How Workforce Management Processes Impact Employee Satisfaction
Workforce Management Trends, Part 2
Consider what your employees care about most—accuracy, fairness, and work-life balance rise to the top. Having HR policies in place to support these principles is essential. Yet polices are not enough. While they certainly reflect good intentions, backing policies up with consistent, automated processes does more to demonstrate your organization’s commitment to the values your employees care most about. Particularly when it comes to employee pay and workforce scheduling, offering transparent, automated workforce management processes can elevate employee satisfaction and even boost brand perception.
Pay Accuracy and Employee Satisfaction
Understandably, employees expect to be paid accurately for time worked, and they want transparency in knowing that every figure represented on their paystub is correct. Yet one of the most startling figures that came out of our most recent workforce management trend survey is that half of all employers don’t learn about payroll errors until an employee complains. By that time, the employee is already unsatisfied, especially in cases where the inaccuracies reflect human error and preventable calculation mistakes related to overtime rules or premium pay policies. And that’s an area where legacy systems, hybrid workarounds, and manual processes have a reputation for falling short.
While manual reviews can help you spot errors, the process is time consuming, and mistakes can still be missed. A robust workforce management solution, like EmpCenter Time and Attendance, proactively alerts your payroll department when inconsistencies appear, so issues such as incomplete timesheets can be addressed before payroll is run. This is the best way to ensure that employee pay is 100% accurate. Automatic alerts also speed up payroll processing, increasing efficiencies at precisely the time when payroll professionals find themselves overextended.
Employee Scheduling and Satisfaction
Workforce scheduling is another aspect of workforce management that’s directly tied to employee satisfaction. In the quest for greater work-life balance, employees are eager for increased autonomy around scheduling and the use of paid time off (PTO). Simple self-service functionality—like being able to indicate availability, swap shifts with qualified peers, and see how much PTO they’ve accumulated—can have a strong impact on employee satisfaction and even facilitate greater engagement. Yet, according to this year’s survey results, only 26% of organizations always allow employees to have a say in when they are scheduled.
And while 36% of employers offer time-off policies they consider more generous than average, nearly four in ten employees report that the act of taking PTO is not easy1. This process can be greatly improved by providing accessible, automated workflows that allow employee and managers, alike, to see exactly how much time off an employee has available before requesting or approving PTO. The result is greater autonomy and work-life balance for the employee, combined with more efficient labor management for the organization.
Stay tuned for the conclusion of this three-part series: Reduce Your Organizational Compliance Risk. And for more on the latest workforce management trends register for our next live webinar: Emerging Workforce Management Trends and Best Practices.
1 GFK Public Affairs & Corporate Communications. “Overwhelmed America: Why Don’t We Use Our Earned Leave?” August 2014. (http://www.projecttimeoff.com/sites/default/files/PTO_OverwhelmedAmerica_Report.pdf)