Tag: workforce management

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Retail workforce management practices that make employees stay longer

warehouse workers, hourly employees

Retail workforce management can be difficult for managers in a high turnover industry. Keeping hourly employees interested and engaged in the job can be an ongoing struggle.

But retaining hourly retail employees a little longer can make all the difference in the success of a retailer. And certain workforce management practices can go a long way in making these meaningful improvements.

Also read: Give managers the time they need to sharpen up their all-around skills

Realize the customer isn’t always right, and act on that

Customer-facing jobs, especially retail, are difficult for employees when they’re expected to act like the customer is always right, said Robert Teachout, legal editor at HR compliance resource XpertHR. What can make a difference here is how managers act. One of the cardinal rules of management is, “Always have your employee’s back,” he added.

The key is to forget everything you ever heard about “The customer is always right,” he said. Customers can be stressed, wrong, rude or, at worst, inappropriate and abusive, and employees appreciate when their manager stands up for them.

“Managers need to step up —  and in some cases are legally  required to step up —  if someone is being abusive to an employee. Like if the employee is a minority or LGBTQ and they’re being harassed, that is harassment and discrimination. it is illegal and the employer has a liability if they don’t stop it,” Teachout said.

“The customer is entitled to the best service you can provide within the policies and practices of your establishment. They’re not entitled to yell at your clerks, not entitled to abuse a coupon program [and] not entitled to throw stuff on the floor and make a scene,” he said. “When that happens, take the employee out [of the situation] and you step in.”

This is also where higher level management needs to have their back, he said. Managers feel safer standing up for the people they supervise when their own bosses are going to support their decision and protect them. 

Make even the smallest change in turnover rates

The retail industry sees a 60.5 percent turnover rate, but it doesn’t need to stay that high. Even a small improvement in turnover will produce large dividends for a store and much larger competitive benefits compared to other retailers, Teachout said. 

The reality in retail is that these hourly positions are many people’s first jobs, and the expectation shouldn’t be that these employees will stay around forever. But that doesn’t mean managers can mistreat them and act like they don’t want these workers to stay longer, Teachout said. 

With seasonal positions, this can be especially helpful. “If you know you have 10 spots to fill every year, would you rather have to hire 10 different people or know that you’ve got two or three people that like working with you, want to come back and have already been trained? That right there is a huge advantage,” Teachout said.

Hourly retail jobs often have low pay, little opportunity for advancement and few if any benefits, and stocking shelves isn’t a personally fulfilling job for many people, he said. But if a manager knows this and considers how they can make the workplace a better place for employees, they may see better engagement and therefore better retention. 

Also read: Knock out the practice of buddy punching for good

Fostering employee engagement in retail workforce management 

Employees are more engaged when they can take ownership of their work, Teachout said. Managers can help here by allowing employees to do tasks that use their strengths. For example, an organized employee may excel in tasks like restocking shelves, and an extroverted employee may excel working at the customer service desk. 

Similarly, hourly workers are more engaged when they feel supported by their coworkers and feel a sense of teamwork. From the moment a manager onboards a new hire, they should introduce and emphasize the concept that “you’re part of a team,” Teachout said. They can explain tardiness or absenteeism policies not in a way that focuses on business impact but in a way that focuses on the impact it has on coworkers. 

He also said that managers can help employee engagement by building individual connections with employees. This doesn’t mean they have to form a friendship, but they should know each employee’s goals, priorities and strengths. This could be a part of a formal, scheduled review, but even more important is the casual conversations, Teachout said. Questions could be as simple as “How’s school going?” 

Create consistent schedules 

Inconsistent schedules are one of the major complaints of retail workers, and more stability in this area helps people balance the rest of their life and responsibilities while still getting enough hours, Teachout said. One of the main reasons recent predictive scheduling laws were passed was to reduce the impact of last-minute scheduling changes, he added. 

Managers should make sure they’re being fair while scheduling their retail employees, he said. Make sure everyone has the same opportunities to work the best shifts and the same obligations to work the less desirable shifts or do the less desirable tasks. This ultimately comes down to respect, Teachout said. Employees will feel more respected if they’re treated the same as their coworkers. 

Also read: Make managers more successful with the tools to retain and engage their employees

While retail workforce management practices like this may not stop or slow all turnover, they can help create meaningful business outcomes. 

“Even keeping someone working another two or three months longer than they would have typically, and at that point they’re already trained, that’s all gravy,” Teachout said. “Even making a small improvement in your turnover rate will provide a bottom line benefit.”

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Global workforce management is complex but more relevant in the remote workplace

Global workforce management is complex but more relevant in the remote workplace

It’s easier for companies to operate internationally, thanks to various technology innovations. But for organizations that want to go international, global workforce management is not a task to be taken lightly.  

So many details go into hiring just one person from another country, including compliance with a different set of laws and setting up a management structure that allows workers across the globe to be managed efficiently. But with remote work becoming more prevalent during the pandemic and sounding like more of an acceptable option after the crisis ends, learning the realities of having a truly global workforce will help organizations decide what the right decision is for them.

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

Global workforce management is more complicated than simply managing a local or national workforce. But for some organizations, it may be worth the extra complexity.

The expansion of the remote workforce 

Remote work has allowed organizations to expand who they can consider an employee. The more widespread switch to remote work makes the labor markets thicker, meaning that employers have more options for employees and that employees have more options for employers, said Brian Kropp, chief of research in the Gartner HR practice. 

While many organizations have thought about expanding to other cities and states in the U.S., others have realized they can cast their net even wider. In the past it could be difficult to get international candidates to move to the United States or American candidates to move internationally, Kropp said. Dealing with employment visas could get complicated. 

Also read: The most pressing workforce management issues of 2020

Remote work from outside the United States, alternatively, allows American employers to not worry about visas, Kropp said. They could have access to high quality international talent that require less compensation than American employees, which is undoubtedly a good thing for employers, he added. 

The complications of a globally dispersed workforce

Collaboration can be difficult with workers in several different time zones. This is one of the more intuitive difficulties, but employers should not underestimate it, Kropp said. The number of overlapping hours between coworkers and team members can be limited when they live in different countries.

Further, employees in different countries have varying leave policies and vacations schedules. At worst, this could breed a sense of unfairness among employees who get less time off than others. Ultimately, what’s important is that team members in different geographies keep each other in the loop and let people know when they’re taking time off, Kropp said.

