Assess Team Strengths

The first step in WFM is team assessment. The aim is to evaluate where your team’s strengths lie and how those skills directly contribute to your organization’s goals. Other aspects to consider include employees nearing retirement so that you can anticipate future vacancies.

Some companies also conduct an external assessment to know more about the talent pool outside their organization. Knowing what talent is available, how hard it is to acquire and the cost of acquiring is all key to planning for the future.

Plan development takes a lot of research. Evaluating your entire workforce requires an in-depth look at your team. Fortunately, WFM systems offer a variety of tools that can assist with this.

From evaluating employee performance to generating custom reports, a workforce management solution provides valuable insights into your team’s strengths.

You can also use various tools to assess your team’s strengths, such as personality tests, two-way feedback, teamwork surveys and performance reviews.

Some specific features that can help with this include:

• Performance Evaluation
• Workforce Analysis
• Attendance Database
• Employee Self-Service
• Reporting and Analytics
• HRM Integration
• Onsite Training

Delegate Tasks

Once you have a clear picture of each employee’s area of expertise and competencies, you can use this evaluation to assign them skill-relevant tasks. This distributes work efficiently among staff members and in a way that benefits both the organization and employees. By entrusting them with tasks that align with their strengths and personal interests, you can foster professional growth and increase job satisfaction.

Here are some key considerations to keep in mind when delegating tasks:

• Develop a clear understanding of the tasks’ requirements, objectives and outcomes, and make sure employees have the necessary knowledge and capacity to complete them.
• Communicate task requirements, performance expectations and deadlines to employees and provide relevant instructions and training.
• Establish quantifiable goals and milestones to track employee progress.
• Regularly monitor task progress, provide feedback to employees and address any performance issues promptly.
• Ensure that workloads are distributed fairly, and avoid burdening workers with disproportionate tasks that may lead to poor quality work or burnout.
• Foster a collaborative work environment where employees can share knowledge and best practices, and seek timely assistance from colleagues.

Consider Future Objectives and Goals

Effective planning requires assessing your business’s performance metrics and reviewing your future business plans and organizational goals. It also includes an estimation of what you’ll need to reach those goals — that might mean additional staffing or readjusting workloads.

This aspect of workforce management can become particularly easy with a workforce management tool that can help you collect and analyze business data. It generates reports to show you the specific details of how your business is doing.

These business insights help you calculate realistic goals based on past performance. Companies also use these insights to assess their team’s strengths. The data also highlights the needs your team may be unable to meet.

For example, if you plan to implement new software, you need to be sure you have employees who can learn the ins and outs of the new system and teach others how to use it.

Some of the functionalities to look out for in your WFM tool include:

• Position and Department Definitions
• Schedule Optimization
• History-Based Forecasting
• Predictive Algorithms
• Custom Reports
• What-If Scenario Planning
• Trend Analysis

Identify Skill Gaps

After assessing your team and your requirements to meet the long-term goals, you may notice some yet-to-be-filled gaps.

Workforce management solutions assist with this by providing insights into team performance and highlighting opportunities for improvement. It also lets you easily identify the missing skills from your workforce and determine the best ways to address the skill gap.

A full-service workforce management solution also provides insights into various factors to help fill these skill gaps. For instance:

• Identify the skills and competencies that are most critical for each job role using skills assessment.
• Identify the specific training needs for each employee or group of employees with training needs analysis.
• Identify employees with potential for future leadership roles and create development plans to help them acquire the necessary skills using succession planning.

Solve Workforce-Related Problems

Once you have a clear vision of your goals, how to accomplish them and your requirements to do so, it’s time to do the actual work. You should consider various solutions to determine how best to meet employees’ needs and fill the skills gap among your workforce.

One potential solution is training. Training and development may be the simplest solution if your employees have most of the skills you need.

If you require a different skill set entirely, consider hiring externally to obtain those skills. Remember that external talent assessment we talked about earlier? That’s where all that research will be useful.

Regardless of your chosen solution, make sure you have a plan for moving forward. For instance, you might need to schedule additional employee training or prepare to integrate new team members and departments.

