The Key Importance of Workforce Management for Organizations
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Unless yours is a one-man organization, you achieve your organizational
goals, to a smaller or greater degree, through a workforce. If that workforce is
not productive, the efficiency of goals-achievement suffers and costs of
achievement go up.
To some extent, productivity can be ensured through use of fear. However, in
modern organizations operating in a competitive environment, fear is becoming
less and less effective. Workers have increasing choices for selecting their
employers.
This is particularly true of IT workforce with the specific kind of skills
that your organization needs. You have not only to find people with the right
skills but you also have to retain them. Both productivity and customer service
can improve significantly if you are able to maintain a stable workforce.
It is in this context that workforce management has become a key management
area these days.
What Is Workforce Management?
Workforce management seeks to develop a workforce consisting of happy and
productive workers through:
- Good payroll and benefits packages and administration
- Best HR practices that help recruit and retain the right kind of workers
with the right set of skills
- Training and developing the workers into a team with the right mix of
skills and fitting in with the organizational culture
- Monitoring performance and rewarding good performers
- Forecasting requirements and developing career and succession plans to
meet the requirements
While the above is the generally accepted view of workforce management, newer
and specialized definitions have also developed. These specialized kinds of
workforce management cater to the emerging needs of service organizations and
call centers.
Workforce management software can help service organizations through:
- Forecasting work orders
- Planning the number of skills of technicians needed to service these work
orders
- Planning the tools and vehicles needed for the servicing
- Scheduling the workers, tools and vehicles in an optimal manner using
predefined rules
- Assigning work orders to particular technicians in each area
For call centers, workforce management software can:
- Forecast call volumes throughout the day
- Plan shifts in a customized manner
- Schedules workers by skills and experience
- Forecast seasonal changes in volumes
- Monitor performance
Workforce Management Contribution to Bottom Line
The diversity of skill sets required in modern IT departments make it
critical that these be assessed and managed properly. Otherwise, the IT
department would rather be a drag on the resources of the organization instead
of being a contributor to its bottom line. There would be an imbalance in the
demands and availability of specific IT skills.
Service organizations need to optimize the contribution of their workforce
through scheduling and routing of their field service personnel. This scheduling
is a complex exercise that needs to consider the skills, nearness to the service
sites, availability of needed parts and other factors. It would need specialist
workforce management software to handle this complexity in a reasonably
satisfactory manner.
Conclusion
A workforce with right skill sets and experience can make a real contribution
to achieving organizational objectives. With an increasingly competitive
marketplace for skilled workers, only a highly effective workforce management
could help organizations hire, develop and keep their skilled workforce.
Workforce management software can help IT and service organizations optimize
worker satisfaction and performance.
We will look at different aspects of workforce management in a series of
articles.
Lucy Caudle, Marketing at SMART, writes about the benefits of
Workforce-Management-Overview.