Global workforce management is complex but more relevant in the remote workplace

In addition, while most companies get excited about a wider talent pool and potential cost savings, what they forget about is how a dispersed workforce might impact company culture and employee engagement, Kropp said.

While employees are generally just as productive working at home versus in an office, many employees find it more difficult to form a relationship with their coworkers and managers when they are remote. Managers may have a concern that these employees don’t have the same company loyalty or that they’re more likely to quit. 

There’s an enormous social component to work, Kropp said, and the decision to leave a company may be different if someone is thinking about leaving their friends rather than leaving coworkers. 

“When you’re more broadly expanding who can work for you in your work from home approach, it’s harder to create loyalty amongst those remote employees, and it’s even harder if they’re in different countries, let alone in the same country. There’s even less social attachment from that perspective,” he said. “The key thing you have to think about if you’re going to radically expand your work from home strategy is, ‘How do you build social connections and emotional ties to your organization?’ ”

“The last thing you want to do is hire these employees and spend a lot of time and energy training them, and then they quit,” he added. “The advice we have for companies trying to expand their work from home strategy internationally is that the strategy must have a huge retention component.”

Workers’ rights and benefits in different countries

Benefits and workers’ rights are dependent on the geography where the employee lives, not where the company is headquartered. Companies need to make sure they’re partnering with third parties that know the labor laws in the cities and countries where new international hires live. There are, for example, companies that help with this, Kropp said. These companies help not only with the benefits and rights but also with tax systems and compensation rules. 

A company will have to have a unique infrastructure based on these rules for each separate country in which they find a new employee, Kropp said. Creating this infrastructure is time-consuming and may require outside expertise. He suggested that an organization looking to expand starts by choosing one or two countries they’d like to hire talent from, build infrastructures from there and don’t fall in the more complicated trap of hiring people from anywhere in the world. 

Management structure 

While differing laws and time zones may make successful global workforce management difficult, a well thought-out management structure can help. 

Also read: How to improve manager effectiveness

Kropp has seen companies that hire both a work manager and a person manager. The person manager lives in the same geography as the international talent and has knowledge of the local situation. The work manager manages the work itself — whatever tasks or projects the international talent is working on. 

This is the most common way for companies to address this, Kropp said. 

Kropp also has seen companies have managers supervise more people, which may not be a positive trend for organizations going global. 

“You can accomplish that if your employees are more similar in terms of jobs, roles and responsibilities,” he said. “But manager performance starts to struggle when they have a greater complexity of the type of person they’re trying to manage, and [managing] people in different geographies just makes that harder.”

“From a manager perspective, you want to think about it as not just the number of people they’re managing but the variability and needs of all the [employees] to get a good sense of how much harder you’re making it for your managers,” he added.  

As organizations consider whether going global works for them, there are a few questions and considerations to help make the decision. 

One metric organizations can look into is how much time a manager is spending on solving problems versus providing support, Kropp said. Especially as management duties expand as the talent pool does, it’s important to consider how to minimize the frustrating work managers have and maximize the productive work they do.

“You don’t want your managers caught up in frustrating details. You want them caught up in overseeing the big picture,” he said.

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COVID-19 and reassessing workforce management

COVID-19, workforce management WFM 2.0, ethics

Over the past several months workplaces across the globe were forced to embrace the future of work in ways they never considered. COVID-19 may fundamentally change the workplace and in this context, here are three key considerations as employers work through this recovery phase in reaction to the pandemic.

  • Rethinking workplaces: Ensuring the health and safety of workers will be crucial to reopening plants, offices and stores and determining new team models.
  • Rethinking workforces: An estimated 2.7 billion people, or more than four out of five global workers, have been affected by stay-at-home measures. In addition to looking at new ways to deploy existing workers across an organization, many organizations are looking to identify opportunities to connect furloughed workers to job openings in areas with growing recovery demands.
  • Rethinking work: As organizations look toward the realities of a post-pandemic world, it’s likely that new business priorities will need to redesign teams and workforce policies, addressing the benefits and risks of a dispersed workforce while building flexibility.

It has become even more critical to look at the COVID-19 pandemic and how it exposed two key problems in managing the workforce. When cost management is not designed into daily workforce management activities and decisions and when there is no dedicated business unit focused on owning timekeeping and scheduling outcomes, it can be difficult to manage your bottom line or your workforce effectively.

The pandemic created an extreme disruption for workforce management. Many employers are concerned about costs and how to reconstitute their workforce to be optimally productive under different conditions.

If they are operating today, things like store hours and cleaning have changed. If they are planning to reopen, the restart may change when and how much labor is needed and can be afforded. Labor cost and revenue models are under pressure to adapt to such changes.

Unfortunately, workforce management has been mainly focused on efficient, automated, transactional processes such as reporting time and automating staffing interactions such as requesting time off. These activities and decisions aren’t likely designed to act as levers to drive critical outcomes or adapt to disruption in the workplace.

Such processes typically work well for what these standards are designed to do, but not for what functions employers should be doing. Transactional, routine scheduling and timekeeping processes aren’t capable of solving for pandemic-level issues impacting the workforce.

The pandemic created an extreme scenario that laid this fact bare. Employers should be operating differently and doing more. It exposes two everyday problems that have long been overlooked.

  1. Cost and productivity should be treated as dynamic outcomes that are actively influenced by the employer in real-time workforce management activities.
  2. Cost or productivity should be managed and influenced well with a workforce center of excellence and people who specialize in workforce management.

Labor cost and productivity can determine if an organization is competitive, profitable and serving its customers well. However, in too many organizations, it almost feels like workforce management is on auto-pilot … until something goes wrong.

If the employer is already operating with workforce management 2.0 — which we will call WFM 2.0 for brevity’s sake — it likely has the following characteristics allowing them to (a) design and control their labor spending for different workplace conditions and (b) know how to assign the work to the modified workforce for the ideal productivity and outcomes.

Characteristics of WFM 2.0 — managing cost and productivity outcomes.

