How to Choose the Right Workforce Tools

If you’re managing a large, remote workforce choosing the right tools is crucial to your team’s success. You need tools that will help your team stay organized, on time, and efficient. Remote workforces can be especially tricky because there isn’t always a manager on-site to make sure that work is being done correctly. Having the right tools for your team means that their schedules will stay organized and you can know exactly when, where, and what they’re doing during their work time.

There is a second, and arguable even more important, benefit to selecting the right workforce tools. Having data and analytics incorporated into your workforce management means that you can optimize your team for even better results. Let’s say that you are scheduling two sales associates, one on a Monday from 2-6 pm and the other on a Wednesday from 4-8 pm. Which of these two associates had higher engagement and sales for the day? Where and when should you send your top talent into the store to sell? Without workforce tools that capture this information, there’s no way to know how to optimize these shifts for top performance.

So, What Workforce Tools Should I Look for?

On-Demand Scheduling System

The first important piece you should look for is a scheduling tool that will allow you to flexibly and quickly send shifts to your team. You’ve probably experienced a time when someone on your team called out sick at the last minute or even didn’t show up at all. With precious time ticking away, wouldn’t it be nice to have a way to send out a shift request to your entire available team? That way, you can get coverage as quickly as possible – ultimately saving you in lost sales time.

Mobile Time & Attendance

Make sure that your new workforce management platform has a mobile app for your team. With a mobile app, you can capture real-time time and attendance. No more manual timesheets being submitted every two weeks. Instead, every employee can access their work schedules right on their phone and clock in and out for each shift. Now you will know exactly when each person is arriving and leaving for their shifts. Using a mobile app also means that you can collect important data from each shift – such as sales data, photos of new displays or events, and even notes and tasks.

Real-Time Reporting

As mentioned above, reporting and analytics are a critical piece of your management that will tie all of your workforce tools together. With them, you can optimize your labor spend in the same way you’ve implemented technology to optimize your supply chain. No more under or over staffing of stores and lost productivity due to lag time from an outdated reporting system. Real-time data and analytics means you can make better decisions for your business even faster.

Integrated Payroll

Trying to process payroll for a large remote team can become a nightmare. Legal and compliance laws are changing rapidly and important to make sure you are paying your team correctly. By having an integrated payroll service as part of your workforce management platform, you can eliminate the headaches that come with processing and issue payroll. Data can be automatically collected from the digital timesheets from your team and paid out each week without you needing to think twice about it. This saves your own internal team hours of work and makes sure that everyone is paid properly.