Navigating Workforce Management Complexity and Enhancing Employee Experience
The 2024 Gartner® Market Guide for Workforce Management Applications provides valuable insights into the evolving landscape of Workforce Management (WFM) solutions. As businesses face increasingly complex labor regulations and growing focus on employee experience, understanding the capabilities and considerations of WFM applications becomes crucial to improving operational efficiency.
The report notes, “organizations leverage WFM applications to improve employee experience (EX) through features such as flexible scheduling, conversational interfaces, corporate communications and employee sentiment capture.”
2024 Gartner® Market Guide for Workforce Management Applications
HR technology leaders seeking WFM to enhance operational efficiency and transform frontline worker experience can use this Market Guide to gain insights into the latest capabilities and find suitable vendors.
Gartner defines WFM as a solution comprising of software and (often) hardware that helps organizations manage their workers’ operational deployment.
Market Description
The core capabilities of WFM applications include:
- Time and attendance—Accurately measuring workers’ working time and absences and making this information available to payroll and other HR systems
- Compliance—Delivering tools to help employees manage compliance with legislation and agreements pertaining to working time, pay and leave
- Scheduling—Providing a means of creating efficient and fair work schedules (sometimes referred to as rotas or rosters) and providing tools to track worker attendance
- Reporting and analytics—Generating reports and analyzing workforce data to enable organizations to monitor workforce trends, identify issues and track progress towards goals
The Evolving Role of WFM Solutions
As customers’ functional requirements vary, so too do WFM vendors’ capabilities. The best-fit WFM vendor will be the one whose capabilities most closely match the buying organization’s functional requirements (plus other considerations, such as historic and future investment strategy as well as industry and geographic coverage).
Use WFM to Drive EX
WFM is an application an hourly worker will use multiple times a day. Furthermore, because hourly workers may not have access to a corporate email account, WFM is likely the application they use most frequently outside of any operational applications. Because WFM is a high-touch tool, it represents an opportunity to transform EX for hourly workers.
Primary use cases include:
- Flexible Scheduling
- Delivery of Corporate Communications to Employees
- Conversational Interfaces
- Capturing Employee Sentiment With Pulse Surveys
Your Next Steps
Link your organization’s WFM investments to broader organizational initiatives targeted at frontline workers, such as boosting retention, improving experience, and creating a compelling employee value proposition (EVP). A best-fit WFM solution will support strategic connections between HR technology, the digital workplace, and other critical application strategies.
We invite you to read the full report to gain a comprehensive understanding of the current WFM market and how it can support your organization’s specific workforce management strategy.
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Gartner, Market Guide for Workforce Management Applications, 2024, Joise Xing, Sam Grinter, Ron Hanscome, Kelsie Marian, Ranadip Chandra, David Bobo, Anand Chouksey, 01 August 2024.
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