  1. Ownership — A designated business unit known as the WFM Center of Excellence should be responsible for labor outcomes (cost, compliance, productivity, quality, scheduling experience, etc.) and the enabling tools required to manage (timekeeping, scheduling, absence management, mobile and web-enabled devices, dashboards, etc.). This team knows the current model and is able to design the future state and the strategy to get there.
  2. Capability — Specialized workforce management professionals who plan, design and support the timekeeping, absence management and scheduling practices and platforms. Post-COVID-19 operations will rely on these experts to know what policies, system configuration and scheduling models need to change to optimize cost and utilization.
  3. Access to leadership and support — the WFM Center of Excellence — the CoE — reports directly to executive-level stakeholders who sponsor the function, hold it accountable, prioritize its needs and fund its operations. Post-COVID-19 transformation will require support from finance, HR, IT and operations to execute on planning, retooling systems and testing and monitoring workforce performance.

Signs that WFM 2.0 is operating effectively.

The WFM CoE understands the workload and work priorities:

  • Secures accurate forecasts. This will be challenging and essential in the post-COVID-19 world to recast the labor supply-demand model.
  • Defines what good work and workforce look like at a detailed, task and practice level blending in the new protocols such as cleaning and distancing.
  • Creates solid data from time and schedule data to determine what labor should cost.
  • Decides what types of workers to engage or what work to automate for the lowest cost and optimal outcome. It may be time to pivot some work to machines, work from home or third parties.

The WFM CoE understands the optimal workforce:

  • What good work looks like — updating labor standards relative to COVID-19 protocols.
  • What workforce is available — WFM differs from workforce planning and headcount management. WFM is about knowing the workforce that is available “today, right now” from the active, skilled and healthy workforce.
  • Who are essential workers.
  • How much the workforce requires to earn (what compensation is necessary to make work attractive — in other words, hazard pay, shift premium for evening, overtime for excessive hours, on-call pay, paid sick time, etc.).
  • How to connect to the workforce using up to date, reliable contact mechanisms.

The WFM CoE understands how to put the proper combination of shifts, people and pay practices together to meet the business needs to drive cost and productivity:

  1. Use the right mix of part-time, full-time, contingent or machine workers.
  2. Design optimal shift patterns and rotations for new health protocols and regulations.
  3. Deliver schedule equilibrium (predictable, stable and adequate schedules).
  4. Score schedule quality.
  5. Prevents payroll leakage (avoiding time inflation, overstaffing, gaming the system to inflate pay and benefits).
  6. Turn on self-scheduling, shift swapping and other self-service scheduling processes as needed.
  7. Use float and standby staffing appropriately.
  8. Is up to date on scheduling laws such as the fair workweek, wage and hour rules, and collective bargaining requirements.

The WMO (workforce management office[DM1] ) or WFM CoE understands what tools the business needs and how to use them, such as:

  1. Timekeeping systems and devices will drive cost and payroll.
  2. WFM devices that improve safety so workers can return to work.
  3. Scheduling systems and communication tools to engage with the workforce in real time as situations change.
  4. Ideal absence management systems to easily facilitate planned and unplanned time off.
  5. Dashboards to monitor cost and utilization, react in real time to problems happening on the front line to ensure consistency in how managers operate.
  6. Data-supported insights to inform internal and external stakeholders to show how cost and productivity are being delivered to support and satisfy workers, managers, investors, regulators and the community.

WFM 2.0 was bound to happen. The pandemic is a catalyst for immediate business transformation.

Labor cost and productivity are critical to the financial and competitive viability of employers. Leaving things on auto-pilot isn’t a cure for COVID-19’s impact on any organization’s health.

Businesses that will recover and thrive can start by establishing a permanent workforce management center of excellence acting as the command center for managing labor cost and utilization.

Lisa Disselkamp is the managing director at Deloitte Consulting LLP.

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Ethics and the future of workforce management

ethics

As the future of work rapidly evolves and organizations integrate people, technology, alternative workforces and new ways of working, leaders are wrestling with an increasing range of ethical challenges.

These challenges are especially pronounced at the intersection between humans and technology, where new questions top the ethics agenda about the impact of emerging technologies on workers and society. How organizations combine people and machines, govern new human-machine work combinations and operationalize the working relationship between humans, teams and machines will be at the center of how ethical concerns can be managed for the broadest range of benefits. Organizations that tackle these issues head-on – changing their perspective to consider not only “could we” but also “how should we” – will be well positioned to make the bold choices that help to build trust among all stakeholders.

Ethical concerns are front and center for today’s organization as the nature of work, the workforce and the workplace rapidly evolve. In Deloitte’s 2020 Global Human Capital Trends report, 85 percent of survey respondents believe that the future of work raises ethical challenges but only 27 percent have clear policies and leaders in place to manage them.

And managing ethics related to the future of work is growing in importance: More than half of the respondents said that it was either the top, or one of the top issues facing organizations today, and 66 percent said it would be in three years.

According to our report, four factors rose to the top of the ethics concerns: legal and regulatory requirements, rapid adoption of AI in the workplace, changes in workforce composition and pressure from external stakeholders.

The leading driver that respondents identified was legal and regulatory requirements. Given that there is often a lag in laws and regulations relating to both technology and workforce issues, this perception is surprising. However, outside of a few moves including fair workweek rules for hourly workers, policy changes have been slow in coming.

The pressure on ethics created by the rapid adoption of AI in the workplace, however, is much more understandable. AI and other technologies make ethics in the future of work, specifically more relevant because the proliferation of technology is driving a redefinition of work. Perhaps the issue that has attracted the most attention is the question of how technology affects the role of humans in work.

While our survey found that only a small percentage of respondents are using robots and AI to replace workers, headlines of the forthcoming “robot apocalypse” continue to capture global attention and raise concern. Organizations that are implementing technologies that drive efficiencies can expect to make decisions whether and how to redeploy people to add strategic value elsewhere, and what, if they decide to eliminate jobs, they will do to support the workers thus displaced. AI will also be a part of scheduling work across a blended workforce of machine and human workers.

As technology becomes more embedded into work, its design and use needs to be assessed for fairness and equity. Organizations should consider questions such as whether their applications of technology decrease or increase discriminatory bias; what procedures they have to protect the privacy of worker data; whether technology-made decisions are transparent and explainable; and what policies they have in place to hold humans responsible for those decisions’ outputs.[1]

Our research found that the third driver of ethics’ importance in the future of work is changing workforce composition, which raises issues about the evolving social contract between the individual and the organization and the organizations and society — the growth of the alternative workforce is one major phenomenon contributing to these concerns.

