Workforce management involves managing employees within an organization to help reduce costs while increasing productivity. If you are responsible for workforce management, you will often create employee schedules, track time and attendance, organize time off requests, and process payroll.
There is plenty of software providers that offer workforce management solutions so how do you know what to look out for?
This blog post takes you through the exact workforce management solutions you need.
What are the key workforce management solutions you need?
Employee Scheduling:
Your workforce management solution should come with an employee scheduling feature. The fact that you are implementing workforce management software means that your workforce is large or complex, and is difficult to manage with manual methods. Manual scheduling of employees gets tedious and mistakes get made due to human error. You either double-book an employee or don’t have enough employees working, or you have unqualified workers accepting shifts. So, say goodbye to outdated excel or time sheets.
An automated scheduling feature takes the hardship out of scheduling and will save you both time and money in the long run. A report by investment firm Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. made the case that workforce management tools can “achieve the elusive and seemingly contradictory goal of lower labor costs combined with higher levels of customer service.” Your workforce management software should also allow you to save your schedules securely in the cloud. This means that all your employees can access the schedule instantly or review any changes made to it.
Employee communication platform
You need to be able to communicate your shift schedule to employees in an efficient and consistent manner. As mentioned, having physical copies of schedules makes it difficult to keep updated and employees will struggle to keep up to date with changes made to them. Ensure your workforce management solution has a platform to communicate with employees. This allows you to distribute the schedule digitally and notify employees of the relevant schedule changes. Celayix has a mobile app that allows workers to receive schedules, notifications of changes, request time off, view timesheets, and many more. The app makes it super simple for supervisors to communicate with their teammates when on the go. It also allows for check-in/out via the app when working remotely.
Find replacement staff feature
Last-minute no-shows or sick calls cause havoc on your employee scheduling. This is why having a find a replacement feature is a crucial part of your workforce management solution. A good workforce management provider should be able to help you manage replacements easily. When an employee is late or is missing a shift, the system should be able to generate a list of qualified replacements to choose from. Our find a replacement feature ensures the replacement employee is available and recommends the best fit using Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence
Speaking of artificial intelligence (AI), is another area that improves workforce management. We have seen a huge growth in the use of AI within businesses, in fact, Gartner reports that the use of AI for business has grown by over 270% during the last four years! Using AI improves your schedule quality by recommending best-fit employees based on their availability, qualifications, and other business rules you set up. AI speeds up scheduling and other parts of the workforce management process. Whether you use AI to create your schedule or for improvement recommendations, you will benefit from huge time savings.
Time and Attendance tracking
Time and attendance features are essential for your workforce management too. Just scheduling employees is not enough, you need to have ways to accurately track the time employees work. The old way this was done was through time clocks or even signing papers with the hours worked each day. Thanks to technology, time-tracking methods have become more advanced. Workforce management providers now have features such as geofencing and GPS tracking. Your solutions should be able to integrate with your payroll system, so you have a seamless connection to pay employees. No more delays or incorrect time sheets!
Another workforce management solution related to time tracking that you need is multi-location tracking. Businesses with employees working across multiple sites may find it difficult to keep track of their whereabouts as well as hours worked. Your time and attendance solution must be able to cater to multiple locations. As previously mentioned, Celayix has an employee app that allows for remote check-in/out of shifts. This makes it super easy and seamless to monitor where and when your team is logging in.
Geofencing:
We mentioned geofencing in the above point, so let’s dig a little deeper! Unfortunately, time theft and buddy punching are common with remote workers. Did you know that buddy punching costs US organizations $373 million each year? This is why geofencing is an essential workforce management solution you need! By using a check-in/out feature with built-in geofencing, you ensure employees check in where they are supposed to be and you only get billed for the right number of hours.
There are a lot of workforce management providers on the market today so it can be hard to know what to look for. If your solution has the above features then you are off to a great start! Get in touch today if you would like to discuss how Celayix can bring your workforce management to the next level!
