with confidence and ease:

1. Understand and Predict with Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

Innovative workforce management solutions use machine learning technology to predict customer behaviors, allowing you to optimize labor spend by creating accurate schedules that meet demand as well as customer expectations. This is especially important in environments where next week’s schedule suddenly hinges on unexpected disruptions or opportunities.

Additionally, AI-enabled digital assistants can surface urgent alerts that enable smarter decision making and faster responses to help managers avoid potential issues before they become problematic. For example, managers can be proactively notified of a potential compliance risk if an employee is approaching too much overtime, or they can be warned if a scheduled employee has yet to clock in, which could possibly hinder productivity by creating a gap in coverage.

2. Measure and Evaluate with Chatbot Technology

Chatbot technology makes it possible to collect valuable employee sentiment information as you’re executing change. This way, you can push out “in the moment” micro surveys to measure the impact of very specific actions that happen throughout an employee’s workday. Combining these chatbot survey responses with a rules-based workforce management solution will take this data even further.

Say your employee, Sarah, worked unplanned overtime last week. Your rules-based workforce management solution knew exactly how many hours Sarah worked in real-time, how many hours she was scheduled, and immediately identified that her work hours exceeded her scheduled hours. Dependent on a defined threshold, your workforce management solution pushed an automatic survey to Sarah’s phone to see how she felt about her unplanned overtime. Sarah then took a couple minutes to relay her dissatisfaction.

This sentiment data is turned into valuable insights that allow you to take a step back and measure how a specific operational change is affecting your employees, whether it’s a particular demographic, location, department, or other qualifier.

3. Take Immediate Action to Improve Your Strategy

Now that you know which operational changes are creating a poor work experience, you can take immediate action to prevent it from happening in the future. Sarah is approaching unplanned overtime again today, but this time—before Sarah even reaches overtime—her manager is notified to preemptively take action and prevent Sarah from working overtime since we know that it had a negative effect on Sarah in the past.

Because you’re able to measure employee sentiment with chatbot technology, you can decide what rules you want to put in place for immediate action to occur and finally close the loop with proactive AI-enabled notifications. This process can be applied to various everyday scenarios—such as fatigue risk resulting from a customer’s urgent request—to ensure that your employees are happier and more engaged.

Thriving in 2021

Emerging technology in your workforce management solution provides you with the necessary tools to accurately predict business needs, evaluate the impact of new strategies on your workforce, and take immediate action to refine and adjust your organization’s road to success. An “in the moment” toolset allows for a more prescriptive approach to thriving in 2021, giving you the confidence to put different measures into action without continuously introducing negative work practices to your valuable employees.

To learn more about driving business success with emerging workforce management technology and other best practices for thriving in the year ahead, download our latest eBook, 5 Workforce Management Secrets to Thrive in 2021 and Beyond.