analytics – Workforce

October 15, 2020October 11, 2021

How to put together effective workforce management reports

compliance; workforce management software

A lot of organizations are putting a good deal of money into HR technology systems, said Matt Stevenson, partner and leader of Mercer’s Workforce Strategy and Analytics practice. The first wave replicated paper-based systems and transformed them for online use, he said. The latest iteration of workforce management systems allows organizations almost an infinite amount of reporting.

”We have a lot of people asking us, ‘There’s too much here for us to really figure out. Can you tell us what we should and shouldn’t be reporting?’ ” Stevenson said.

Also read: Labor analytics add power to workforce management tools

He added that people in various departments look for different information in their workforce management reports. Operations professionals may focus on questions like, “How can this process be more efficient?” while those in the finance department may ask, “What’s the cheapest way to do this task?” And workforce management professionals focus on a different set of questions.

Stevenson had other thoughts about what workforce management professionals should be focusing on with reporting.

What’s your problem?

“Our finding is that it’s harder to come up with the questions than it is to draw answers from the system,” Stevenson said. “What’s also problematic is if you interrogate the data enough, it will eventually tell you what you want to hear. Which means if you [dig deeply enough] into a data set, you can find a data point that will confirm your hypothesis, even if it’s just not right. So that makes it a little bit hazardous.”

For those approaching these expansive workforce management reporting systems, what’s important to remember is to know exactly what question they’re trying to answer or what problem they’re trying to solve, he added. Don’t approach this with intellectual queries that have no clear connection to solving a specific problem.

Also read: A technology integration is an intervention to dissolve common payroll errors

He gave an example of a client with so much data, their mantra became that they would not gather any more data until they knew exactly what decision it would inform. “Data for the sake of data just makes it too hard,” he said.

Follow the trends

While these HR systems and tools are good for reporting, another important use for them is a trends analysis of what has changed over the years, Stevenson said. From there, users can go about exploring what caused the trends or changes.

For example, organizations could create workforce management reports to assess what mix of employees in each store gets the most profits. One way to do this would be to look at the most profitable store and copy their mix, but that would ultimately miss the point.

A deeper trends analysis could help them explore questions like, “When this store/location added another employee, did it lead to more sales over time?” Looking across different store locations over a period of time this way, the person doing this analysis may realize that the staff mix or adding more staff might not be a significant factor for profitability at all.

It could be something more straightforward, like the highest-performing store does the best because of its location, Stevenson said. “A jewelry store and rich neighborhood will sell more than the jewelry store in the middle of a field.”

Also read: Cloud workforce management saves on costs, resources and time

He said the tougher question is, does it matter on how many people you have? Or is it something else? The answer depends on factors like the store’s business model and what it sells. Flexible HR systems allow users to answer these more complicated questions, and a skilled user can create their own reporting process in the tool to answer their own unique questions.

A good, flexible reporting system will allow users to discover the right question for their own unique needs, Stevenson said.

Finding the right questions

To find the right questions, users can hire experts or talk to stakeholders of the organization, Stevenson said. But that on it’s own may not be the most efficient strategy.

“To be honest, most [users] just find themselves reacting to the data,” he said. They find themselves in a reactive cycle rather than a proactive cycle, and it’s hard to get out of that.

That’s the complicated part of these HR systems, Stevenson said. Users have all this extra data and the system can help with administrative tasks, but there’s so much data that reporting can become complicated. “There’s too much to report, and you have to put it in that extra effort to figure out what the right things are to report. And that’s not always straightforward.” he added.

The right sections to feature on your workforce management reports

The categories to feature on an organization’s report depends on their industry, Stevenson said. For manufacturing, it may be all about having the right number of people to operate the machines. In hospitality, what’s more important is having employees with specific skills to perform certain tasks.

Also read: How to avoid overstaffing through wage tracker software

For most industries the “workforce planning” and “compensation” categories are important, he added. Organizations also are wanting to report on its diversity, equity and inclusion numbers.

Ideally, there’d also be some data regarding productivity, even though that may be tough unless a company has a measurement to rely on that signifies productivity, he said.

Reporting in the health care industry

Health care can benefit from these HR systems and reporting the most, Stevenson said. Lives are at stake, so if there’s a possibility that changing an HR model can save someone’s life, that’s a huge opportunity.

Also read: Mental health provider persists through pandemic to continue patient counseling

For example, he said that Mercer recently found that when they joined operations data with HR data, they can predict 85 percent of the variance of things like the likelihood of picking up infections in a hospital. These are predictions and not explanations for what is happening, but they’re still helpful.

