The complete guide to enterprise workforce management

The more your business grows, the harder it is to manage your workforce effectively. You might be able to get by on standard tools at first, but eventually, you'll need enterprise workforce management software to help your team thrive. 

Workforce management is critical for enterprise businesses and any operation at scale. Large organizations quickly learn that, as they diversify, workforce management is no longer a luxury. It’s the only way to improve how you manage teams across complexity.

Unsurprisingly, workforce management software sells faster than at any other time in history. 

Give your team the tools they need to excel: With the right tools, employees can focus on their work — not manual data entry and tracking down information. Managers can focus on employee development and high-level work.

The key takeaway: With an enterprise workforce management tool, employers are less likely to micromanage and overwork their teams. The results? Happy employees, increased productivity, and a positive impact on the company’s bottom line.

Enterprise workforce management, or WFM software, manages the most crucial aspects of business operations, from employee time to project status. With the right workforce management tools, you can increase profit margins while keeping employees happy and productive.

Master workforce management with a comprehensive workforce management system.

An enterprise workforce management system is an all-in-one software solution that helps companies automate day-to-day operations. This may include tracking time, building and optimizing schedules, gauging productivity, and optimizing resource allocation.

You get an understanding of elements such as time and attendance tracking to link actions to performance goals, labor costs, and historical data. It turns labor management into performance management for a global workforce.

High-value workforce management software for enterprises is about giving your team what they need and getting out of the way. The right tool will be comprehensive but straightforward enough to ensure company-wide buy-in. And today, many include comprehensive workforce analytics to help you make informed decisions.

While these solutions can be costly (especially at the enterprise level), it’s easy to justify the cost of a WFM tool when it’s helping you budget consistently.

Key features that workforce management systems offer

Finding the right tool can be tricky. Knowing what features you’re looking for can simplify that process and make your choice easier. 

These are the key features most teams look for in WFM tools:

• Task and time management

• Task automation

• Resource allocation

• Integrations 

• Analytics 

• Reporting

Savvy enterprise organizations use technology to manage their workforce and drive productivity and profits with data-driven methodologies. It’s time to join them.

Workforce management is crucial because it creates a framework your team can use to manage projects, budgets, and resources. With integrations and automation, your enterprise workforce management software can handle every aspect of your business, often with little work on your end.

With WFM tools' increased visibility and improved metrics, teams can increase efficiency and meet KPIs and other strategic goals.

Here’s what you can expect from a WFM tool:

• Gain actionable insights: Managing remote team members' workloads is difficult without a glimpse into their work. With a WFM tool, managers gain insight into how much time team members spend on projects.

  
  

• Reduce manual work: Manual workforce management won’t cut it. Enterprise-grade businesses are too large to function without automating things like time tracking and project management — that’s where your WFM tool comes in.

• Improve compliance and security: Address complex regulatory requirements and reduce compliance risks with one comprehensive solution.

• Meet project deadlines: Understand how your team spends each day and look for areas to improve. Coach teams, flag risks, and prevent overwork and burnout.

• Improve the employee experience: Increasing employee retention and overall experience is critical for profits and productivity. Increased trust and transparency can help.

88% of organizations use time and attendance workforce management applications. Using a tool to manage your workforce planning is no longer a luxury — it’s a necessity.

Workforce management software use cases

Let’s take this discussion into the real world and examine WFM use cases for specific industries. We’ll address major issues plaguing each sector to see how enterprise workforce management software can help. 

Software development teams need help staying aligned on projects

Software development teams can use WFM tools to align their QA, DevOps, and Product departments with project and time tracking features. They can also reduce the need for manual check-ins by providing visibility into project status.

With reporting and analytics based on time tracking data, managers can see how much time their team spends fixing bugs, reviewing PRs, or sitting through meetings. 

Workforce management solutions help developers identify task dependencies and assess workloads across teams. With these tools in their tech stack, developers will always know what stage a project is in and who to contact with questions. 

Real estate teams want to identify their most profitable teams, locations, and clients

WFM tools help real estate teams view activity, website and app usage, and other insights to see which teams, projects, or locations are the most productive and profitable. 

Organize real-time insights by client, location, or team to pinpoint what is working and what isn’t. Then, use task management features and budget limits to keep projects on track. 

Staffing and recruiting agencies need help with their unique payroll needs

WFM tools can function differently for staffing and recruiting teams. These teams fall in the same industry category, but their needs differ. 

• Staffing agencies: WFM can help you accurately record recruiter hours and create custom invoices for contingency searches or RPO clients.