The number of self-employed workers in the United States is projected to hit 42 million in 2020. “Invisible labor forces” are being exposed in the recent research by Mary Gray and Siddarth Suri’s “Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass,” which talks about the unsavory working conditions of many workers performing the high-tech piecework (labeling data, captioning images and flagging inappropriate content) that powers automation and AI.

The fast growth of this workforce segment is calling to attention related ethical concerns, including alternative workers’ access to fair pay, health care and other potential benefits.

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Defining workforce management: Leading teams for success

Sector-Report-RPOs-Do-More-Than-You-Think-8b38574

In 1922, James R. Angell, president of Yale University and the Carnegie Corp., led a joint initiative between the Engineering Foundation and the National Research Council. The goal was to take workforce science to new heights through unifying modern engineering, labor, management, and educational bodies. It has given birth to what we know today as Workforce.com and workforce management.

Since then, the team behind Workforce have delved deep into the science behind workforce management — from productivity, labor regulations, workforce challenges to the evolution of work. All of these insights have been put into practice with a full-featured workforce management platform that is being used by companies across the world.

The anatomy of effective workforce management 

So what is workforce management? Based on almost a century’s worth of research and study, we identified three main components that are crucial at effectively leading teams. Each of them requires a unique approach, but as a whole these areas should function seamlessly. Let’s look at each of them. 

Operations. When talking about workforce management, the first thing that comes to mind is operations management. It is all about making sure that quality output is created, within the given timeframe and resources in an organization. This involves planning and organizing. Some of the processes are creating employee schedules, timekeeping, output management and budget forecasting. 

Labor compliance. Labor regulations govern workforces around the world. These laws are set to protect workers and regulate certain business practices concerning the welfare of employees such as wages, work conditions and employment relationships. 

Labor regulations can differ by country or region, and these are taken into account in company employment rules and policies. While increasingly difficult to remain compliant, failure to do so can mean costly penalties that can greatly damage not just an organization’s bottom line but also its reputation. 

Employee engagement. Employee engagement is an area of workforce management that focuses on enabling employees to perform their best in alignment with their individual purpose and the objectives of the organization as whole. 

Employee engagement is typically correlated with happiness with work. But it’s important to note that they are not one in the same. Happiness at work is just one of the byproducts of good employee engagement.  To achieve good employee engagement, there has to be a clear communication in the workforce — from onboarding to getting the job done. 

Also read: How to make your onboarding process engaging and easy

Debunking common workforce management myths

Workforce management can spell success or failure for an organization. Let’s look at some of the common beliefs that can hinder success for an organization. 

It’s just scheduling. While creating schedules is an important part of workforce management, it’s not just all there is. It has a lot of moving parts that are tightly integrated with each other. This includes timekeeping, budget forecasting and engaging employees. 

Also read: Leave management should be as simple as submit, approve and hit the beach

It can be done manually or using spreadsheets. This can be done manually, but such an option can be prone to mistakes. One wrong value input can mess up the entire sheet and end up being counterproductive. It can result in wasted time to find the problem. 

It is easier for smaller organizations. There are many factors at play in workforce management, and one of them is company size. But that doesn’t mean that a smaller organization has it easier than a big corporation. Each organization, regardless of size, has its own unique sets of goals, objectives and needs. And all of these come into play when managing the workforce. What makes it easier or harder is not just how many employees they have but also the alignment of roles, resources and objectives.

Upskilling or training can lead to more skills and less staff. Nurturing the potential of staff is vital in workforce management, but developing their skills and training them to gain new ones doesn’t necessarily mean a lesser need for staff. 

There needs to be a balance in mentoring staff to be able to do more and making sure that they still have the space to master their newly acquired skills. Leaders need to be careful not to unnecessarily push staff from task to task or they can risk driving them to burnout. 

Culture doesn’t have an impact on business performance or bottom line. Culture is one of the vital components that sets the tone for employee engagement. A company may have a strong set of policies but it will all be for nothing when the culture doesn’t sit well with the employees. It can lead to high turnover rates, lower productivity and overall low workforce morale, which can all impact the bottom line.

Also read: Give managers the time they need to sharpen up their all-around skills

It’s a one-time deal. Establishing processes for operations, labor compliance and employee engagement is a good start. But workforce management continuously evolves. There are always changes that will influence the needs of an organization and leaders need to be quick to adapt to those changes. Optimizing is constant in workforce management, and it’s something that leaders need to pay more attention to. 

Setting up the workforce for success

Workforce management involves many processes that can be daunting and time-consuming for managers or team leaders. Here are some best practices that can make workforce management more efficient.

Use a workforce management platform. Leverage technology for the admin tasks involved in workforce management. Use a workforce management platform to accurately keep track of attendance, automate timesheet to payroll processing, scheduling, time-off management, and to make sure that labor laws are accounted for in computing for pay.

An effective workforce management platform goes beyond borders and allows for teams to work together no matter where they are. Go for a solution that can be accessible anytime, anywhere and on any device. 

Before going for a workforce management solution, it’s imperative to look at your needs as an organization. According to the Workforce Management Trends for Hourly Workers, 46 percent of respondents say that poor integration with other systems is a shortcoming of their current workforce management platform. Avoid this type of challenge by understanding your requirements and considering ease of use for staff. 

Monitor and optimize. Workforce management is all about maintaining efficiency and employee well-being. One advantage of automation is having data and analytics that can be a source of insights as to how you can optimize your operations and what areas you can improve on. Analyze your data and make informed decisions about how you can improve productivity and employee engagement in your organization. 

Listen to your employees. Communication is key to a successful workforce. Always keep channels open to your employees. Since staff are always on the front lines, it pays to listen to them to gain better insight on customer service, identify operational gaps, and improve working conditions for staff. 

Effective workforce management is all about employing smart solutions to spend less time on repetitive tasks and paperwork and more time on improving the business and empowering staff for success. It’s all about creating value for customers and employees alike. 

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The most pressing workforce management issues of 2020

workforce management 2020, mask, COVID-19

While the buzzword “the future of work” is often thrown around as if it’s the new, exciting, sexy thing, it just refers to a reality that’s always been true. The economy changes, technology changes, and social trends impact the way people want work. Workforce management — as a field that relates to employees’ wages, schedules, promotability and more — can be impacted by large economic and social trends as well as technology.

Smart workforce management professionals pay attention to what trends impact their organization and workforce and plan ahead. Some trends relate to the COVID-19 pandemic and others relate to forces that existed much before that. 