“When we work with our hospital clients, we can tell them, ‘Here are the things we can predict based on the types of shifts, the characteristics of the staff, the number of hours people work, where they work [and] the flows of people coming in and out.’ Then we bring them operational data like, ‘[What] kind of patients do you have at any given time? What’s the case mix?’ ” he said.

“What we’re trying to do now is convince clients to program this into their HR systems,” he added. This may allow them to narrow possible causes for why an event (like infection spreading through a hospital) is happening on the premises.

How these HR solutions are maturing

“It is my personal opinion that these systems will reach their full maturity when they’re more integrated with the other parts of the business, like financial systems and operational systems,” Stevenson said. “Because then you can compare the people with the financials and compare the people data with the operational data.”

Stevenson said that it wasn’t that long ago that these HR tasks were done on paper, and now we’re at the point where some people are complaining about the fact that their electronic records don’t match up to those in another HR system.

He believes that at this future level of maturity, HR systems will be able to help answer people’s questions about what the right questions are and what’s the right data to collect.

“I think we’re pretty far away [from maturity]. but just because you’re far away doesn’t mean you won’t get there fast,” Stevenson said.

September 28, 2020October 1, 2021

Cloud workforce management systems continue their rise

Cloud workforce management solutions have consistently become the norm in recent years, but some organizations continue to stick with their same old on-premise HCM systems.

As organizations look to the future of their organization and how technology will manage HR tasks, consider these differences between cloud-based and on-premise solutions.

Also read: How technology can help your employee engagement strategy

Pricing for cloud workforce management solutions versus on-premise solutions

While on-premise solutions remain in use, eventually all solutions will be cloud-based, priced per employee per month, said Karen Piercy, a partner at Mercer’s Philadelphia office. Still, many organizations are still using the same on-premise solution they’ve had for years.

If a large organization has bought many different technology solutions and constantly moves to the latest upgrade every few years, the costs come through in the large upfront sum to purchase the original technology and smaller annual maintenance costs, Piercy said. Additionally, companies generally choose to upgrade every few years and pay the cost for those upgrades.

Compare that to a cloud-based solution, which updates automatically and relies on totally different pricing models.

“For some organizations, if you bought [an on-premise solution] 15 years ago and haven’t done much upgrading, your costs for that technology is not that significant. Now in the new model, the pricing will be different,” Piercy said. “But I do think there are [cloud] solutions for different sized organizations, and there are different pricing models for different types of employees. Some software vendors cost a lot less if they’re contingent employees or if they don’t have full access to the system or they’re part-time.”

Regarding cloud workforce management solutions, Piercy believes organizations can find a pricing model that fits their needs regardless of the technology budget they’re working with. Plus, it’s a change they’ll have to make eventually. “I do think eventually everything will be priced this way and all vendors will move to that kind of model,” she said.

On-premise decline

While 70 percent of organizations have deployed at least one cloud-based HR application, 40 percent still use at least one on-premise solution, according to the Sierra-Cedar “2019-2020 HR Systems Survey.”

However, now many software vendors are no longer selling on-premise solutions, Piercy said.

“Now if you want [something] new, you can’t really get on-premise. That 40 percent will continue to drop as organizations continue to replace their solutions,” she said.

The future of cloud solutions

Piercy expects that growth will continue in many different HR areas in this marketplace. For example, she believes that we will see more features like artificial intelligence and chatbots as part of the core product.

Of course, she added, organizations will need the right data in their systems to use some of these features correctly.

“You need to have skills linked to employees to be able to do analyses and recommendations around that. But I think as it’s baked into the core solutions, companies are going to use it more and more, and it will get more refined. That’s one area where I think we’ll see a lot of growth,” she said.

Meanwhile, there are new entrants to the cloud marketplace, like the Microsoft and Google, Piercy said. They’re companies to watch as they could choose to do things very differently than the norm.

There’s also been a boom in the products and services involved in every aspect of talent acquisition, especially now since processes like onboarding are not being done in person, Piercy said. Onboarding is an example of something that can be difficult for HR to do, and therefore different cloud vendors are seeking to address this gap, coming at it from different directions.

Analytics are easier with the cloud

Analytics are a heavy area of growth in HR software solutions. Organizations have often struggled with on-premise solutions in terms of getting data in a way where the numbers are actionable and make sense, Piercy said.

