Making Managers Productive in the Moment

A successful manager needs to identify opportunity, judge issues, and prevent risk all at once. A continuous balance of countless responsibilities, managing is a high-flying job and perhaps the keystone of your organization’s daily productivity and leadership. Managers are not only the face of your employees’ day-to-day interactions, they are the ones who ensure that all work is executed with your company’s best interest in mind. Whether in the field, on the floor, or at a desk, every minute of your manager’s time is of great value to your organization. How do you equip your managers with the right tools that will cut through unnecessary noise and enable them to maximize productivity?

A day in the life

No matter the size of your company, your managers deal with a mountain of tasks in a single work day.

Employee supervision – Managers are responsible for training, supervising, and evaluating dozens to hundreds of employees. They are the encouraging voice behind employee performance and the direct line for all questions or concerns. Managers also need to allocate time to touch base with their teams to ensure that employees are happy, productive, and engaged with their work.

Business performance – Managers are expected to implement successful business strategies and prioritize work so that tasks are completed with a high quality and in a timely manner to meet the financial goals of the company. From assigning tasks and meeting deadlines to managing quality control and responding to traffic surges, your manager’s efforts are always geared toward creating happy customers and improving the bottom line.

Administrative duties – Responding to emails, making phone calls, creating and amending work schedules, approving vacation requests and shift swaps, managing projects, resources, and documents—the list goes on. Administrative work is far from glamorous but it’s the oil that keeps a business running smoothly.

With so many hats to wear, managers simply can’t afford to lose valuable time with tedious processes and unnecessary work.

Your retail manager is working the floor on a Saturday afternoon—peak foot traffic and prime time for sales. Should he or she be forced to leave the floor and spend hours trying to fill an empty shift when their employee calls out last-minute? Similarly, your manufacturing manager is planning a strategy for the work week. Does approving a single vacation request three months from now take precedence over evaluating today’s production goals?

Your managers need more

The biggest challenge is prioritizing. Your managers need a workforce management solution to not only streamline and automate processes that would otherwise exhaust their time, but to also help prioritize the importance of administrative tasks that might not need immediate attention. A solution that understands urgency, promotes desirable behavior, and automatically minimize waste will allow your managers to focus their productivity on the essential matters at hand.

A workforce management application does the hard work for your managers so they can be present with their team and productive in the field. Lean, consistent schedules can be generated with a single click—all while identifying areas of conflict like overtime, too many consecutive work hours, and scheduling gaps. Empty shifts are filled without disruption and time off requests can be approved automatically. Immediate updates help your manager see tasks that require their attention in advance, while mobile access offers the digital tools that your manager needs to take action in the field.

The manager of tomorrow is the manager in the moment

Innovations in the workforce management area will help tomorrow’s manager be present in the moment with even better manager-employee communication and improved oversight. The manager of tomorrow will leverage artificial intelligence to access features like schedule nudges that prevent escalation and location-aware applications to increase visibility of tasks.

You count on your managers—and so do your employees, but it’s a job that can’t be done alone. Establishing the appropriate foundation to keep your managers focused on the “now” will cultivate a higher workplace satisfaction, boost productivity, and give your managers the responsiveness they need to make their people feel valued.