In today’s business world, there are constant challenges that businesses across industries need to manage. No company is perfect, and challenges will arise but finding a way to meet these challenges will set a business up for success. We explore the challenges of today and possible workforce solutions in more detail below.
The impact of digital transformation on business
We have all heard the current buzzword “digital transformation” come across our boardroom tables or in meetings, on the news etc., and there is a good reason for this. Digital transformation is changing and shaping businesses in a new way. It is challenging for businesses to change what they have always done and take a leap of faith by utilising technology in new and innovative ways to enhance operational efficiency and workforce management and drive revenue and profitability.
Over the past two years, the trend of utilising more technology, especially for workforce management, has been accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic. When the pandemic hit, no one was aware of the global impact it would have, especially in the wake of national lockdowns. This caused a monumental shift in how people began to utilise technology. In many cases, technology became the lifeline for many industries.
Technology made it possible for teams to communicate effectively. It created flexible working arrangements and schedules and split team projects. In this way, a business could carry on, having employees work in different shifts, having open lines of communication with clients and still ensuring a great customer experience.
Now that the pandemic is no longer a threat to businesses, what other challenges are organisations facing concerning workforce management and can these be solved with technology? We answer these below.
Today’s top 3 top workforce management (WFM) challenges
There are many different workforce management related challenges that businesses are having to navigate in the current business climate to improve market competitiveness and overall profitability. We examine these three challenges below, as well as possible workforce solutions.
#1 Getting relevant data for meaningful insights
For many businesses getting relevant data and insights has been a difficult task. This is mainly because much of the data has been curated manually and is in older filing systems. It will take a lot of time and effort to pull all the information and put it together to identify trends, patterns and insight. This data is often also not reliable because of the element of human error.
So what is the solution? You guessed it, technology in the form of contingent workforce management solutions. These systems automatically capture data, organise it and analyse it, allowing you to gain insight into elements related to employee overtime, time and attendance, personal grades, jobs completed etc. This provides valuable insight for a business that will enable:
- The identification of problems or issues fast
- The effective tracking and management of overtime
- Operations managers to identify valuable employees
- The tracking of jobs and the time is taken to complete these
- Managing the profit per job
- Identification of opportunities related to increasing revenue
- The reduction of labour costs
#2 Unpredictable work schedules
One of the most time-consuming tasks operations managers deal with is creating work schedules, especially where the workforce is unpredictable and sometimes more unreliable due to socio-economic factors. This can cause several problems for a business, such as not having employees show up on time or at all for jobs even though they were scheduled to do so.
What is the workforce solution to this challenge? The simple answer is a scheduling software solution like EasyRoster. This workforce solution makes it easy to perform on-target forecasting to meet service-level agreements and enhance customer experience. It offers predictive forecasting, which helps to forecast accurately, and schedule workers so that managers can develop strategies for grade/rank scheduling and shift preferences. This kind of workforce solution can also predict staffing requirements across multiple sites, ensuring that you don’t miss anything and don’t let any clients down.
#3 Difficulty scheduling workers at multiple locations
Scheduling workers at multiple locations can overwhelm any operations manager. In addition, there may be employees whose schedules could accidentally overlap at various locations at one given time. This particular challenge leads to other problems, including derailing labour costs.
While some organisations still use paper for scheduling, or an Excel spreadsheet, a workforce solutions like EasyRoster dramatically decreases time and human error when scheduling workers at multiple locations.
Digital workforce management solutions quickly solve the issues of multi-location staff scheduling, including overlaps, by showing or alerting management of conflicts before they arise. This software solution caters to multi-location staff scheduling and often allows users to view these multiple location schedules separately or together.
EasyRoster, for example, helps your organisation schedule employees to single or multiple locations:
- With the correct number of staff of the correct grades, being rostered at the correct sites
- Limiting overtime and non-productive time as much as possible
- To ensure an acceptable profit for each site
Challenges that will impact business in the future
The above-mentioned workforce management challenges are impacting businesses significantly, which is why technology like EasyRoster is essential. Finding technologies that solve business challenges and make things efficient and productive are critical to a business’s success, especially in today’s market.
We must look to the future and examine what kinds of challenges businesses will face ensuring we are prepared. According to a study conducted by PWC, we can expect to deal with three main challenges in the future. These include:
- Rapid advances in technological innovation – technological breakthroughs in automation, robotics and AI are set to change the nature and number of jobs available dramatically. Technology has the power to improve productivity, drive markets and ultimately restore the work-life balance many are missing.
- Demographic shifts – the world’s population’s size, distribution and age profile are changing. The population is ageing which is putting pressure on businesses and economies. It will be essential to rework business models to consider the need for training and new skills development because of this. The term used for this is Re-tooling. This will also drive the demand for automation and productivity-enhancing technologies.
- Rapid urbanisation – according to research by the UN, 4.9 billion people will become urban dwellers, and by 2050, the world’s urban population will increase by 72%. Cities will be the vehicle for job creation and challenge businesses to expand and develop to meet the need for more jobs.
Conclusion
Businesses today are needed to lean on technology in new and innovative ways, especially where workforce management is concerned. Workforce management technologies can provide valuable insight into the business, its operations and efficiency while enhancing productivity through automation and scheduling. Technology will continue to be something that companies turn to, especially to meet the future challenges we expect to face. Together with technology, businesses will reach new levels of efficiency and productivity, enhancing market competitiveness and driving revenue. This remains an exciting space to watch.