Also read: Labor analytics add power to workforce management tools

In the past when the leadership team would be making a decision on something, it was often the case where HR would bring in one set of numbers and finance would bring in a different set, she said. If people couldn’t come to a consensus, generally employers would end up siding with finance’s numbers, not HR’s. The cloud, however, allows teams to more easily access the same data.

Additionally, the new technology that’s being baked into HCM systems is allowing for much better basic reporting and much more detailed analytics around that, Piercy said.

One of the key results of the new technology is that organizations are going to be able to leverage the data.

“[People will] finally be able to leverage their data much better and do the deeper analytics that HR has been wanting to do — being able to prove business cases and value of HR programs, and understanding their workforce in more detail,” Piercy said. “We’ll see more and more of this promise coming through with technology.”

September 15, 2020June 29, 2023

Cloud workforce management saves on costs, resources and time

While cloud-based human resources applications are now the standard for new buyers, many organizations still use on-premise systems, according to Sierra-Cedar’s “2019-20 HR Systems Survey.”

The report noted that 40 percent of organizations still use at least one on-premise HR application, and that number is decreasing at a relatively slow rate. Meanwhile, 70 percent of organizations use at least one cloud HR system, the report stated.

Organizations that aren’t investing in cloud workforce management systems may be missing out on many advantages.

“If you’re not in the cloud right now or if you’re not on the path to the cloud, then you are considerably behind,” said Wilson Silva, senior vice president of outsourcing at Alight Solutions. “You’re missing out on the opportunity for many workplace benefits.”

Also read: Unify those far away workplaces with global mobility tools

Simplify the data entry process

Typically with a cloud workforce management system, a big benefit is that organizations just have to deal with one source of information, Silva said. A manager could enter a data element in one place, and that can be considered for multiple processes. They don’t need to use several competing platforms and make sure they are all in sync with the correct shared information.

A united platform allows managers to be more efficient with data entry and focus on the quality of data entry rather than the amount of time it takes to sync up multiple platforms with the same data, he added.

More frequent updates

Most cloud-based workforce management systems come with automatic updates multiple times a year, unlike older types of workforce management platforms for which organizations must wait a year or more for more hands-on updates, Silva said.

Anything that allows you to adopt new functionality and apply it in a timely manner is a strong benefit for any organization, he added.

Compliance with new laws

While cloud-based software can’t do all the compliance work for a manager, it can make their job much easier, Silva said. For example, with payroll, cloud workforce management systems can consider tax rates of different geographies. And the cloud allows companies to more quickly address legislative changes.

The ongoing update piece of this also allows companies to feel comfortable that they are on the same page as competitors, said Jake Soliman, vice president of cloud services solutions at Alight Solutions. They have access to the same functions and features as others.

Given this standardization of much of the workforce management process, organizations can more easily benchmark themselves against their competitors and see where they stand.

”This is what the software delivers. ‘This is the best practice for 90 percent plus. Let’s use it as our benchmark and use it for a more standardized process.’ It can be that driving engine behind helping HR to be as efficient and standardized across the globe as they can,” he said.

Easing the workload of your workforce

The cloud essentially allows organizations to offload infrastructure onto a third party, Soliman said. The costs, resources, time and expertise that in-house IT or HR departments used to save for maintaining a workforce management system can now be used for something else.

“You get out of what might not be a core competency for your organization, and are able to move that into a company that specializes in that delivery. It’s a cost save and a resource save as well,” he said.

Better data security

While some people might worry about the safety of their information in the cloud, the reality is that for cloud workforce management systems, data security is usually better than the old way of doing things, Soliman said.

Also read: Labor analytics add power to workforce management tools

“Do your due diligence and put your security team on it, and I think you will be pleasantly surprised that their standards are more likely than not better than what you’re running now,” he said. For cloud based systems, he added, “they all understand their business is predicated on data security, and one breach could be catastrophic to their organization. So their budget and their attention to controls are above and beyond what most would do on their own.”

There’s always the implication that “outside my network” means “not safe,” but that’s just not true, Silva said.

“It is possible to have your data outside of your network or in the cloud and it is just as safe if not safer for them as when it was in your network,” he added. “Where you find potential for breaches is when the data is when somebody is handling data outside the cloud or passing spreadsheets around.”

Rely on the experts

For the customer who hasn’t moved on to the cloud yet, there’s no need to do the switch alone, Soliman said.

“Having the in-house resources can be daunting, but having a partner help build that design and run it is becoming much more commonplace,” he added.

Having someone who has expertise in deployment is critical, Silva said. Whether an organization chooses to rely on the vendor’s expertise, there are many consultancies that also help clients maneuver the cloud because learning a new software takes time, he added.

