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Workforce management is a data-driven collection of processes designed to optimize employee productivity, staffing efficiency, and overall business performance.
As workforces evolve — with remote teams, automation, and new performance technologies — organizations need accurate workforce analytics to plan, measure, and adapt effectively.
This article explains what workforce management is, how to implement it, and how data-based insights can drive stronger performance and better workforce decisions.
Workforce management aims to improve company performance by helping employees become more productive.
The success of a business depends on the employee experience. Making sure your team members have a good time and are happy at work should be a top priority. When the right people with the right skills are on the right team, the company benefits— and workforce analytics helps measure and sustain that alignment.
Deloitte research shows that companies in the top quartile for employee experience are usually 25% more profitable than their competitors in the bottom quartile. Strong workforce management practices create measurable gains in productivity, profitability, and retention.
Implementing a workforce management process can take a lot of work. When done right, it can have a big effect on your company's bottom line and service levels — especially when supported by accurate workforce analytics and reporting.
WFM can help organizations save money by cutting labor costs and business expenses (like office space) while increasing employee engagement and productivity.
The following tips will make it easier to put WFM into place.
It's challenging to manage the unknown.
Review the current workload of the business to identify staffing needs. A workforce management solution can provide real-time analytics and reports to identify these patterns and track workload trends over time.
An audit will help identify problems with current processes, like when a department is spending too much through overstaffing or because it has too few team members.
Using full-time equivalent (or FTE) calculations, an organization can accurately predict how many people it will need to hire.
FTE will help you understand how many hours of work an organization requires to complete all its tasks. Then, managers divide that number by the number of hours in a full-time work week to figure out how many full-time team members are needed.
Integrating workforce analytics into this process allows teams to forecast staffing levels based on historical data and performance trends, improving accuracy over time.
New projects that start on a smaller scale can use the same process. Knowing how many people you need for a project helps calculate the labor costs budget accurately for future projects.
A well-thought-out staff schedule ensures that the organization meets goals and that the right people are retained for projects.
Workloads, staffing, and resources can frequently change, making staff scheduling difficult. Employees get sick and emergencies can happen, but it's easier to deal with the unexpected if you have an excellent staff schedule.
Workforce analytics tools can help visualize capacity, forecast scheduling conflicts, and ensure coverage aligns with demand patterns.
Consider a solution that uses automation to simplify your staff scheduling. Automatic shift and schedule reminders, idle time monitoring, and built-in invoicing will allow you to work on your bottom line instead of repetitive administrative tasks.
Managers should pay attention to and learn about their employee's combined skill sets to build productive teams that enjoy working together. For a workforce management process to work well, you need always be learning about your staff.
Using workforce analytics to track skills, workloads, and performance trends can help ensure each team member is assigned to tasks that match their strengths and capacity.
After making a strategic staff schedule, ensure that the team members' skills match the job's needs. Provide complete instructions and information so projects finish on time.
Common scheduling mistakes include giving employees too much to do in a single shift or giving team members jobs they haven't trained for, leading to confusion and frustration.
It will help if you start by figuring out which tasks have the most significant effect on productivity.
Use workforce analytics dashboards or productivity reports to measure task efficiency, identify bottlenecks, and monitor improvement over time.
Changing workflows, automating tasks, or holding time management workshops are all ways you can begin to optimize your process.
The process will improve if the right team members are empowered to foster change. Make sure team members have a voice and open feedback opportunities.
Monitoring employee productivity is a key part of effective workforce management. Choosing the right metrics and analytics tools ensures you’re tracking the data that truly reflects performance.
To monitor employee performance, start by tracking:
Tasks completed
Time worked
Quality of work
Stress levels and well-being
Employee morale
Employee engagement
Over time, WFM's set of processes will use historical data to measure success, highlight trends, and anticipate problems.
A properly executed workforce management process allows your organization to hit critical milestones and identify opportunities for improvement.
Monitoring these accomplishments is a crucial part of improving the process of workforce management.
Hubstaff workforce management solutions include scheduling employees, keeping track of payroll, keeping track of invoices, and managing tasks. Check out Hubstaff today. 14 days for free.
By implementing a workforce management process, organizations can identify improvements in many areas — and use workforce analytics to measure those results over time.
Key areas of impact include:
Labor and operational costs
Quality of work
Legal compliance of hours worked
Customer satisfaction
Employee experience
Now let's talk about how to optimize for these improvements.
One of the primary benefits of workforce management is lower labor costs.
Workforce analytics dashboards can highlight inefficiencies by comparing scheduled hours, worked hours, and project costs — helping reduce unnecessary labor expenses.
An effective workforce management process also leads to high-quality work.
Organizations should ensure that their employees are well-trained and are working as efficiently as possible. The right people must do the right jobs. As a result, team members create a positive customer experience.
Tracking quality metrics and employee output through analytics provides visibility into which teams or processes drive the best results.
Workforce management can also help organizations comply with employment and HR legal requirements. Organizations can track how many hours their employees work using WFM software solutions and keep the organization in compliance with labor laws.
Analytics tools make it easier to audit time data and ensure compliance with labor laws by providing transparent, verifiable records of employee hours.
The benefits of a well-run workforce management process lead to increased customer satisfaction.
When a business optimizes its staffing levels and saves money on labor costs, it can pass these savings on to the customer.
When team members are happy, they are more likely to be motivated to do good work and enhance the customer experience.
In the last few years, one of the most significant changes in workforce management has been the move towards improving employee satisfaction.
Pay more attention to your employees. Get team members more involved and make them feel like they’re integral to the business.
Giving your employees the right apps to do their jobs creates a positive employee experience. Team members will be able to perform at a higher level, leading to higher employee engagement.
Research shows good employee experiences make team members 16 times more engaged and eight times more likely to stay at a company.
Workforce management is crucial in the call center and contact center industries.
Forecasts help call centers estimate weekly call volume. This type of forecasting requires a system that collects SMS, chat, and voice data.
Manual spreadsheets require a lot of historical data to predict call center staffing needs. The call center could sort this data and display it on a dashboard with the right WFM software solution.
Good workforce management includes caring for people who work from home, like those who had to leave the office because of the pandemic and work remotely.
A sound workforce management system gives them the flexibility and speed they need to move their employees to a work-from-home structure.
As the workforce changes, so must your software and strategies for managing the workforce.
Building and implementing a WFM process from scratch using only spreadsheets and calendars is not a good idea. It's incredibly time-consuming and it involves an unnecessary amount of effort.
A modern WFM solution should provide clear analytics, accurate time data, and real-time visibility into team performance. The goal is to simplify administration while improving decision-making.
Look for features that integrate time tracking, productivity insights, and forecasting dashboards, helping leaders understand how work happens and where to optimize.
These features include:
Time tracking
Productivity monitoring
Project budgeting and workload analytics
Field service tools such as geofencing and location-based tracking
Hubstaff’s time tracking platform forms the foundation for its workforce analytics capabilities. By accurately capturing when and how work happens, Hubstaff enables teams to transform time data into meaningful insights about productivity and performance.
These insights help organizations understand trends, plan staffing more effectively, and evaluate results with real metrics.
With integrated features for time tracking, productivity monitoring, project budgeting, and workforce reporting, Hubstaff connects everyday work data to higher-level business decisions — giving teams clarity and confidence in how they operate.
Hubstaff gives you free access to its solution for 14 days, so you can test our platform and see what works best for your business. It's a great way to make running your company and teams a breeze.
Increase employee and customer satisfaction with time tracking, payroll solutions, and project management features.