As a startup, we want to hire the right people, at the right time, doing the right tasks. But how can we achieve this? The answer: effective workforce management. Find out what this is and how this can improve your employee productivity.

What is workforce management? Workforce management (WFM) is not a new trend in business. It is an effective framework to optimize employee productivity. The call center industry can testify to that.

Call center companies use WFM processes to improve their employees’ performance and productivity. Just imagine receiving over a hundred calls in a day. How can you manage and allocate such to your staff? With the proper processes, this challenge is manageable.

How?

WFM includes effectively forecasting labor requirements as well as creating and managing staff to accomplish tasks on a day-to-day and hour-to-hour basis. The company’s management team can allocate people to each task and allocate tasks to each staff effectively to avoid gaps and delays in deliverables.

Still skeptical about this business framework? Let’s see how workforce management works and how it can benefit your company greatly.

Processes of Workforce Management

When implemented correctly, workforce management processes can help companies reduce costs and improve customer service. It can achieve this through consistent and automated monitoring of the workforce.

An efficient system avoids overstaffing your team by determining the ideal number of employees to have in each shift and project. Partnering with the right workforce management software, your company will have a high-performing workforce.

Before we dive deeper into its benefits, let us first find the effective workforce management processes and system.

Forecasting

Forecasting is effectively predicting the future outcomes of current work by analyzing data collected. This process also helps in knowing the quantity and the type of staff resources needed for a project during a certain time of the year.

For example, the holiday season. Many employees want to take days off during the holidays. By effectively forecasting the work data, the management team will know the amount of work needed during the holiday season. So, you can estimate and effectively designate leaves to employees. You can satisfy your business needs as well as the demand of the employees.

Budgeting

This process is crucial because it requires planning and properly allocating the company’s monetary resources to the workforce. By budgeting your company’s monetary resources, you will know how many staff your company can afford on hand. Also, with this WFM process, your company can forecast and optimize staff deployment and at the same time balance the workload as labor demands change.

Scheduling

Scheduling is the process of planning, controlling, and patronizing work in your company. Staff scheduling allows a company to automate staff schedules based on certain variables such as vacation leaves, holidays, workload, and absences.

This WFM process is a stroke of luck in the call center industry. In the past, scheduling was done manually. The process was time-consuming and inefficient that companies are left understaffed during critical times. With the WFM scheduling system, companies can monitor the work schedules of each employee and make sure that there is enough staff assigned to work during peak seasons.

Time and Attendance

Tracking working hours is essential in managing the workforce. You will need WFM tools and processes that will show the time and attendance patterns of the employees. With this, you will perceive potential gaps in coverage and address chronic absentee and tardiness issues.

Performance Management

You need to make sure employee activities and their outputs meet the company or the organization’s goals. This WFM process helps the company better understand employee engagement. By analyzing data and using the performance management system, your management team can pinpoint what drives employee productivity. Understanding how your staff members work helps employers give appropriate rewards to employees who exceed expectations. In turn, you will have satisfied employees who are driven to work better.

Compliance

Remember that one of the benefits of a workforce management process is staying compliant with labor laws. This is managed through compliance tracking. This process is the most complex and costly among the other processes. Maybe because it deals with the legal issues of the business. Non-compliance with state, federal, and local employment laws can gravely result in fines and employee lawsuits. Very tedious.

This process includes the tracking of required certifications and training for specific roles, missed breaks, labor standards, sick leave requirements, and union agreements.

Benefits of Workforce Management

Now that you know the different workforce management solutions, it is time to get to know how these processes can help improve employee productivity.

Hire the right people

WFM makes sure that you get the right people to do the right tasks, at the right place, and at the right time.

Here is an example: the Holiday season like Christmas is a perfect time to put up sale offers to customers. A Christmas sale hypes the spending spirit of customers for valuable Christmas presents. A gift shop will be terribly busy during such times. But staff members will also want to take days off during this season.

With a properly executed workforce management process, the gift shop can manage staff leaves and absences to make sure that the store is never understaffed. As a result, the store will have a fully equipped staff when the wave of customers arrives.

Efficient workforce analysis

It can help analyze the current situation of the company. With a workforce management framework equipped within your company, you can fully maximize your resources and lower labor cost without lowering the work quality.

Let us say you have a mobile application. During the development stage, you have six developers working on it until it is time to launch the application. After analyzing your workforce data, you find out that some development processes are now unnecessary after launching. So, you decide to downsize the team or reassign them to do improvements on the application.

Using WFM processes, you can analyze the amount of work your company needs and cut off labor costs before any problem can occur.

Compliant with labor laws

WFM also helps the company stay compliant with the national, local, and union laws. With that, your business will keep operating with quality and integrity.

Manage Your Workforce Right

Your workers are your greatest asset. They are the blood and veins that keep your day-to-day operations running. Also, they are your biggest competitive advantage. By properly managing your workforce, you can improve not just the time of their work but the quality of their work as well.

To stay productive, all you need is to follow the recommended workforce management processes stated above. But they are not all. Along the way, you will discover other processes that can help you improve your startup as it grows.

Remember, do not take workforce management lightly. It can greatly save your company from issues, especially if you have teams working offshore, say an offshore software development team. To make sure that you can manage your offshore development team properly, you need to partner with a reliable company with talented and very dedicated developers.

Full Scale is an example of a well-managed, quality-based, and fully equipped offshore software development company. Our talent pool consists of skilled and seasoned developers for all development needs. Whether you are seeking mobile applications (both iOS and Android), software, and even web apps, we have the right people.

What’s better is that you are in full command of your development team even if you are halfway around the world. We have appropriate tools for communication built for these situations. If you are worried about poor management, don’t be. You can have a project manager carefully supervise your team.

What are you waiting for? Give us a call and start scaling your business.