“It’s not just a data entry system. It’s a transactional system, and understanding the configuration and workflow that goes with it is sometimes harder than it may seem,” he said. “If people view that an HR or payroll system is simply ‘You just enter data in,’ I think they find out pretty quickly that’s not the case. The skill set around it is a whole lot more challenging.

“So get some help,” he added. “It’ll make your project way more successful.”

The future of the cloud

Wilson noted that there is a level of maturity in the cloud software marketplace now. Large players have either through acquisitions or in-house developments created comprehensive services that offer everything including HCM, payroll, compensation, time tracking, performance and recruiting. But now rather than building out their product offerings they’re moving on to analytics and benchmarking.

The question software companies are seeking to answer is, “How do you leverage the data that companies input to give them analytics on how to drive performance?” Wilson said. How can analytics help drive value through data companies already have?

The next direction he sees things going is benchmarking, he added.

Also read: Labor analytics: A how-to guide for company leadership

“It’s not just about the ability to let customers utilize data, but the question now is, ‘I have this metric or insight. But is this good or bad?’ ” he said. Cloud systems can allow companies to compare themselves to what competitors are doing. An organization can assess “if I’m doing well or not based upon what other companies have the ability to do.”

August 17, 2020June 29, 2023

Labor analytics add power to workforce management tools

Employing labor data analytics typically leads to more informed business decisions. From labor forecasting to measuring employee morale, data analytics allows for more precise and impactful results.

The advantages of implementing workforce management solutions also are clear. Automating time and pay calculations and empowering employees through mobile apps give managers valuable tools to control scheduling, compensation costs and organizational needs.

Using both resources powers the ability to make even stronger choices for workforce management.

Power tools with the power of analytics

Backing workforce management tools with the power of labor analytics creates a formidable partnership. This can help save money, establish formal business practices and remove the guesswork hindering management and operational issues. Employers can make more informed talent decisions, and:

Predict future hiring requirements.
Calculate current staffing needs.
Analyze compensation and overtime.
Optimize employee engagement.

Also read: Labor analytics: A how-to guide for company leadership

Predict future hiring requirements

The growth of an organization can be hobbled by its ability to find qualified employees. Since there are times when hiring comes in a flurry, recruiting becomes post the position, make the hire and pray they work out. Oftentimes new hires are not as productive as the existing staff and can cut into the team’s productivity. Forecasting labor needs through analytics establishes measured hiring practices. And implementing tools such as Workforce.com’s shift ratings and feedback solution provides managers with the ability to carefully balance veteran staff with new hires.

Calculate current staffing needs

Managers can get burned by being overstaffed and understaffed if they rely on traditional shift patterns and gut instinct. Overstaffing creates disillusioned employees with little to do, a lack of focus and a negative attitude toward co-workers. Productivity suffers and compensation costs needlessly soar. Conversely, understaffing leads to employee stress, burnout, poor performance, rattled customers and high turnover. Shift feedback tools help managers forecast their needs and curb chronic overstaffing and understaffing.

Analyze compensation and overtime

Few things catch an employer’s eye faster than seeing overtime on the compensation ledger. And like melting snow off a mountaintop, their irritation trickles down to frontline managers. Indeed some overtime can be justified, but there are workforce management solutions to adjust scheduling to seasonal or even hourly rushes that will manage compensation costs and limit unneeded overtime.

Optimize employee engagement
An engaged workforce produces a happy workplace. Balancing staffing needs and incorporating flex schedules builds confidence that management is looking out for their interests. Allowing employees to provide feedback also gives them a voice in organizational operations.

The Workforce.com Shift Rating and Feedback mobile app prompts staff once a week to provide their insights on common workplace topics. Their feedback in turn helps managers rate staff and build skill profiles. Those profiles benefit managers by pairing employees with varying skill levels as they build out schedules. Managers making quick, informed decisions gives employees the knowledge that their input has provided valuable guidance.

When workforce analytics and tools are functioning well, it’s not only the business that benefits. Employees want to take more initiative. Empower them with workforce management mobile solutions to solve problems. For example, they can:

Communicate their needs for scheduling and time off.
Quickly swap shifts on their own.
Get and provide feedback that can improve their performance and drive organizational productivity.
Develop their skills and utilize their potential.
Build camaraderie across the team.

Equip executives and managers with the analytics and tools they need to understand labor issues and make more informed decisions. Implement Workforce.com’s shift ratings and feedback solution to quickly and easily bolster your employee and scheduling analytics.