Based on information from various reports and expert interviews, these workforce management issues are some of the most immediate for 2020 and what practitioners should be thinking about.  

Employee safety

In environments like factories, workplace safety has always been a point of focus, while the same could not be said for the average retailer or office setting. “All of a sudden, that’s changed,” said Matt Stevenson, partner and leader of Mercer’s Workforce Strategy and Analytics practice. Due to COVID-19, employers are concerned with how the work environment must change to ensure employee safety.

Also read: COVID-19 and workers’ compensation

Currently, this is one of the most significant workforce management issues, he said. I’s impossible to predict how long this hyper-focus on employee safety will last. He surmised this depends on whether a COVID-19 vaccine is developed and when. 

Stevenson gave the example of polio. Before the vaccine it was a serious threat, and there were polio epidemics globally. After the vaccine was created, safety issues related to polio stopped being a concern. On the other hand, he added, viruses like HIV still don’t have a vaccine decades after being identified in 1981.

Also read: When employees return to work, consider these guidelines

Shifts in the way work is done 

One outcome of COVID-19 is that certain jobs are  done differently, Stevenson said, especially with remote work. Some organizations did not change their operating models because they didn’t have to, and the pandemic made it so they did not have a choice. 

For example, the use of telemedicine has grown since the pandemic started, Stevenson said. Telemedicine has existed for years, but there was some resistance to it, and it was often underutilized. With a pandemic that limits physical contact, people began embracing telemedicine. It’s possible this trend could continue after the pandemic ends. 

That’s what happened with retail stores, Stevenson noted. Online shopping for goods of all types is the norm these days, although consumers still can visit brick-and-mortar locations.  

Industries like hospitality, leisure and travel have been especially impacted by the pandemic, he added. It’s difficult to imagine how a shift to something more online-friendly would look for these organizations. 

The future of the physical workplace

Whether remote work will be as accepted after the pandemic ends is still unknown, but there’s a possibility that organizations will be more open to a largely remote workforce. 

As employers think about their return-to-work plan, they may start with only bringing people in they have to, Stevenson said. From there, a large portion of the workforce may remain remote. This could lead to a big picture question of, “Do I need this big, expensive office space if I can just have employees work from home instead?” 

This is already happening in the tech sector. Twitter recently announced that staff can work from home permanently. 

Not enough flexibility for employees 

Deloitte’s “2020 Global Human Capital Trends” report highlighted organizations that took employee-friendly approaches — giving employees more jurisdiction over their work schedules and  offering them new flexible time off programs. These approaches are designed to allow employees to “live and work at their best” ultimately had positive impacts for companies. Company culture was improved, and teams saw better communication and collaboration. 

workforce management 2020

More flexibility is good for worker well-being, which is good for business, according to the report. It surveyed respondents on how they have redesigned work to promote well-being in the organization. The top three answers were “giving workers more autonomy in how they do their work” (45 percent of respondents), “using technology to promote connectivity and collaboration” (41 percent) and “increasing flexible and/or predictable scheduling” (39 percent). 

“Worker input is critical to understand what changes to work practices may have the greatest impact on well-being,” the report noted. For organizations who want to take this route, they need to think about how to get that employee input and act on it. 

Interestingly, the report also noted that forward-thinking organizations should “stop obsessing about generations,” which leads to too many oversimplifications about employees. Ultimately most people, regardless of their generations, want many of the same things in a workplace — including their preference for flexible schedules.   

A larger focus on workforce science

Mercer’s “Global Talent Trends 2020” report highlighted the need for HR and workforce management professionals to get better at workforce science — a practice that can help professionals address many workforce management issues. For example, the survey found that only 24 percent of respondents said their organization has data on who is at risk of burnout. Only 43 percent of organizations surveyed used metrics to identify employees likely to leave, and only 18 percent have looked at the impact of pay strategies on performance. This is an area organizations can improve on in future years.  

The report didn’t paint a grim picture, though. Mercer’s surveys have found that  the use of predictive analytics has increased from 10 percent in 2016 to 39 percent in 2020. While there’s more employers can be doing with analytics, they’ve also been stepping up their game the past five years.

“The good news is that the workforce science discipline is gathering momentum,” the report stated. “That said, insights into workforce management could be adopted more widely.”

 

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Payroll challenges eased by software solutions

software, compliance

Payroll can be a complicated and time consuming process. If employers fail to be compliant —  intentionally or not — they may face potentially debilitating business consequences.     

Workforce management professionals can use technology solutions to address complicated payroll challenges. 

Challenge: Maintaining tax compliance

Tax compliance challenges come in many flavors. The Federal Unemployment Tax Act poses potential complications for employers, and employers must be careful to compute their FUTA tax liability correctly. 

Further, certain flexible work arrangements may introduce tax complexities to employers who must figure out how, when and where to withhold state taxes for their employees. Remote work is mostly a positive trend. Employees are generally more productive working outside the office, and employers can consider a larger pool of candidates for a job. But the company must make sure they have an effective system that takes state and local tax laws into account, especially if it manages a geographically scattered workforce. 

The right payroll system will help employers do this by allowing them to input all relevant tax laws in the system. Then managers don’t need to worry that the laws aren’t being addressed in their payroll, and they can continue benefiting from a flexible, remote workforce. 

Challenge: Balancing federal, state and local compliance laws

An “overwhelming alphabet soup of laws, regulations and agencies” govern the workplace — and not just regarding tax compliance. Federal agencies like the EEOC and OSHA and regulations like FMLA and COBRA affect workplace decisions on everything from payroll to health care to time off and beyond.

Managers may have a lot on their plate in addition to payroll, like creating effective schedules, controlling wage costs and taking overtime in account. While they deal with everything on their plate, they also have many legal responsibilities to balance. 

Labor management software can take on the most difficult part of this process, knowing how to apply different laws and regulations to every payroll decision. This leaves time and mental energy for workforce management professionals to focus on other parts of their job, rather than getting bogged down by compliance concerns. 

Benefits of payroll software

Payroll is a baseline, necessary duty of many managers’ jobs. Still, they have many other responsibilities that occupy their time and attention. Technology allows them to automate what is taking up too much of their time and energy and increasing efficiency at the organization.

Try Workforce.com software for your payroll and scheduling needs, which has saved managers: several hours a week by automating time consuming tasks like payroll. 