Fortunately, the various functionalities of workforce management solutions make workforce planning as easy as possible.

FAQs

What is workforce management?

Workforce management is the process of optimizing an organization’s workforce to improve productivity, efficiency and profitability. It involves employee scheduling, time and attendance management, labor forecasting and performance monitoring, making it critical for managing a remote or hybrid workforce.

What are the goals of WFM?

Here are some common goals of workforce management:

• Optimally allocate resources to meet operational demands.
• Ensure the organization has the right talent, skills and capabilities to meet changing needs.
• Minimize overtime and reduce absenteeism to control labor costs.
• Leverage data and analytics to make effective management decisions.
• Comply with labor laws and regulations regarding working hours, breaks, overtime and other industry-specific requirements.
• Establish a culture of continuous improvement by regularly evaluating workforce processes and practices.
• Build a positive work environment that promotes employee satisfaction and well-being.
• Nurture employee skills, provide L&D opportunities and build succession plans to prepare employees for future leadership roles.

Why is WFM important?

WFM is essential for organizations of all sizes and industries. With a comprehensive WFM solution, organizations can optimize their workforce, reduce inefficiencies and improve their teams and processes.

Here are some of the benefits of workforce management:

• Accurate labor forecasting and scheduling to help overcome overstaffing, overtime or time theft challenges.
• Timely adherence to local, state and federal laws to prevent non-compliance risks like lawsuits and fines.
• Mobile accessibility and self-service tools that help employees use the system without time or location constraints.
• Automated processes that save time by reducing manual workload, improve accuracy and minimize administrative burden.
• Real-time insights into critical KPIs like engagement rates, customer satisfaction and retention volumes that allow you to make process changes and improvements for better performance.
• Two-way communication across all members of the organization to boost engagement and participation.

What are the common challenges in WFM? How can they be overcome?

Some common challenges in workforce management include schedule and roster conflicts, talent shortages, absenteeism, non-compliance with labor laws, wage theft and manual processes.

Here are some ways to overcome these challenges:

• Automate scheduling with a WFM solution to ensure efficient and accurate scheduling that considers employee availability and workload.
• Establish clear attendance policies and monitor attendance using WFM software, and address absenteeism promptly to prevent it before it becomes concerning.
• Conduct regular meetings with employees to understand their problems and come up with solutions.
• Keep detailed and accurate records of each employee’s working hours, salaries and deductions and bonuses.
• Stay on top of labor laws and regulations to ensure compliance. Use WFM software to generate time-tracking reports to verify compliance.
• Use collaboration tools to keep remote workers engaged and ensure standard performance.
• Use historical data and industry trends to forecast labor demand accurately and then optimize schedules and staffing levels to match demand.

What’s the difference between workforce management and human resource management (HRM)?

Workforce management (WFM) and human resource management (HRM) are two distinct but overlapping fields.

WFM focuses on optimizing an organization’s workforce to improve efficiency, while HRM focuses on managing the employee-employer relationship and creating a positive work environment. While WFM ensures that your employees have the right skills and schedules to perform their jobs, HRM ensures optimal resource utilization to meet business goals and objectives.

WFM involves tasks such as employee scheduling, time and attendance management, labor forecasting and performance monitoring. HRM, on the other hand, includes tasks such as recruitment, onboarding, compensation and benefits management, and employee relations.

While both aspects of business management are crucial to business success, they have different goals and functions. By integrating HRM and WFM, organizations can create a comprehensive approach to managing their workforce and achieving business objectives.

What is workforce planning?

Workforce planning is the process of analyzing, forecasting and planning organizational activities to meet current and future employment needs. It aims to ensure the business always has the human capital it needs to run efficiently and effectively — now and in the future.

Developing a cost-effective talent acquisition strategy that closes any talent gaps is also a major component of workforce planning.

Additionally, effective workforce planning includes regular analysis of employee productivity. If the workforce is underperforming, then changes like adding a learning management strategy can help increase productivity.

