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Home Is Where the Hub Is

Nov 4, 2019

Home Is Where the Hub Is
A cluttered home equals a cluttered mind. The same holds true for your workforce management solution. Just as sifting through a heap of neglected laundry in search of a matching sock steals time and patience, so does navigating an outdated system with a poor user interface. Complex menus, buried information, and unactionable content turn what should be intuitive processes like clocking in and out, requesting time off, or simply viewing a vacation bank into slow and tedious struggles.

So, what’s the solution to a messy home? Tidy up. Dust the cobwebs, organize the clutter, neatly place your everyday items in an easily accessible place. The ideal workforce management solution will have done the housekeeping for you by employing a sleek, elegant, and polished hub that aggregates the most relevant content in the system as well as your most common actions to create a simple, personalized dashboard. Think of logging into your system as opening the front door to your home. What should users expect from a hub dashboard?

Informative and actionable

Get in and get out with ease. A hub dashboard surfaces valuable information in a single, easily accessible place and allows the user to take immediate action without having to drill down into other areas of the system. Employees have visibility of helpful information like personal schedules, timesheet summaries, and time off balances. Managers can see operational items that impact business like company-level KPIs, employees who are approaching overtime, and urgent shift swap requests. Actionable items like clocking in and out, requesting and approving time off, and amending schedules can be completed within seconds.

A personalized one-stop-shop

Tailored to fit your individual needs. A customizable hub lets the user choose what information and actions are important for the them to see or hide depending on their role and day-to-day activities. An advanced hub experience will even allow the user to tailor notifications based on urgency so that relevant actions are completed in a timely manner, while less urgent tasks are sorted to avoid disrupting productivity.

A personalized one-stop-shop
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Consistency

A consistent hub experience is crucial for true employee engagement. An application that scales across devices allows users to access their dashboard via mobile, desktop, tablet, or kiosk while still maintaining a rich, full-featured experience. Hourly employees can clock in or out from any device, line managers can take advantage of mobile capabilities in the field, information is served up at the user’s fingertips no matter the circumstance.

Ability to source from separate systems

Information doesn’t have to end where another system begins. A hub with the ability to act as a channel for separate products, such as payroll and HR systems, provides a seamless experience through a single point of access. Without any additional steps, the hub automatically surfaces information in the background so that an employee can view something like biweekly paychecks from a third-party payroll service right on their WFM dashboard.

Ability to source from separate systems

Inclusivity

The core of any product design should consider a full audience, and a hub experience does just that. For users who rely on screen readers, who are affected by colorblindness, or even users who may not have their own personal devices, a hub is designed to be accessible no matter the limitation. User engagement is not just about a pretty interface, but also about making something that works for any type of employee with any type of need.

When considering a hub experience, it’s important to note that you still want a very powerful, flexible back end to the system in addition to a responsive design. An attractive user interface on top of an immature product won’t function like that well-organized house, but more like a last-minute, lazy-girl fix most commonly used when expecting company. Sure, everything looks great on the surface (and you might even trick a few guests) but the larger problem is still hiding under the bed. You’ll still have to dive deeper into the system to get to some of the actions you need to take in your day-to-day work life. A vendor with credibility and history behind their product started with something familiar rather than from scratch, offering deep functionality to drive engagement and make your job easier.

Dashboards like hubs are groundwork for delivering a next-generation experience across multiple products in an employee’s life. In the future, capabilities from devices that come into the market such as chatbots, digital assistants, and AI, could allow a user to change information with a simple voice request without even clicking a button. Traversing across different types of devices and interfaces is a journey toward extending the user experience beyond the screen. But for now, let’s just start with cleaning up the house.

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