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Workforce management software: Don’t underestimate its value

workforce management software; hr tech

Workforce management professionals face more responsibilities than ever before, and workforce management software can help them manage their many responsibilities.  

While workforce management used to be a more focused term — mostly encompassing payroll, timesheets and scheduling — now it encompasses a broader array of duties including recruiting, onboarding, training, technology and more. Some of these duties are owned by HR, while IT, finance or operations take care of others. Balancing this variety of duties is not simple. 

Also read: How technology fits into an HR manager’s job description

Between 2020 and 2025, the workforce management software market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 4.21 percent, according to India-based market research organization Mordor Intelligence. The report also found that the global workforce management software market was valued at $2.7 billion in 2019 and is expected to reach a value of $3.5 billion by 2025. 

Why use workforce management software?

Organizations are interested in using HR and workforce management software for multiple purposes, and many organizations plan to use certain types of software in their long-term plan, according to the 2019 “HR State of the Industry” report from the Human Capital Media Research and Advisory Group, the research arm of Workforce.com. While 37 percent of the organizations surveyed already use a management software system that addresses all core areas of talent management, 10 percent plan to purchase it in the next year and 8.4 percent plan to in the next three years. 

workforce management software; hr techThe same trend exists for organizations interested in software that specializes in one talent management category. According to the report, 46.4 percent of employers already used recruiting technology software, 9.2 percent planned to in the next year and 6.5 percent in the next three years. With scheduling/time and attendance software, 59.9 percent of respondents already used it, and 9.3 percent and 5.8 percent plan to in the next year and three years, respectively.

Among this huge workforce management software landscape, organizations may have challenges choosing a provider and managing the software. Vendors are releasing new versions of workforce management software every other day while similar companies are also emerging, noted MarketWatch. 

Also read: Workforce management takes time and effort

One important functionality of a workforce management software solution is the capability to create schedules based on varying rules and regulations. For example, numerous cities and states have passed legislation including laws guaranteeing workers the right to request scheduling accommodations and predictable scheduling laws. Meanwhile, an organization may have specific internal rules that apply to just one team of employees, or they may have global employees who don’t fall under American law. 

The benefits of workforce management software 

Workforce.com software, for example, addresses this by allowing users to input a rule or regulation and have it automatically added to the system. This isn’t the case with every time and attendance software, but capabilities like this allow workforce management professionals to create good schedules despite the many rules that impact how they can and can’t schedule employees.  

Also read: 3 steps to navigating effective wage and hour compliance

The benefits of workforce management software solutions are clear. They can save organizations time and automate complicated processes. Still, some organizations haven’t made the leap yet, citing reasons like lacking the time, budget or resources to choose products, assess vendors and deploy new applications.Experts advise companies in this predicament to start small with core software solutions that address payroll, time and attendance, paid time off and benefits. Delaying workforce management software investments will hinder a manager’s ability to automate the necessary tasks and focus on the parts of their job that can’t be automated.

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What is workforce management? Different departments have different ideas

time clock, workforce management, scheduling, time and attendance

The term “workforce management” may be a common term around the office, but that doesn’t mean it’s well understood.

A major challenge is that IT, HR, Finance and Business Operations —  the departments that each have control over some aspect of workforce management —  think about it differently. There is not a consistent definition among professionals in these groups, said Lisa Disselkamp, a managing director in Deloitte Consulting’s Human Capital Practice.

While workforce management used to be a more simple term — mostly encompassing payroll, timesheets and scheduling — now it encompasses a broader array of duties including recruiting, onboarding, training, technology and more, she said. Some of these duties are owned by HR, while others are owned by IT, finance or operations.

Now, workforce management is a business function with many stakeholders, and this can cause confusion or disorder among these departments, Disselkamp said. 

Meanwhile, workforce management has also shifted from purely transactional to strategic, she said. When she talked to clients 5 to 10 years ago, conversations revolved around issues like, ‘‘I have to fix my timekeeping because payroll is not right or there are errors.”

workforce management, scheduling, time and attendance

“You were trying to fix broken processes,” she said. “Today the difference is the outcome. The outcome is ‘I’m spending too much on labor and workforce management. I need processes and I need to hold people accountable to the results the business is interested in.’ The transaction is just how I get the result,” she said. Essentially, workforce management now hinges on owning specific business outcomes versus owning processes.

Conflicts of ownership

Disselkamp explained how different departments may look at workforce management: HR looks at it from hire-to-retire and the HR functions in between like onboarding, training and scheduling. IT thinks about the platforms used to enable workforce management and think about questions like “Am I delivering good technology? Is the system performing properly? Am I assigning people access to the system?”  Finance deals with costs and funding. And business operations thinks about the day-to-day tasks and how to allocate work. 

Also read: Workforce management takes time and effort 

Different departments can share a set of metrics to show how they’re performing rather than relying on different numbers, Disselkamp said. Shared metrics helps unify departments under the same workforce management goal.

For example, grocery stores are famous for bad schedules, she said. From the workforce management perspective, some grocery stores just don’t honor that social contract with employees who need predictability and good schedules to plan their life around.

Management can ask themselves the question, “Can I translate good schedules into financial outcomes?” Disselkamp said. And the answer is yes. This provides the HR and finance departments to work together toward a common goal, combining scheduling and finances. They can connect data like schedule scores versus turnover, which has the potential to make the case for better schedules because turnover costs a company a good amount of money. 

Juggling 4 types of employees

Not only does workforce management mean different things to departments, but it also means different things for hourly/shift workers, salaried workers and contingent workers, Disselkamp said. Front line managers may struggle when they manage all three types. Their definition of workforce management might be how they, on a day-to-day basis, allocate the work that must be accomplished and by which type of worker. Does the company have the right systems in place to manage all three employee subsets? How do you allocate shifts and adjust workloads for types of workers for whom you have different legal obligations?

Further, the rise of nonhuman labor through automation, artificial intelligence and robots complicates workforce management more, Disselkamp said. Sometimes bots need system access just like human users do,  and so they need their own individual “identity” to enter a system and do certain work. In situations like this, Disselkamp said, a front line manager essentially must manage four types of workers — robots included. 

“I think it’s a fascinating issue, and we don’t have the leading practices yet,” Disselkamp said. 

Potential solutions for modern workforce management 

While labor has traditionally be thought about from a supply-and-demand perspective, now the interesting thing about workforce management is the trend of looking at it more from the perspective of the employee experience, Disselkamp said. Employees need to work a certain number of hours a week and know their schedule ahead of time so that they can plan the rest of their life around it. 

