What is workforce management? [+ 5 Tips for efficiency]

Workforce management is essential in ensuring business success and growth. You may be asking the question, why? The simple answer is that workforce management enhances employee productivity, allows for better labour planning, lowers operating costs, improves customer service and more.

We deep dive into the ins and outs of workforce management, the impact this can have on your business, and tips for improving this necessary process in more detail below.

Workforce Management Explained 

Workforce Management, which is often abbreviated to WFM, is a process framework that aims to optimise employee productivity by ensuring that the right person, with the right skill set, is assigned to the right job at the right location and time. This enables you to make sure that your employees are positioned in a way that allows you to meet the demands of your clients and their various project needs. This becomes vitally important for several industries, including cleaning services that utilise shifts and sell hours. 

Within the cleaning services industry context, Workforce Management will allow you to effectively plan shifts according to the upcoming project and job needs, and assign employees with the right skills to meet these needs. By having the correct number of staff at a job site with the right skills, you can reduce operational costs, enhance productivity, and ensure that your customers are getting a quality customer experience that is within budget and allocated time frame.

Workforce Management Benefits

Workforce Management is a strategic tool that enhances the operational performance related to human resource (HR) management, performance and training management, scheduling, budgeting and forecasting, analytics, and payroll. This allows you to: 

• Align your resources to the demand and boost operational efficiency based on employee availability, competency, staffing levels, turnover, employee capability and more.
• Enables you to make informed decisions based on reliable data-driven information through reporting, especially where operational costs, workload, overtime, absenteeism, and employee requests are concerned.
• Allows you to forecast and plan for potential elements that may affect your business and enables you to plan and address these proactively. 
• Empowers you to utilise historical data to forecast elements related to your business needs, service level requirements and compliance agreements.
• Provides real-time analysis to optimise schedules and skills as well as track and manage scheduled activities and employees. This alerts you to anything that would impact customer service and enables you to manage this quickly.

Workforce Management in Practice – 5 Tips 

From the above, it is clear that efficient Workforce Management is critical to ensuring operational productivity. For this to enhance your business performance, you need to ensure that you are managing all the different moving parts of this process as efficiently and effectively as possible. To help you do this, we have put together our top 5 Workforce Management tips: 

Tip #1

Ensure you have a system in place that enhances visibility by allowing you to track everything related to:

• Customer contracts, jobs, feedback, and the services you need to provide.
• Essential employee information related to their skills sets, addresses, preferences, sick leave, work performance etc. 

Tip #2

Maintain effective and open lines of communication with your employees and create employee engagement. This will empower your employees to talk to you about any issues, problems or opportunities they have to improve their working conditions, work-life balance, customer interactions and overall productivity.

Tip #3

Look at implementing an ongoing education and training program. When employees feel valued and invested in, they will work harder and more efficiently especially when given the right tools and training. This not only enhances their work experience but the overall customer experience as well. 

Tip #4

Ensure you measure productivity by tracking workflow, hours, trends etc. With this kind of insight you can improve overall performance, make adjustments where needed, and improve productivity. 

Tip #5

Utilise the right technology to make Workforce Management an efficient and straightforward process that will allow you to manage every element related to your shift schedules, employees, operational requirements, payroll, and client needs. 

From our experience, having the right technology in place is key to ensuring that you reap all the benefits of Workforce Management. With so many different WFM solutions on the market, you need to find the right fit for your business needs. Adapt IT’s EasyRoster solution is fit for purpose and has strategically been developed with the cleaning services industry in mind. 

This innovative workforce management solution enables you to track and manage every aspect related to labour efficiency with minimal effort and no spreadsheets. This workforce management system utilises automation to simplify the complex nature of rostering, attendance tracking, and more, thereby saving both time and resources.  

How does EasyRoster enable effective workforce management?

In the simplest terms, the EasyRoster Workforce Management software empowers operational managers to improve labour efficiency and meet client human resource requirements. This is done by providing workforce management tools to ensure efficient rostering and posting of personnel at different locations. 

Earlier on, we mentioned that Workforce Management enables you to ensure that you have the right employees, with the right skill sets, at the right locations and projects. The EasyRoster WFM software facilitates this by enabling you to efficiently manage: 

• Contract and Human Resource management – enables you to find and keep the right employees while also ensuring that you can track and manage all client contract needs and requirements. 
• Staff scheduling and Time & Attendance per location – improve customer experience by ensuring your staff are on the right job at the right time and right location. Track time and manage attendance per location with this solution and utilise this information to flag any issues or redeploy employees, for example if one employee is absent from work. 
• Management Reporting – utilise data collection and reporting to measure elements related to overtime, absenteeism, productivity, and more, to make informed business decisions to improve operations. 

With this technology, you can effectively enhance your competitive edge by improving productivity and efficiency, reducing absenteeism, tracking and managing profitability, and more. Each of these elements contributes to the success and growth of your business which is the ultimate goal.

Conclusion 

Workforce Management is an essential component of running a successful cleaning services business. To maximise overall operational and labour efficiency, you need to have the right tools in place, like EasyRoster.