Companies face an abundance of concurrent challenges: meeting customer needs, addressing labor scarcities, devising products and services, and maintaining cash flow. The last thing any leadership team wants is the added complexity of intricate workforce management. Consolidating and tracking all your workforce data across various systems or spreadsheets can result in inaccuracies. The tasks of overseeing worker availability, monitoring hours worked, and ensuring accurate wage payments in compliance with state regulations can become an overwhelming labyrinth. Missteps in these areas can result in inadequate workforce planning, skyrocketing overtime costs, compliance hazards, and a general deficit in organizational success.
By streamlining and automating the management of one of a business’s most costly resources – its employees – leadership and teams can devote their energies to high-impact projects. This not only improves the experience for customers and employees but also facilitates business growth.
In particular, managers require a system to structure work schedules, promote a positive employee experience, and make informed staffing decisions. Concurrently, employees require access to the right tools at the right time to securely manage their working hours. A unified workforce management solution provides all of these facilities, offering a mobile app for digital time clocking, visual scheduling tools for managerial organization, and a thorough wage rule engine. This amalgamation improves efficiency and accuracy in time tracking, scheduling, wage calculations, and analytics, paving the way for operational success.
Essential Features for an Effective Workforce Management Solution
- Digital Time Tracking: Traditionally, organizations use outdated, disconnected systems, or even worse, paper punch cards for time tracking. These methods often lead to timecard inaccuracies, increased payroll expenses, and unhappy employees. Implementing a workforce management solution equipped with digital time tracking gives you enhanced control, visibility, and flexibility over one of your most valuable assets – your people.
- Holistic Scheduling: Each week, managers invest substantial hours planning schedules, balancing factors such as employee availability, hours worked, accrued overtime, and forecasted demand. Conventional scheduling tools often fail to offer a comprehensive view, being either manual and customized or presenting incomplete data. Both scenarios can result in understaffing or overstaffing, delayed schedules, unanticipated absences, and unfair scheduling practices. To make informed scheduling decisions, managers need a system that provides a complete overview of all available workers in a single interface.
- Automated Wage Calculations: As businesses grow, they often employ a variety of worker types: hourly, contract, full-time, gig workers. Keeping track of all these categories, along with the corresponding wage regulations and laws, can be a daunting task. Using Excel spreadsheets or disconnected systems to track these categories leads to increased payroll costs, wasted time, and noncompliance risks. An all-inclusive workforce management solution offers a wage rules engine that automatically calculates wages, including overtime, based on business policies and regulatory guidelines.
- Integrated Analytics: Insightful workforce data is vital for making informed decisions regarding planning and organization. Accessing required data can be time-consuming with Excel or niche workforce management systems. Transferring labor costs, sales data, and customer counts from your ERP and payroll systems to an isolated workforce management tool can result in outdated or incorrect data. An integrated system that connects workforce management processes with your ERP allows managers to make decisions based on forecasted sales and labor costs, customized by store, warehouse, or regional targets and goals.
- Enhancing Employee Experience: Employees seek the flexibility to adjust their schedules without jeopardizing the business or their roles. An effective workforce management solution needs to provide a user-friendly platform for employees to clock in/out, manage shifts, request schedule changes, and communicate directly with management and HR regarding scheduling or timecard issues. Ensuring employees feel supported in performing their duties efficiently helps retain top talent and enhances operational efficiency.
NetSuite SuitePeople Workforce Management offers a complete, unified, and mobile workforce management solution. Managers can streamline team schedules based on labor forecasting and other critical data, like overtime hours worked. Employees gain access to digital time tracking and a mobile workforce management app for seamless shift management and open communication with managers regarding scheduling or timecard issues. In addition, the finance department benefits from an all-encompassing wage rules engine, ensuring timely and correct payment for all employees.
