What is Workforce Optimization (WFO)?

Workforce optimization, WFO, is a business strategy focused on helping you reduce the operational costs associated with managing your workforce, improve employee performance, reduce turnover, and ultimately help the company to operate more efficiently. All of this leads to improved customer satisfaction. This is certainly a tall order, but having a fully integrated workforce optimization platform will prove critical to the successful growth of your business by helping you save time and money on overseeing your workforce. This is time that your team gains back to focus on more important business goals rather than being bogged down in the administrative burden that you may be facing now.

Having all of your data in one, integrated place is critical to a workforce optimization strategy. Workforce optimization supports a business and helps them grow by providing important data on the performance of the workforce. This gives you real-time data in order to give feedback to your workforce and quickly improve performance. Implementing these operational efficiencies and streamlining performance management allows you to ultimately improve the customer experience leading to higher sales. What business wouldn’t want that?

Why You Need Workforce Optimization Software

Technology plays a critical role in implementing and launching an optimization strategy for your workforce. Using antiquated, manual processes simply won’t get the job done. In fact, you may end up making more work for you and your managers, having the opposite intending effect on saving time and resources. What you need is one end-to-end platform that will have everything you need for scheduling, training, and feedback all in one place. Implementing a scheduling software system means you’ll have one system of record for your entire workforce along with an easy way to add tasks and goals to each shift. Here are the important components you should consider when evaluating workforce optimization software for your team:

Integrated scheduling

Scheduling is the first crucial piece of the puzzle. In order to fully optimize your workforce, your software platform needs to include a fully integrated scheduling system that allows for tasks, notes, and flexibility. Having a technology platform for scheduling greatly reduces the hourly of manual work that this process can typically take. No more phone calls, text messages, emails, and other disorganized and chaotic ways of scheduling. Having all of the information about your workforce in one place means that you can quickly schedule the right person with the right skills for the right shift. A perfect balance.

Attendance tracking

Using manually recorded and submitted timesheets means tons of errors or incorrectly reported work hours. It’s necessary to have an attendance tracking component in your workforce optimization software so that you can know exactly when and where a member of your team is working. A mobile app with clock-in and clock-out features can record these times automatically and aggregate them into timesheets. Now, you’ll have one accurate record for all time and attendance for your entire team.

Real-time reporting & analytics

Without reporting, it’s impossible to make better decisions for your business and your team. Integrated these features into your optimization software lets you quickly pivot your staffing decisions and provide important feedback to members of your team. With one end-to-end software system, you can now 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.