Article By – Mr Vikas Wahee, Head of Solutions, BPM & ITES, Intellicus Technologies
Workforce optimization is one of the most critical aspects of achieving operational excellence. With growing resources and tasks, enterprises need the ability to handle demands for continuous success efficiently. To achieve this, they turn to workforce management software enabling companies to optimize their workforce and ensure the best use of all available resources.
But workforce optimization isn’t limited to simply managing resources. In fact, there are a lot of new strategies for workforce planning that ensure optimum performance and lead to both employee as well as customer satisfaction. This article will share 10 key strategies to achieve seamless workforce optimization.
Assigning Right Resources to Right Tasks
Having the right number of people and right skill of people for the right jobs builds the base of quality workforce management. Once you ensure this step, you need to create a process to ensure well-distributed resources across different shifts, locations as well as roles. WFM software enables you to access all your historical data, understand the business pattern and support WFM teams to accurately predict, plan and assess staffing requirements. Using an efficient WFM solution, you can understand peak working hours, customer behaviors, seasonal patterns and use your workforce effectively based on these insights.
Choose the Right Tools
The workforce management software that you have chosen must have all the right tools that your business needs. Crucial features like attendance tracking, communication methods/tools, scheduling, forecasting, etc., empower managers to well plan shifts without any chances of overlap or mishaps. They can use these tools to create agile schedules and monitor performance using real-time workforce data. These features and tools are also useful in case of any impromptu changes and unforeseen challenges as they help mitigate sudden risks and enable managers to make use of emerging opportunities.
Respond to the Needs of Your Business
Choose the workforce management software that should be able to cater to the specific demands of your business and industry. Any ideal option allows you to set rules, design customized workflows and update settings that work for your organization.
Smarter Forecasting
To stay ahead of your competitors, your WFM software should be able to deliver accurate predictions and forecasts based on all your historical as well as new data, events or any external regressors. With such insights, you will be able to leverage your data to anticipate demand fluctuations, resource allocation and overall productivity.
Create Better Schedules
Scheduling lays the groundwork for productivity. Creating efficient workflow schedules will enable you to manage your staffing needs and employee burnout. Your workforce will only be able to deliver optimal performance and contribute to the organization’s growth if they’re satisfied and a good workforce management software will let you ensure just that.
Communicate Effectively
Workforce management software plays an extremely important role in ensuring seamless communication between managers and employees. Whether managing leave requests, shift changes or any corporate announcements and communications, it can facilitate any and all of these to ensure overall harmony.
Know What to Measure
Measuring results is crucial to estimate processes and efforts for workforce optimization. An efficient workforce management software provides all the necessary metrics to measure, track and analyze overall performance. Using these metrics, you can gain useful insights into employee attendance patterns and schedules which can be further used to finetune your management strategies leading to informed business decisions.
Be Flexible
In today’s modern world, nothing is certain. No matter how much you plan, factors like market volatility and uncertainty can always affect your business. To ensure optimization in your workforce environment, you need flexibility for scheduling adjustments, multiple strategies for resource allocation or any other ad hoc situation. With workforce management software in place, you can quickly adapt to changes and unexpected circumstances and still maintain workforce efficiency.
Hire Well
Optimizing and managing your existing staff is only one side of the workforce management coin. You also need to strategically hire new staff members to ensure the evolving needs of your business. Using the right tool provides you with valuable insights into the existing gaps in your workforce, which, in turn, enables you to generate proper recruitment requirements. Hiring the right staff increases productivity and ensures business growth.
Don’t Neglect Employee Engagement
Employee loyalty isn’t gained from creating the best working schedules. Instead, it comes from employee engagement activities that motivate people to work towards achieving business goals. With workforce management software, you can power your employees to have a say in their schedules, engage in learning and development courses and recognize their work. Ensuring employee engagement and satisfaction leads to higher productivity and assured organizational success.
To summarize, workforce optimization shouldn’t be an optional element of your business in today’s day and age. Choosing the right workforce management software and leveraging it ensures a strategic advantage for your organization. It enables you to align resources efficiently, cater to changing market needs and create a motivating workforce environment for your employees.
