Businesses have a lot of competing priorities: customer demands, a labor shortage, product and service creation, cash flow. No leadership team needs workforce management complexity added to the mix. Planning and tracking all your workforce data in spreadsheets or disparate systems, can lead to inaccuracy. Gaining visibility into worker availability, tracking hours worked, and accurately paying workers by wage regulations in their states can be overwhelming and complex. If not done correctly, it can lead to poor workforce planning, high overtime spending, compliance risks, and lack of organizational success.
By simplifying and automating management of employees — one of the business’ most expensive resources — leaders and teams are freed to focus on impactful projects while improving the customer and employee experience and ultimately growing the business.
Specifically, managers need a way to organize work schedules, provide a good employee experience, and make confident staffing decisions. In addition, employees need the right tools, at the right time, to manage their hours in a secure manner. Companies can get all of the above with a unified workforce management solution that includes a mobile app for digital time clocking, visual scheduling tools to help managers organize their teams, and a comprehensive wage rules engine to improve efficiency and accuracy around time tracking, scheduling, wage calculations, and analytics.
Features to consider in a workforce management solution:
Time Tracking. Time tracking at most organizations is done with outdated, disparate systems or worse, paper punch cards, that lead to timecard errors, increased payroll costs, and disgruntled employees. A workforce management solution with digital time tracking provides greater control, visibility, and flexibility for one of the business’ most valuable resources, its people.
Scheduling. Managers can spend hours every week planning out schedules and trying to juggle employee availability, hours worked, overtime hours accrued, location, and predicted demand. Traditional scheduling solutions don’t provide a complete picture — these tools are either manual and customized by each team or provide incomplete information. Both can lead to problems including understaffing or overstaffing, delayed schedule creation, unexpected absences and unfair scheduling — where certain employees receive more hours than others. For managers to confidently make scheduling decisions, they need a system that provides a complete picture of all available workers in one screen.
Wage Calculations. Growing businesses may employ different types of workers: hourly, contract, full time, gig. Managers must keep track of all these categories and the laws and wage regulations that apply to each. Organizations tracking this mix of categories with Excel spreadsheets or point systems that lack connectivity to payroll and finance data incur higher payroll costs, waste time — and increase the risk of noncompliance. A comprehensive workforce management solution provides a wage rules engine that automatically calculates wages, including overtime, based on business policies and state and federal regulations for all the workers you employ.
Analytics. Workforce insights are crucial to making smart, confident decisions around planning and organization. With Excel and point or niche workforce management systems, it takes time to access the needed data — if it’s even possible. Transferring information on labor costs, sales figures, and customer counts from your ERP and payroll systems to a disconnected workforce management tool takes time and can result in outdated or incorrect data. A unified system that connects workforce management processes with your ERP empowers managers to make decisions based on forecasted sales and labor cost percentages, tailored by store, warehouse, or regional goals and targets.
Employee Experience. Employees want the flexibility to make changes to their schedules without affecting the business or their positions. A workforce management solution needs to provide a no-hassle platform for employees to clock in and out; pick up, swap, or drop shifts; request schedule changes; and open up direct lines of communication to management and HR to address scheduling or timecard concerns. Ensuring employees feel supported to do their jobs efficiently and effectively helps retain top talent and improves operational efficiency for managers.
Complete, Unified, Mobile Workforce Management
NetSuite SuitePeople Workforce Management(opens in new tab) provides businesses with complete, unified, and mobile workforce management. Managers gain the ability to map out team schedules based on labor forecasting and other information, like overtime hours worked. Employees get digital time tracking to support them anywhere, anytime and a mobile workforce management app to pick up, drop, or reschedule shifts and connect with their managers on scheduling or timecard concerns. And finance will appreciate a complete wage rules engine that ensures every worker in the organization is paid correctly and on time.
Want to learn more about how NetSuite SuitePeople helps businesses increase the efficiency and accuracy of workforce management processes? Join the upcoming product demo Automate Workforce Management Processes(opens in new tab) webinar to understand how NetSuite optimizes staffing, gains visibility, & automates wage calculations.