You don’t have to give your employees big raises or lavish gifts to boost productivity. Instead, consider workforce management software that balances sophisticated features with user-friendly design to improve productivity in many ways.
Top-tier workforce management (WFM) solutions are designed with people in mind. They’re simple for HR managers to use and easy for workers to engage with.
Automate Time Tracking
Many time-consuming aspects of managing a workforce can be automated using WFM software. It includes manual tasks like creating schedules and approving time cards and more complex processes such as budget management, reporting, and forecasting. Automating these processes frees managers to focus on boosting productivity.
For example, if you have one team member who regularly struggles to meet deadlines, you might configure an automatic time tracker to take screenshots of their computer at random intervals. It can help you collect more data on where they spend their work time and motivate them to avoid distractions, meet deadlines, and get more done. Of course, close monitoring would only be effective with a positive workplace culture and fair compensation, but automated tracking can make accountability easier.
In addition, the right tools can boost productivity by allowing employees and managers to communicate efficiently. For instance, if several team members work remotely or on the go, centralized communication can prevent confusion, missed information, and different departments from accidentally working at cross purposes. By putting essential messages on a centralized dashboard, you can ensure that your team members always have the latest information, which is a great way to improve productivity.
Mobile WFM tools can also allow managers to handle scheduling and other managerial tasks from any location with an internet connection. For example, a charter school recently implemented mobile WFM tools that allow their team to create monthly reports from any tablet or smartphone while on the move. It saves them two and a half days each month.
Automate Scheduling
A large part of workforce management (WFM) includes a company’s processes for establishing, tracking, and managing employee schedules. These systems help managers optimize how, when, and where work is accomplished while determining who is best suited.
A sound scheduling system can forecast staffing requirements and predict ideal staffing levels based on preset business and human resource parameters. These may include customer traffic, holidays, financial restrictions, worker skills, and other variables. It helps businesses match staffing needs to client demand and avoid over- or understaffing.
It can also manage short-term peak load demands, worker availability, financial limitations, skill levels, and labor laws. It can even track and improve scheduling patterns to reduce overtime spending.
The right tool provides managers with scheduling analytics to identify the most productive employee groups and adjust accordingly. It can significantly impact overall field productivity.
A well-designed scheduling system can also cut the time to create a schedule by as much as half. It allows managers to spend that time optimizing other aspects of their department. It can also help ensure that shifts are covered during an unexpected absence, e.g., a sick day or an unscheduled meeting. It is crucial because it prevents the inefficiencies and costly errors that can occur when scheduling is done manually.
Automate Payroll
WFM, or workforce management software, is a technology that aids companies in managing personnel data. This data allows HR managers to glean insight into employee productivity, improving the company’s bottom line. Specifically, it reduces labor costs by automating payroll. It means time-consuming manual tasks like transferring employee hours into payroll, processing leave, and calculating overtime are no longer required. HR and payroll professionals can focus on other important, high-value tasks.
Employees benefit from automated payroll, too. For example, a business owner can create a shift swapping or request for a time off process within their WFM system, and employees can do this on their own without a call to HR. It improves their work/life balance and boosts morale. They are also more satisfied with their jobs, which directly affects productivity.
WFM systems with integrated payroll are a huge productivity booster for small businesses. These tools eliminate the need to manually transfer data between systems and reduce the risk of errors. For instance, a mistake in data entry can lead to a chain of corrective actions that take away from the team’s core competencies and reduces productivity. In addition, an automated system eliminates the need to calculate pay rates and deductions by hand. It saves time and money while improving accuracy.
Automate Reporting
An automated reporting system allows for better visibility over one of your most important assets: your people. Whether you are a large company with many different departments or a small business with just a handful of employees, it is essential to have accurate data on employee time and attendance. This data will give you a clear picture of your most valuable resources, which will help boost productivity across all departments.
Automated workforce management solutions can help to reduce unscheduled overtime by preventing managers from scheduling workers in the future for overtime hours they are not available to work. It prevents unnecessary stress and anxiety for the manager and eliminates the need to rework the schedule or search for another worker to cover the shift. This feature also helps avoid compliance issues with federal, state, and local laws and union contracts.
Businesses can estimate staffing needs and appropriate staffing levels using workforce management tools based on preset business and human resource factors. It implies that a company won’t have to spend money on overstaffing and won’t ever have to worry about understaffing, which can harm production and reduce customer service.