Researching Workforce Management systems? Make sure you evaluate the tools for workforce analytics. Let’s look at the top three things you want your software to track.
But first…
Let’s define what we mean by a Workforce Management system. At a minimum, a Workforce Management system administers employee time tracking and scheduling. Newer tools track accruals, meals/breaks, and overtime.
Even a bare-bones WFM system can provide insight into your personnel. This insight can help you make better decisions about resource allocation.
What should your system be measuring?
1. Workforce Productivity
Your workforce management system should give you insight into productivity.
The formula for productivity isn’t complicated; hours worked per tasks completed. This can be measured by employee, team or any other useful metric.
Things to look for:
- Which workers are consistently more productive?
- Which teams work best together?
- Would cross-training the most capable improve productivity?
- Does productivity vary per shift?
Your software can help you organize the most effective teams and schedule them accordingly. Create schedules templates for effective teams.
Job role tracking ensures you have the right coverage for each department or project. Job role alerts tell you if a schedule has the right employee qualifications.
2. Employee Engagement
Engaged employees perform better.
What does analytics have to do with engagement?
Since you can’t observe every employee constantly (or read their minds), your WFM system can shine a light on this important quality.
Punctuality is telling. Notice which staff members are chronically late. Your system should be able to set lockout times that force staff members to clock in within a specified time.
Everything is not always as it appears…
Watch for early punch ins and late punch outs. It may not indicate that the employee is hyper-punctual and goes the extra mile. It could reveal intentional hours padding. Either way—it costs you more in payroll and may not benefit the company.
Now you can take control:
System alerts can tag late punch-ins. Clock lockout prevents unauthorized punches. Intelligent clock features can help reduce time theft and encourage employee engagement.
If your staff members interact with customers, your ultimate goal is customer satisfaction. When employees are on-time and engaged, your customers have a better experience. If you don’t interact with customers—link to productivity. Engagement is required for both measures of success.
Don’t forget:
To best serve your customers, workers need a comprehensive understanding of policies and procedures. A WFM system with onboarding tools makes it easy for a new hire to read the rules and regs. Verify completion of all steps in the process. Some systems let you create short quizzes to validate that the worker has read and understands the material.
3. Unplanned Overtime
Small businesses that can’t control overtime better have fat margins. Evaluating overtime analytics can help you reduce payroll costs.
Which departments or teams drive OT expenses?
Who are my habitually overtime team members?
Where can I minimize overlap?
Do some shifts accrue more overtime regardless of the employees working them?
Once you identify frequent fliers, interview the workers and ask them what’s going on.
This can yield some surprises…
You may find that the reasons for overtime are out of their control. The employees who clock the most may be the heroes who make up for slackers or OT abusers who want the extra pay. You can get overtime under control with a change in scheduling.
Now it’s time to use a handy tool:
Set overtime alerts to warn you of overtime while creating the schedule. Alerts will also flag shift swap requests that put an employee into the overtime zone.
SwipeClock WorkforceHUB provides actionable data. Gain workforce insight and make better decisions.
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SwipeClock offers WorkforceHUB, the unified Human Resources portal that makes it easy to optimize the performance of your managers, employees, and business.
WorkforceHUB includes TimeWorksPlus, TimeSimplicity, TimeWorks Mobile, and ApplicantStack. We’ve just added recruitment, onboarding, benefits enrollment, performance reviews, and employee engagement! WorkforceHUB is created for busy employers like you who need to reduce cost-per-hire, streamline scheduling, automate time tracking, maintain regulatory compliance, and lessen labor costs.
How much can you save? Check our SwipeClock ROI Calculator.
We can get you up and running with Workforce Management Suite in minutes. Contact us today to book a demo.