A principal called “schedule equilibrium” — an employee-focused way to score workforce management from an employee’s perspective —  can help with that, Disselkamp said. There are three main ideas behind schedule equilibrium: predictability, stability and adequacy of hours.

In workforce management today, companies need to honor the social contract with employees and contractors and create good schedules, she said. 

“A schedule is like a purchase order for your labor, and timesheet is like an invoice. So if we think about workers like we do suppliers, we want to develop good relationships with them. And that means we have a business relationship with them where we are providing work and income and workers are providing us with their labor and availability. People want to be empowered to say when I work, how much I work [and] what I earn,” she said.

Another leading practice in workforce management is developing a workforce management office, or WMO, she said. A WMO is a department that sits high enough in the organization to have executive-level availability, and they’re in charge of tasks like what the organization’s best practices for workforce management are, what enabling technology there needs to be and which staff members will take on specific duties or responsibilities. Further, the WMO department is held accountable to certain metrics and performance outcomes, like any other department. 

“Staff it with people who specialize in workforce management. That’s their job. It’s not part of their job,, it’s not something they do as part of a committee — it is their full-time day job,” she said. 

Further, this could help organizations whose operations, IT, HR and Finance departments are not on the same page about workforce management. 

“[It’s] being managed by all kinds of people and we don’t know what good looks like. We don’t have standards, and it’s hard to come together and agree on what should happen first and where we should spend money to improve workforce management,” Disselkamp said. 

Also, a trend that has emerged in the past five to 10 years is the position of Director of Workforce Management, she said. 

Daniel Smitley, director of workforce management and analytics at World Travel Holdings, has worked with the organization for five years but became its first director of workforce management only three years ago. Prior to that, the highest person in the organization with “workforce management” in their title was a manager. 

Smitley’s team is responsible for scheduling call center agents and forecasting calls, he said. They also manage agents’ time off and any reporting associated with that, and their team is directly invested in the finances behind the schedules. 

Similar to Disselkamp’s “schedule equilibrium” solution, employee experience is a consideration for World Travel Holdings’ workforce management team when it creates schedules, Smitley said. The call center environment can be rigid, and he wants it to be more relaxed for these employees. Depending on the season, there are about 700 call center employees, most of whom are hourly, he added. 

“Work-life balance is my passion, and as the director of workforce management, I make sure that’s a key lens that my team looks through,” he said.  “We’ve always cared about our agent experience, and we’ve continued to progress toward giving them more autonomy and empowerment to create their own schedules.”

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Time and Attendance Orientation Guide

In a growing business, the day will eventually come when managing time and attendance on paper becomes both inefficient and risky, especially when trying to balance things like overtime, paid time off, and myriad regulations. “It usually happens when companies reach 50 employees,” said Jose Gaona, vice president of product strategy for Replicon Inc., a cloud-based time tracking applications provider. “At that point it becomes too complex to do.”

It can also get extremely time-consuming, with human resources staff spending hours each week manually tracking timesheets or punch cards, and transitioning that data over to payroll. Gaona recalls working with a health care facility that processed 10,000 employees’ monthly payroll and had a manual time-keeping system.

“They had 10 people involved with processing time,” he said. Beginning two weeks in advance, the team would sit at a conference table and sort through piles of time cards, and then pass their work to the person next to them to check for accuracy. “And because they had to start two weeks in advance, they had to forecast the last two weeks of every month,” he said. Once they implemented an automated time and attendance system, that process went from two weeks to three days, and from 10 people to two. “It had a huge impact.”

ROADBLOCKS

  • Don’t automate everything. A good time and attendance system will automate tedious tasks, like tracking data and generating reports, but you still need a human touch to do things like accommodate individual schedule goals or to adapt the schedule to accommodate short-term ebbs and flows in workforce planning.
  • A major obstacle in this journey is that time and attendance has four stakeholders — payroll, IT, finance and operations, said Deloitte Consulting’s Lisa Disselkamp. “You need to choose a single owner, or the process will be driven by the individual with the most influence.”

Along with time savings, automated time and attendance systems can also eliminate errors, uncover time theft and, most importantly, help with compliance. “When we talk to companies, the No. 1 issue they are concerned about is compliance,” said Richard Allaway, general manager of ADP small-business services. A recent survey from ADP shows that 35 percent of respondents say they spend more time today on human capital management-related compliance tracking than they did two years ago. And it will only get worse. “The HR landscape has gotten incredibly complex regarding state and federal regulations, and if employers don’t stay in compliance with all of them, they face fines, penalties and even lawsuits,” he said.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ 2015 Global CEO survey, 78 percent of CEOs are concerned with over-regulation and its effect on their ability to achieve their companies’ strategies. This is especially true for small businesses that spend up to 80 percent more per employee on federal regulatory compliance than large companies, according to a U.S. Small Business Administration survey.

An automated time and attendance system that is linked to payroll can reduce the risk of compliance issues because it provides the transparency and data management tools that companies need to track and audit their scheduling and overtime to ensure compliance with the Affordable Care Act, Family and Medical Leave Act, local rules and union contracts.

FAST TRACKS

  • Consider a point system to deal with chronically late employees. Start every employee with five points, and take one away when they are late, then every six months add an additional point to their banks. Establish appropriate disciplinary measures for those who run out of points.
  • ‘Think of time as an asset,’ Replicon Inc.’s Jose Gaona said. You wouldn’t throw away valuable products of resources, so give the same respect for your team’s time.

Value vs. Risk

Though if you want to get the most value from a time and attendance system, you need to think bigger than just compliance, said Lisa Disselkamp, director of HR transformation for Deloitte Consulting. “Time and attendance shouldn’t be treated as a back-office function,” she said. “It should be positioned as a driver of business outcomes.”

If companies want to get the most out of these tools and processes, they should align scheduling and attendance strategies with business goals that have measurable outcomes such as improved productivity, increased employee engagement, better customer satisfaction or reduction of operating costs. “When you focus on what you are trying to accomplish as a business, it reframes the conversation,” she said.

For example, if employee engagement is the goal, you might focus on creating schedules that are more predictable, consistent and adequate so employees can better plan their lives and budgets and reduce use of sick days and shift trading. “It creates shared value for the employees and the employer,” Disselkamp said.

