01 Aug Is Your Workforce Management System Tracking These 3 Essentials?
Evaluating Workforce Management software features? Make sure you evaluate the tools for workforce analytics. Let’s look at the top three things you want your software to track.
But first…
Let’s define what we mean by a Workforce Management system. At a minimum, a Workforce Management system administers employee time tracking and scheduling. Other desirable features are PTO, overtime, breaks, job codes, and compliance.
Even a bare-bones WFM system can provide insight into your personnel. This insight can help you make better decisions about resource allocation.
What should your system be measuring?
1. Workforce Productivity
Productivity and profit go hand in hand.
The formula for productivity isn’t complicated; hours worked per tasks completed. This can be measured by employee, team or any other useful metric.
Things to look for:
- Which staff members are consistently more productive?
- Which teams work best together?
- Would cross-training the most capable improve productivity?
- Does productivity fluctuate by shift?
Your software can help you organize the most effective teams and schedule them accordingly. Build shift templates in your schedule tool for best-fit teams.
Look for job role tracking tools. Job role alerts tell you if a schedule has the right employee qualifications.
2. Employee Engagement
Engaged employees perform better.
You are probably wondering how WFM can track engagement…?
Since you can’t observe every employee constantly (or read their minds), your WFM system can shine a light on this important quality.
Punctuality is telling. Notice which employees are chronically late. Your system should be able to set lockout times that force team members to clock in within a specified time.
Everything is not always as it appears…
Watch for early punch ins and late punch outs. It may not indicate that the employee is hyper-punctual and goes the extra mile. It could reveal intentional hours padding. Either way—it costs you more in payroll and may not benefit the company.
Now you can take control:
System alerts can tag late punch-ins. Clock lockout tools enforce schedules. Intelligent clock features can help reduce time theft and encourage employee engagement.
If your team members interact with customers, your ultimate goal is customer satisfaction. When team members are on-time and engaged, your customers have a better experience. Even if your employees don’t interact with clients—compare engagement to productivity. Engagement is required for both measures of success.
Don’t forget:
To best serve your customers, staff members need a comprehensive understanding of policies and procedures. A WFM system with onboarding tools makes it easy for a new hire to read the rules and regs. Confirm completion of required tasks. Some systems let you create short quizzes to validate that the staff member has read and understands the material.
3. Unplanned Overtime
Small businesses that can’t control overtime better have fat margins. Analyzing overtime data is an area where you can make some tweaks and notice significant returns.
- Which departments or teams drive OT expenses?
- Who are my habitually overtime staff members?
- Where can I minimize overlap?
- Do some shifts accrue more overtime regardless of the employees working them?
Once you identify frequent fliers, interview the staff members and ask them what’s going on.
This can yield some surprises…
You may find that the reasons for overtime are out of their control. The employees who clock the most may be the heroes who make up for slackers or OT abusers who want the extra pay. You can get overtime under control with a change in scheduling.
Now check this out:
Set overtime rules in your scheduler to avoid unintentional overtime scheduling. Alerts will also flag shift swap requests that put an employee into the overtime zone.
Payroll Partners WorkforceHUB provides actionable data. Gain workforce insight and make better decisions.
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Payroll Partners offers WorkforceHUB™, the unified Human Resources portal that makes it easy to optimize the performance of your supervisors, employees, and organization.
WorkforceHUB™ includes TimeWorksPlus, TimeSimplicity, and TimeWorks Mobile. We’ve just added onboarding, benefits enrollment, performance reviews, and employee engagement! WorkforceHUB™ is designed for busy employers like you who need to streamline scheduling, automate time and attendance tracking, maintain regulatory compliance, and reduce labor costs.
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We can get you up and running with Workforce Management Suite in minutes. Contact us today to set up a demo.