What is workforce management?
Workforce management is the process a company takes to maximize productivity, performance level, and forecasting. Effective workplace management involves planning, scheduling, staffing, and real-time adjustment when challenges arise. This includes tracking workers, training management, recruiting, analytics, and everything involved with maximizing productivity. The human resource department is an integral part of workforce management.
Why is workforce management important?
Workforce management is tied with the company’s bottom line and the overall productivity of the company. A key aspect of workforce management is scheduling, which is achieved by analyzing data, duration of customer contacts, sales, and transactions. For example, tracking employee turnover rates and improving employee retention can enable your workplace to be more productive. Workforce management can be optimized with workforce management software and scheduling software.
What are common barriers to effective workplace management?
- Manual scheduling
Effective scheduling is difficult to do manually. According to the 2019 Gartner Report “Market Guide for Workforce Management Application,” in 2025, over 50% of enterprises with hourly workers will still be using manual scheduling approaches. Managers often encounter problems with last minute cancellations, overstaffing, or inaccurate time tracking such as buddy punching. Team members also encounter problems or being scheduled for too many hours, which leads to burnout. Scheduling is a common source of dissatisfaction among team members and leads to shift-based workers having a higher turnover rate.
- Inadequate recruiting
A common barrier to productivity begins before a candidate even arrives at an interview. Inadequate job descriptions mislead team members into a role with different tasks than what they signed up for. Whenever employees are expected to fulfill more duties than they have time or resources for, they are more likely to leave. Having contradictory roles than what was established and lack of support from management are also predictors of low retention. - Lack of training
New team members, especially temp staff, often get thrown into the frontlines without thorough training. Other team members must then pick up the slack by training the new team member themselves, or doing extra work. Training is the responsibility of management.
What are workforce management solutions available?
Workforce management software can streamline scheduling and avoid common problems managers typically face. The software automates tedious processes to free up time for other aspects of managing. They take into account employee availability and empower managers to make scheduling decisions that make everyone happy. Hyre’s workforce management software specializes in scheduling and temp staffing. This allows shift managers to easily coordinate their team even when understaffed or facing last-minute cancellations. Workforce management software can also forecast labour costs, allowing managers to budget and plan ahead of time.
Regular feedback from the team is another significant way to pinpoint workforce management problems and solutions. This is especially helpful for recruitment and onboarding problems. Ask team leaders what common problems new hires face to identify recruitment and training solutions. New team members can also be encouraged to share feedback on how well they felt their onboarding process prepared them.