Regardless of your business goals, it’s important to do your due diligence before implementing any time and attendance system. That means making sure you understand your pain points, what you want to accomplish and how you are going to measure the impact of a new system. And recognize that it is going to require a change in the way you operate, Disselkamp said. “It will feel disruptive at first, but in the long term it will add a lot of benefit.”

TIME AND ATTENDANCE CHECKLIST

  • Once you hit 50 employees, it makes sense to transition to an automated time and attendance system.
  • To measure the return on investment of a new system, factor time saved, compliance risk, “time theft,” and unexpected overtime into the equation.
  • Update your scheduling process, and rules around attendance before choosing a tool.
  • Choose a system that can grow with you and adapt to constantly changing regulations.

Plan

Organize the data. Gather all of your historical data on scheduling as well as documentation on attendance rules, payroll guidelines, union agreements and any other documents that influence time and attendance. “If all this data isn’t in place, the transition will be a lot more complicated,” Replicon’s Gaona said.

Review your process. Think about things like how you assign schedules, track time/overtime, and keep track of tardiness and vacation days, then consider whether you want to make improvements, said Joe Wang, chief services officer of ServicePower. “You want processes that clearly define what is expected, and when and where you will make exceptions.” Consider whether you want to update rules around how schedules are assigned, and the way you deal with employees who are chronically late, Wang said.

Look at the regulations. One of the biggest goals for time and attendance programs is to achieve and prove compliance. Before choosing a system, identify the rules you need to comply with, the data you will need to collect, and which systems will need to be integrated to achieve those goals, said Andrew Shopsowitz, manager of product strategy for Ceridian HCM Inc. “If you don’t link time, scheduling, payroll and benefits together, it can be hard to stay in compliance.”

Find the hidden roadblocks. Do an audit of every aspect of your time and attendance process, with a focus on “home grown” solutions that individuals create as workarounds, Disselkamp said. For example, the manager who does all scheduling on paper then enters the data later into the system or allows shift changes without documenting them. “If those hidden systems remain, it will impact your outcomes,” she said.

Set a baseline. Measure the time spent doing time and attendance today, including the costs associated with fixing errors, moving data from one system to another and compliance-related penalties. Use these as benchmarks to prove the effectiveness of the new system.

Set expectations. Figure out how time and attendance aligns with the business strategy, then establish key performance indicators — i.e. improved productivity, reduced turnover, lower operating costs. “When you know the outcome you want to achieve, you can plan back from that,” Disselkamp said.

Do

Assemble a shortlist of vendors. Focus on core functionality, like whether it is cloud-based, has mobile functions, is customizable by users and integrates with your broader HR management system. Then look at usability and performance. “It needs to be user-friendly or you won’t get buy in from managers,” Shopsowitz said.

Involve managers in the review process. If they are the ones who will use the tool, they have to like how it works.

Review reporting tools. The best solutions will give you real-time insight and alerts related to key performance indicators, like increased overtime, or too many hours for part-time workers. “You don’t want to review that data two weeks after it happened,” Shopsowitz said. “You want that feedback in real-time if you are going to avoid compliance issues.”

Make vendors prove themselves. Don’t let the system drive the process, Disselkamp said. “Tell your vendors the outcomes you are looking for, then have them show you the features that will help you achieve those results.”

Think about the future. Choose a vendor and system that can grow with your company and be easily adapted to accommodate new regulations, employees and scheduling strategies. You don’t want to be locked into a system that doesn’t meet your needs in three years.

Make an app for that. Take advantage of mobility features to give managers and employees the freedom to check schedules on the fly. “You want a system that can be used where the work happens,” Disselkamp said.

Train employees to use the system. The only way to get value from a new time and attendance tool is if managers use it effectively. Provide training and support tools in a variety of formats (e.g., live classes, Web-based modules and help desk support) to make sure they have the confidence to embrace the new software.

Communicate. Once you choose a tool and/or a new process, tell your workforce what the changes are, how they will work, and how they will benefit the employee and the organization, Wang said. “If employees understand why you are making a change to your time and attendance program, it will feel less like Big Brother is watching them.”

Review

Measure results against key performance indicators. Six to 12 months after you implement the system, gather data to review impact. Have you cut overtime? Improved engagement? More effectively aligned schedules to the flow of business? Quantifying the effectiveness of the system will help tie HR investments to strategic business outcomes.

Track adoption. Make sure managers and the HR team are using the tool effectively, including data analytics features to support real-time decision-making, and ensure rules and regulations are being met. Consider offering additional training or incentives if adoption is low.

Communicate results across the business. Share impact data with the executive team, managers and front-line workers, and customize your communication to the relevance of your audience, such as financial benefits to your CEO or chief financial officer, or more consistent schedules to employees and managers.

Use the data to build your brand. Reductions in turnover, improved employee satisfaction, and greater predictability in scheduling are all value-driven outcomes that can help you establish the company as an employer of choice.

Do something with the savings. Have a plan for how you will use the time or money saved as a result of the new system, Disselkamp said. Then communicate that plan to the company. “It helps people understand how they are contributing to the business, and that can be very empowering.”

RECAP

PLAN

  • Collect all of your employee and regulatory documentation.
  • Revise any time-and-attendance rules or processes that are creating inefficiencies.
  • Identify current and future regulations that directly affect your business.
  • Look for homegrown processes (i.e., custom spreadsheets used for time tracking) that need to be incorporated into your new system.
  • Define strategic business outcomes (i.e., reduced overtime and improved engagement) and set a baseline to measure results.

DO

  • Assemble a shortlist of vendors that offer the features to meet your needs. Consider including mobile options, real-time reporting, and software-as-a-service on the list.
  • Involve managers in the review process to secure buy-in and prove usability.
  • Look for tools that offer alerts when you fall out of compliance with regulations or internally set rules.
  • Choose a system that can grow with you and adapt to changing regulations.
  • Teach employees to use the tool, and explain your business goals for choosing it.

REVIEW

  • Measure results against key performance indicators, focusing on things like time and money saved, improved retention and greater accountability.
  • Share results with the executive team, managers and front-line workers.
  • Make sure managers are using the tool effectively, and offer training, incentives and deadlines to encourage adoption.
  • Use results to attract new employees and establish yourself as an employer of choice.
  • Reinvest the money and time saved into new initiatives or incentives, and let employees know the role they played in making those programs happen.