• Corporate recruiting teams: Recruiters can use WFM to focus on succession, retention, and requisition with time tracking, employee scheduling, and automated payroll.

Both staffing and recruiting teams can use timesheets to pay employees accurately. They connect time tracking data to payroll integrations and quickly pay freelancers and global teams in their preferred currency and payment platform.

Marketing agencies need to be able to track client budget limits

Whether you're a boutique firm or a global full-service network, WFM tools can automate budgeting to ensure you don’t have to dip into your contingency fund.

With workforce management solutions, agencies can set client budgets and get automatic alerts as you near them. You can also access detailed breakdowns for:

• Hours spent

• Timesheets

• Client budgets

• Project statuses and timelines

• Potential labor costs or overruns

WFM tools also help you sort billable from non-billable hours and create automated client invoices. Linking that back to your workforce data makes it easy for an agency to understand the profitability of projects or clients. 

E-commerce teams require advanced support 

You can manage global e-commerce teams using WFM tools with real-time productivity insights, invoices, and secure payments. 

Most importantly, e-commerce brands need 24/7 global support for shoppers and logistics partners. WFM tools can provide that while also ensuring accurate payroll — and adhering to PTO compliance standards around the globe.

Use WFM tools to get real-time insights from account creation to the customer’s doorstep, so you’re never left guessing. 

Hubstaff is an enterprise workforce management solution that can help you with: 

• Project management

• Legal compliance

• Top-tier security

• Actionable insights

• Understanding labor costs

• Employee schedules and attendance tracking

• Dedicated enterprise mobile apps

• And more 

What does Hubstaff offer enterprise-level businesses? We help them achieve operational excellence while offering tools that address labor needs and work-life balance requirements.

Let’s take a look at our primary value-adds for companies at scale, operating across a single or multiple locations. 

Project management 

With Hubstaff, you can streamline enterprise time tracking and project management. Then, empower front-line managers to improve profit margins with budget allocation metrics they can sort by employee, project, or team.

Use our task management features to quickly prepare an Agile workflow matching your team's work. Once you have workflows established, you can build detailed and actionable time reports and understand a project's profitability at a glance.

For enterprise businesses with company-provided equipment, you can automatically configure company-owned devices to track employee activity with our corporate app.

Actionable insights 

Managers can use the Hubstaff Insights add-on to access industry-specific benchmarks for hours, productivity, and app usage. Then, compare that to how your team performs to gauge what areas need improvement.

Reduce headaches and micromanagement with transparency into project status and employee time. Managers can access a unified time view for individuals and teams right from the dashboard.

You can also gain insight into how much of your team’s time is spent in meetings or on less productive tasks so you can help them focus on critical priorities.

Compliance and security

We know security is top of mind for business. That’s why Hubstaff offers enterprise companies advanced compliance and security features. We also provide continuous compliance updates to meet evolving legal requirements. 

Hubstaff security features

• SOC 2 Type II

• Single sign-on

• MSI installer

• Data encryption in transit (https) and at rest

• Detailed audit and system logs

• Network and physical security

Hubstaff Compliance features

• GDPR Compliance

• HIPAA compliance

• Privacy Shield compliance

Read more about our security efforts here. 

For companies looking for extra protection, Hubstaff offers a data retention add-on for only $2 per user/month. This add-on extends data retention within Hubstaff from three to six years. Learn more about it and retention policies for each plan in our support pages.

Employee experience 

Hubstaff’s mission is to help businesses like yours create the best, most productive day of work for their employees every day.

Use the Hubstaff Insights add-on to fight burnout using key metrics into employee time. Hubstaff creates a quick snapshot of employee time spent so managers can use it to evaluate their team's health. Put employee engagement in the hands of your leaders so they can prioritize positivity alongside labor demand, employee availability, and customer demand requirements.

The real value-add of enterprise workforce management is in the employee satisfaction it can create. Businesses are rapidly discovering how vital employee happiness is and seeking ways to improve employee engagement.

Here’s where we’re currently at: Employers aren’t sure how productive their hybrid and remote team members are. This uncertainty is a huge problem, but employees fear it might lead to micromanagement. The right WFM tool can solve this problem. 

Reduce micromanagement with WFM tools: Workforce management provides organizations with the tools to manage teams without constant check-ins. With a dispersed and diverse modern workforce, businesses need tools to help them manage workforce management's intricacies. 

The right workforce management tools can revolutionize the way your team works. With a tool that can handle your day-to-day management, your team can spend more time on the stuff that matters.