Similarly, strategic workforce planning aligns the workforce’s needs with long-term business goals. That includes succession planning, which ensures plans are in place to quickly fill essential management roles, typically for higher-level roles.

Workforce planning involves many moving pieces. It includes your employees, their active development and your organizational goals.

With multiple moving parts, workforce planning will be most successful if you actively evaluate and update your plans. You can easily automate this heavy workload by implementing workforce management software with features that can track and analyze data for you — making your planning process easy as pie.

What are the goals of workforce planning?

Implementing workforce planning helps identify where your organization would benefit from expanding teams and areas where your employees would benefit from additional training. It helps you find the right employees who have the skills necessary to take up various job roles.
However, there’s more to accomplish by actively implementing workforce planning practices.

One goal of effective workforce planning is problem prevention. A major part of workforce planning is thoroughly assessing each department’s skills and whether those departments’ employees have those skills. By conducting this assessment, you’ll be able to recognize gaps where skills are missing and be able to correct that issue before it becomes a source of pain.

Another goal of workforce planning is to maintain successful leadership. Effective workforce planning helps you recognize the leadership positions that are currently open or soon will be open. With that in mind, you can assess which employees would succeed in those newly open positions. You can also plan their training for the new role, making for a smooth transition.

Finally, the ultimate goal of workforce planning is to increase productivity and efficiency. Integrated workforce planning provides analytics that can provide data about how your plan affects the business.

Planning gives you a clear overview of your organization’s performance metrics so that you can set realistic goals for the future. Implementing a workforce planning strategy that includes quantitative and qualitative metrics sets your business on the path to long-term success.

It sounds like a large workload will be required to meet these goals. In reality, there are only a handful of core tasks to benefit from workforce planning. However, if you’re new to workforce planning or just incredibly busy, workforce management software can streamline these tasks to simplify the entire process.

What are the key features of WFM software?

Key features of a workforce management system include:

1) Employee Scheduling: You can create and manage employee schedules that align with operational requirements while considering factors like employee availability and skills, labor laws and individual preferences. This ensures the right number of staff members are assigned to the right tasks at the right times.

2) Time and Payroll Management: WFM solutions help you track and manage each employee’s working hours and overtime and manage PTOs, sick leave and other absences on a centralized dashboard. You can easily generate payrolls, calculate benefits and accruals, provide compensations and more based on their working trends.

3) Performance Management: WFM software allows you to track employee activity and monitor their performance against business objectives in real time. It allows you to offer regular feedback and coaching to employees, identify areas for improvement and recognize top performers.

4) Skill Development and Training: You can provide a range of training and development opportunities to enhance each employee’s knowledge and capabilities through online or in-person workshops, on-the-job training, and eLearning and mentorship programs.

5) Workforce Analytics and Labor Forecasting: The software offers analytical data reports that give valuable insights into workforce trends, productivity and overall performance. You can evaluate this information to identify opportunities for improvement, optimize resource allocation, and make data-driven business decisions.

6) Regulatory Compliance: The software ensures timely compliance with industry-wide workforce regulations for minimum wages, leave entitlements, GDPR, audit and financial record-keeping and more.

How do I select a workforce management system?

When selecting which workforce management solution best fits your business, you’ll want to consider your specific requirements, everything from must-have features to what deployment you need.

Make sure you conduct adequate research to find top-rated solutions, talk to the service provider about system capabilities, and evaluate vendor responses to compare their services and industry experience.

While evaluating your options, look for a solution that:

• Provides self-service time entry and management to employees.
• Allows you to configure the platform according to business and workforce needs.
• Alerts you in case of compliance issues and changing regulations.
• Integrates with external platforms like payroll, project management and HR, and offers complete visibility into the operations of each system.

However, if that sounds daunting, look at our free requirements template and use that as a basis for your list. We’ve also put together a free comparison of workforce management systems.

Are you looking for more help finding the right workforce management solution for your business? We’re happy to help. Get personalized recommendations by messaging [email protected] or via phone at 855-850-3850.