With the skills gap costing US companies $800,000 annually and technology continuously creating the need for roles that never before existed, HR is prioritizing employee retention and acquisition to keep up.
Need an edge? Having the most robust workforce management process possible can be your major differentiator; not just for HR and Operations, but for your employees, too.
To achieve this, your WFM plan needs to focus on more than just scheduling—and having the right automated solution in place to execute. Here are 3 benefits a holistic workforce management strategy can provide for your 24×7 scheduling environment (that doesn’t focus on scheduling).
1. Identify Talent Gaps
Attendance impacts production. So having access to employee attendance data can be strategically used to solve production problems.
With paper or computer spreadsheets, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly where an employee was working at a specific time; with such outdated processes, you typically only know who is working during that particular shift… and that’s as long as someone manually makes changes to the facility schedule when an absence or job swap occurs. In turn, this makes it difficult to monitor employee performance.
How? Well, if the shift supervisor only has the names of the people working to look back on instead of an audit log of which employees were working which positions when production was halted, they are left without the data they actually need to get to the root of the problem. They don’t have trends to monitor such as “the same names keep popping up” or “this particular certification expired for X who was still working that job”.
Such performance management data can turn into your greatest coaching tool by pinpointing when training could be improved. These analytics can identify a lack of talent planning or even poor utilization of existing resources.
Once you get to the heart of where the talent gap or upskilling opportunity is, you can get to actually fixing it.
With an automated workforce management solution, you’ll have access to such patterns. Having an integrated Qualification Management System is even more of a benefit. That way, only employees who are qualified for the assignment based on your pre-existing rules (certifications, OT allowances, compliance benchmarks based on a number of days worked in a row, etc.) will be scheduled for that assignment to begin with. You’ll avoid costly compliance penalties and employee downtime by ensuring that the employee is certified and eligible for that job.
2. Increase Employee Satisfaction
A recent study that polled more than 1,000 U.S.-based hourly employees and employers found that 61% of frustrated employees cite scheduling and communication pain points as reasons for quitting. As an answer to this problem, 57% of Millennials surveyed in the same study claimed they would prefer to use their mobile devices to access their schedules and training materials.
A holistic workforce management strategy is not only inherently mobile, but it’s also what your hourly employees want!
This skills gap means that attracting and retaining top performers is a huge priority for you. Letting employees have more visibility into their schedules is a great start—but with the right workforce management software, you can take it one step further.
What if you could minimize red tape involved in making leave requests by providing real-time updates to when leave is approved? Or what if employees could be granted more control over their schedules when they want to make last-minute changes?
Giving them access to an Employee Self-Service portal that lets them swap shifts with other qualified employees, bid for long-term job vacancies that break up the monotony, and streamline the vacation planning process at a few clicks of a button can be seen as a major competitive advantage to those 57% of Millennials that you’re currently struggling to attract.
3. Adhere to Complex Compliance Rules
No company wants to spend money on fines. But if your current workforce management process doesn’t include automating union, local, state, federal, and fatigue rules during the point of scheduling, then you may not even know that you’re vulnerable to potential violations.
Too many overtime hours or shifts worked in a row are huge areas of potential danger, particularly in the nuclear and oil and gas sectors where employee fatigue is heavily monitored.
By automating this process, you can adhere to even the most recent laws. If your organization is still relying on paper-based scheduling, it’s easy to accidentally assign an employee too many hours or to schedule a person’s shifts too close together.
But by adhering to compliance rules and best practices at the point of scheduling, you can successfully avoid fines and grievances. You’ll efficiently keep track of hours to make sure employees are not overworked and maintain compliance on particular fatigue rules effortlessly, from rest periods to hours off between shifts. On top of this, you’ll have a centralized system of record to audit every keystroke when necessary.
The Indeavor Solution
Looking to monitor employee performance, increase worker satisfaction with Employee Self-Service, and effortlessly maintain compliance? Indeavor can help you achieve all 3 (yes, while streamlining your current scheduling process).
Indeavor Engage is our workforce management SaaS solution that offers clients an end-to-end, cloud-based employee scheduling, time & attendance, and absence management system. It integrates with your human capital management and enterprise resource planning systems to create a robust platform that provides you with real-time employee data.
Click here to request a demo.
