The fundamental objective of Workforce Management (WFM) is a strategic decision made by an organisation to deploy human and pertinent resources to optimise productivity. Occasionally, companies get exposed to unintentional hazards due to uncontrollable circumstances. These threats mainly comprise manufacturing errors caused by workers’ negligence and unpredictable natural calamities. An effective workforce management process can mitigate several unforeseen risks. It helps businesses to surge ahead with convictions.
Many operational activities of a business enterprise directly related to employee productivity are the rudiments of an efficient WFM system. An excellent workforce management plan and layout invariably boosts the company’s capabilities to track employee movements against preset standards. These include tracking staff attendance, scheduling and gauging daily performance. As the top management hierarchy gradually gets familiar with the WFM principles, these preset standards are usually inevitable to attain organisational goals.
Workforce Management Explained
Before exploring the WFM traits, it is necessary to respond to the question, “What is workforce management?’ When businesses go through the phases of improving their product line or undertake expansions by distributing human resources across locations, they often overlook the HR element. A startup or growing business entity often experiences explicit challenges with its workforce. These include:
- Manpower shortage
- Substantial cost overruns involved in identifying and organising human capital
- Modest or notable breaches of labour regulations
- Underperformance of existing workforce, subsequently affecting production
- Low staff attendance and attrition
These challenges usually crop up due to the absence of proper managerial planning and managers’ incompetence in meeting production metrics. Leading and successful companies give due weightage to their workforce and HR teams. They sincerely pay attention to arranging quality training modules for existing staff, creating an excellent recruitment process, and demonstrating a top-class management standard. Some companies perform these activities with their in-house strength, but a few outsource these processes to reliable Human Capital Management agencies to attain the prescribed HR goals.
Why Workforce Management Software is Used by Successful Companies?
As a common practice, exceptional workforce management software caters to those inherent programs that support and manage employee performances, such as scheduling and tracking attendance. Many business enterprises use these platforms as stand-alone devices. However, for several others, they serve as a justified component of a better scope of vendor-driven HR applications developed for integration with HR frameworks.
A crucial characteristic of competitive WFM software is its capability to include a self-service portal. These options ably help employees track their PTO (Paid Time Off) balances. They can also request for days off from the shop floor. These applications assist employees in completing the formalities independently, and the HR team members have the leverage to avoid involvement in unnecessary documentation so that they can concentrate on other critical strategic activities.
8 Proven Benefits of Workforce Management
An enhanced productivity level is the main target of the workforce management application; therefore, the successful implementation of workforce management offers significant advantages to any business organisation.
The proven benefits of workforce management are as follows:
1. Automotive Attendance Tracking
A modern and up-to-date workforce platform automates attendance tracking, which boosts data accuracy and minimises payroll deficiencies. Now, companies can go through a host of operational processes hassle-free. These activities include precise reporting of hours worked and absenteeism in real-time.
2. Improved Employee Productivity
Reliable workforce management software eliminates manual business processes and allows company owners and managers to efficiently manage a complete line-up of policies and principles regulating staff time and attendance. Now, managers can ascertain that staffing requirements are adequately covered and respond intuitively if things go the other way around. They do it with the help of the improved visibility of working hours, the exact strength of production workers and ideal safety measures.
3. Better Workplace Environment
An ideal workforce management system can help company management implement an environment of employee safety and compliance, including managing surrounding health and safety standards more efficiently. Modern companies can now ensure all required information is accurate and encourage a dedicated workforce to report health and safety hazards on the shop floor to the competent authority. It has become possible due to the effective implementation of WFM tools with unique features of streamlining and automating employee health and safety protocols.
4. Cost-Effective
The streamlined processes ensured by a competent WFM application raise your business’s productivity level, which duly offsets the cost of deploying WFM software. It means that HR managers are investing less time in administrative responsibilities. Their intense visibility into staff availability and budgeted hours confirms the precision and authenticity of time utilised on productive and unproductive working hours for a given period linked to payroll preparation. It also ensures reduced employee overheads and expenses for labour overages and incremental overtime.
5. Staff Engagement
A state-of-the-art workforce management tool can immensely contribute to employee engagement. This specific software helps employees be more productive and achieve superior work-life balance through enhanced flexibility in scheduling. As a result, organisations can provide freedom to their employees through the much-required empowerment. It happens when effective WFM software gathers employee sentiment, uses feedback and preferences, and includes them in the scheduling efforts.
6. Flexibility in Employee Scheduling
Several companies need help managing and controlling staff schedules that conform to job skills and business demands to maximise output while incurring bare minimum costs. A reputable WFM solution offers modern and time-tested tools that help create staff schedules, factoring perfect workforce alignment with forecasted client demands. It gives freedom to concerned employees to manage their working schedules with foolproof self-service tools.
7. Safety and Security
Biometric data collection is one of the significant features integrated into contemporary WFM tools. These comprise fingerprint scanners to clock staff in and out time. It eliminates the likelihood of buddy punching. Foolproof and secure workforce management software also has a built-in machine learning solution driven by artificial intelligence. It efficiently tracks dubious activities and other anomalies in the punched data to prevent fraudulent movements from influencing the payroll.
8. Exploring Business Insights
Leading companies and startups can ensure high-end business decisions for upcoming projects out of the pipeline. Implementing organisational and section-wise data centralised under a single roof is possible. The perfect implementation of WFM software has made it a breeze. The software helps companies monitor overall performance with real-time reporting.
End Note
Functional workforce management is a unique solution that incorporates the elements of staff and related absence management and their health and safety concerns. Besides, this utility tool is integral to employee payroll and other vital HR responsibilities and financial implications. The apparent consequence leads to error-free, engaged, productive, well-connected, and dedicated employee strength for gross organisational success.
Automate now with ProHance workforce management software. They can provide you with hybrid tools to mark staff attendance and leaves, perform required tasks, manage virtual teams, offer suitable apps to admin, and cater to real-time geo location tracking and task updates. This particular WFM platform has everything you could imagine as a corporate manager!
