Beginners guide to work force management

A Beginners Guide to Workforce Management

What is workforce management?

Put simply, workforce management is all about assigning the right staff to the right job at the right time.

Although that might sound simple, it is in fact a complex business challenge, because there are many factors that come into play. Many companies use different pieces of specialist software for resource planning, customer record management and HR, but still rely on simple spreadsheets or even pen and paper when it comes to staff scheduling. In even a small contact centre this can result in expensive overtime payments, unproductive idle time, poor customer service, high attrition rates and untapped revenue potential.

That’s where workforce management can help. By optimising and automating staff planning you can make sure you assign your employees to tasks in accordance with your business requirements.

Workforce management allows you to:

forecast your requirements – so you know how many employees with what skills you’ll need in the future
plan your work schedule – so you have exactly the right number of employees to meet your needs
manage your employees’ time - so you can determine your employees’ work time accounts
monitor and analyse your results – so you can see whether you are meeting your targets, and take prompt action if not.

Forecasting

For workforce planning to be successful, you must be able to predict your short, medium and long-term staffing requirements. When forecasts are inaccurate, the schedules are irrelevant. Unfortunately, contact centre leaders often lack complete visibility into activities that impact their future contact volumes, forcing them to do the best they can with available information. This information gap occurs when contact volume is driven by activities outside of the group’s control or as a result of unexpected events such as systems problems or lack of communication between departments.

In order to make sure you have the right number of staff in place at the right time, you first need to work out what the right number is. This number is chiefly determined by your operations. Workforce management is a set of tools that help you forecast how your business activities will develop and how these plans will affect your staffing needs.

A workforce management system uses historical data to provide predictions about future needs. It may also help in recruitment and training by matching the skills profile of your staff to your longer-term needs. If you run one-off or regular campaigns, a workforce management system can help you determine the staff you’ll need.

Scheduling

Automation, optimisation and integration are the key ingredients of staff scheduling. Staff scheduling is a complex task which calls for numerous, sometimes conflicting objectives to be addressed. The main objective of staff scheduling is to create schedules that meet all legal and contractual requirements, as well as taking into account employees’ qualifications, personal working time preferences and availability. Workforce management gives you a way of automating these requirements and may allow employees to participate in the planning process, leading to happier, more motivated staff.

Because a workforce management system also allows you to predict long-term needs, it can also support your training programme to make sure you develop the capacity to meet those needs.

Time management

Effective workforce management includes time management that’s just as flexible as your employees’ working times. The processes related to recording and validating actual hours worked are closely linked with staff scheduling. It therefore makes sense to ensure that your time management is closely co-ordinated with all the other components of workforce management. This means fewer errors in payments, and a clear means of resolving disputes.

Analysis and monitoring

The faster you detect any deviation from your plan, the more effectively you can react. Real-time monitoring means you can immediately compare your targets with actual data. It can also determine whether your requirement forecasts were accurate. This means you can respond more quickly to changes and you can adapt your plans to keep your schedules efficient. You can also monitor adherence (e.g. to agreed working times or legal requirements) and generate reports.

Why can’t you do this with a spreadsheet?

Planners have to take into account a whole range of different factors when setting up a staff schedule. Many constraints have to be considered at once, including legislation, local agreements and employee contracts, as well as budgets, individual employee qualifications and employee availability. And, of course, schedules must conform to the rules, but they must also match your staffing needs. Too many staff means extra costs, too few could compromise customer service. Setting up a schedule is therefore essentially a combination problem, but the number of possible combinations is far too large to be handled in a simple spreadsheet; it requires a system with considerable power and mathematical sophistication.

Benefits

The results of putting an integrated workforce management system in place can be seen in all areas of the business. By allowing you to automate and standardise routine recurring tasks, workforce management gives you time to focus on what’s important.

Operations

Workforce management helps you integrate operations, finance and monitoring to reduce costs related to staff, admin and IT, while enhancing your employees’ productivity. The benefits include:

increased efficiency, as staff planning is always based on your business requirements
reduced personnel costs, through avoiding unnecessary overstaffing and overtime, and eliminating non-productive time; errors in payments are also avoided, as actual working times are captured
faster and better decisions because you have access to all KPIs in real time
reduced management costs, as processes are streamlined and integrated.

Employees

A workforce management solution allows you to provide a working environment and schedule to suit your employees’ needs better, and to match employee skills with business needs. Benefits include:

better work–life balance because employees’ preferences can be taken into account in staff planning
lower attrition rate – employees who are assigned to tasks that match their skills and qualifications are less stressed and more motivated
greater fairness because popular and less popular working times and locations cannot only be more evenly distributed, but also allocated in line with regulations and contractual requirements

How long does it take a workforce management system to pay for itself?

Every company has to consider whether a given investment will pay for itself, and over what timescale. However, the introduction of a workforce management solution will generate immediate benefits, including:

increased revenue and better service
reduced personnel costs
lower management costs
lower costs for recruitment and training
reduced IT costs – because of web-based technology and savings on infrastructure and management