Future Proofing Your Business with Workforce Management Software

Outdated workforce management processes can be costly. Manual administrative processes, especially for scheduling and payroll, can be time-intensive and error-prone. On an enterprise level, this can translate to lost productivity, growing labor costs, and a lack of data insights.  

With this in mind, automation can benefit a business, but it can’t magically fix efficiency and productivity problems. Introducing automation to a faulty procedure will proliferate any convoluted or unnecessary steps. There’s no real value earned by merely exchanging the labor from people to machines. But how can you continue to do more with less?  

In this blog, we’ll discuss how effective workforce management practices can help find time-consuming manual processes and how workforce automation can be used to eliminate manual errors.  

The Case for Workforce Management

The value of automation comes by integrating with modern workforce management (WFM) strategies, which leads to improved process flows, smarter budgeting for workforce management, and cost control. Workforce management is the art and science of getting the right people, with the right skills, in the right place, at the right time—all while keeping costs under control and compliance with labor laws. WFM functions include: 

• Resource planning: forecasting staffing needs, scheduling employees, and ensuring there are enough qualified people available to meet business demands. 
• Time and Attendance Tracking: tracking employee hours worked, breaks taken, and overtime. This data is used for payroll processing, but also helps find areas for improvement in scheduling or resource allocation. 
• Performance Management: measuring employee performance metrics, finding training needs, and providing feedback to help employees improve. 
• Analytics and Reporting: generating reports that offer valuable insights into workforce performance, scheduling efficiency, and cost effectiveness. This data can be used to find areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions about workforce management strategies. 

The right workforce management software can provide stability and agility by allowing organizations to make rapid changes and corrections no matter what the circumstances may be.  

Research firm Brandon Hall Group (BHG) released a report, Workforce Management—A Constant Need in a Constantly Changing World where they say organizations that can adapt to a constantly changing world will be the ones that succeed. 

The Value of Workforce Management

There is a distinction between intelligent workforce management automation and most other human capital management (HCM) systems. Intelligent workforce management software—or Best-of-Breed WFM—integrates with your HCM. This integration does more than merely help you hit your goals—it helps support the potential of your business. Organizations must understand their capabilities in terms of people, processes, and technology to fully realize the benefits of workforce management (WFM) strategies. Intelligent workforce automation:  

• Doesn’t just streamline budgets—it maximizes budgetary spend  
• Doesn’t just lower payroll costs—it offers insights into refining payroll costs  
• Doesn’t just improve for today—it adapts to continue improving in the future  

The value and ROI that modern workforce management provides only works if it removes mundane, repetitive tasks from your employees’ responsibilities and enables them to focus on more impactful business processes. By clearing employees’ plates of these banal, menial (but necessary) tasks, they can concentrate on bigger picture projects that move your company forward and stay ahead of the curve. Meaning, automation should free workers to focus on complex tasks. 

Workforce management solutions enable companies to become more agile and make necessary changes quickly without complicating workflows. These solutions also deliver cost savings, an increase in employee satisfaction, and a reduction of turnover rates, yet despite that, most businesses still use outdated, legacy, or entirely manual workforce management processes. By improving the labor force and maximizing abilities under tight budgets, businesses can remain competitive. 

By giving workers new methods of communication, scheduling, clocking in, and task management, ineffective and error-prone processes can become a thing of the past. Modern workforce management enables organizations by giving them optimized use of their greatest asset—their people. 

The true value of intelligent workforce management is to give employees better, faster, and more access to the tools they need to support their roles and to help you understand and anticipate employee needs and wants. By tackling all the inefficiencies holding back your people and processes, organizations can remain in a better position to thrive, adapt, and continue to thrive in the future. 

You’ll know it’s intelligent workforce management when you see the result: a workforce optimization system that allows you to react at the speed of change of the outside world. The WorkForce Suite from WorkForce Software can be used to create more human connections, combat conscious and unconscious bias, and generate more engagement in the workforce. 

To learn more about the best processes for implementing automation, please check out the BHG Report: Workforce Management—A Constant Need in a Constantly Changing World.