Workforce management is an essential tool in running your business. When used effectively, it increases productivity, cost-effectiveness, agility and flexibility in your organization, taking it to the top in the competitive economy. Having an excellent workforce strategy requires a team of specialists and application software. With a highly-regulated world economy, it has become essential for your organization to have a workforce management strategy in place.
What is Workforce Management?
Workforce management is about time and attendance tracking, absence, employee scheduling, leave management and regulatory and legislative compliance. The global economy is coming up with more complex compliance regulations that carry hefty punishments if not adhered to. A compliance failure may cause your company to suffer lousy publicity, heavy legal fines and low morale in your employees.
Here are some ways for you to keep your company ahead of the legislation and regulatory terms. They can either make or break your organization:
Standardize Processes and Policies
Rules and policies should be uniform to allow for consistency and transparency. These rules help to manage leave management and other aspects of workforce management. The employees have clear guidelines on how to conduct themselves and operate within your organization.
Moreover, it is crucial to have the rules and policies in check for the external audits. External auditors demand auditable trails of employees’ compliance with the regulations and their implementation of the policies in place.
Automate Employee Schedule Function
You don’t want to schedule one staff member over and over again in the system. It is a costly mistake that can make a difference between making profits or losses in your company. Humans are to error, and that is why an automated system is recommended.
Automation helps you pre-plan your employees’ schedules and helps optimize your cost revenue ratios. Automation also improves accuracy in your organization while adhering to the company’s policies and regulatory compliance. The type of your business greatly determines the system to install.
Automate Time and Attendance Tracking
Your managers have more pressing issues and responsibilities than to spend their time managing timesheets for your employees. With the numerous and ever-changing technology advancements, automated systems are meant to relieve your managers of the pain-staking time-consuming tasks.
You can now track your employees’ attendance through time and attendance systems. These automated systems help save time while freeing up your staff from HR and management to attend to more strategic tasks. Additionally, the automated systems improve data accuracy, reduce payroll errors and control labor costs.
Review Your Staff Self Service Options
This tool allows managers and employees to suggest their scheduling requests and send them to appropriate approval channels. It boosts overall productivity across the organization. This is similar to giving back the power to your staff while giving them more control over how they organize themselves. They get to work around their hours, shift swaps and plan for vacation time.
When employees feel this empowered, they are motivated to work and remain loyal to your organization. Furthermore, the self-service strategy reduces pressure on your line managers. This automation promotes a fair and just company culture.
Use Proactive Absence Management Procedures
Absentee employees are one of the significant obstacles any company faces. Absenteeism threatens your organization’s productivity, profitability and competitiveness. It generally paints the business in a bad light.
To curb this economic cancer, you need to adopt a proactive approach. By automating solutions to manage the issue, you get to put in procedures, implement and monitor the patterns to guarantee action in the earliest opportunity. It also ensures your compliance with relevant legislation and regulations.
Flexible Workability Strategy
Flexibility and agility are trends that businesses are adapting to. It allows for remote and mobile working within the organization. This has been brought on by the work-life balance campaign where employees look for organizations that are flexible and accommodating to their social lives.
The 9 to 5 working day plan is an old school strategy, and the world is rapidly evolving. How businesses are conducted these days allows for the freestyle working system. The eight-hour working day system was brought on by necessity, and it is only wise if you go along with the changing times. A flexible workability strategy has proven to increase productivity, improve retention rates while reducing costs.
Modern Office Decorum
Employees need to feel a sense of belonging in the workplace. Enforcing better and friendly office policies creates a psychologically, safe and friendly company culture. Installing a few office games, less strict dress codes, and open floor spaces creates a relaxed work environment for your employees. You should consider the regulations and legislation compliance to help in the transition.
When your staff feel considered and relaxed, they are most probably going to bring their A-game, in turn, improve productivity. The professional conduct is maintained, but the employees do not feel like they are in a prison that they long to get away from at the end of the day.
