What is Workforce Management?
Within your store operations, your workers are at the very core. Every customer interaction depends on them. In today’s workforce, it has been proven that workers expect more from their managers than they have in the past. This can range from greater work-life balance, to more say on how they contribute to day-to-day operations. In addition to your workers, store managers are also being challenged to address these new demands along with ensuring to manager and stay compliant with ever-evolving labor laws, regulations, union rules and internal policies. Given these new challenges, you should consider implementing an intelligent workforce management software solution for your retail operations.
What is Workforce Management?
At a basic level, workforce management solution is one that enables you to simplify retail complexity. In other words, this technology helps speed up your processes while eliminating inefficiencies. When this software is in the hands of your managers, it enables them to optimize schedules in order to spend more time training and assisting front-line associates and interacting with customers. In addition, with these optimized schedules, your managers will be able to account for their workers’ schedules and improve employee satisfaction and retention for their store. With a workforce management software, the intuitive mobile interface mobile user interface allows your employees an easy-to-use method to share their availability that will in turn, empower your store managers to see what resources they have and distribute tasks appropriately.
A workforce management software also ensures your store operations stay compliant with the ever-evolving labor laws and keep your labor costs low. When configured correctly, this solution can automatically adjust schedules in response to these labor laws being created and changed. Internally, tracking compliance with the policies can bring a challenge without real-time visibility and actionable notifications. Time and attendance solutions help identify noncompliance issues in real-time that enables management to proactively respond to potential violations to avoid fines and penalties. Not only can you avoid unnecessary costs for your store through potential violations, but you will also be enabled to forecast future demand needs from your customers to eliminate unneeded labor spend. This solution can more accurately predict factors impacting sales and customer demands can come with advanced algorithms that automatically account for variables such as store type, size, departments, workers’ roles and regulatory laws.
Why is Workforce Management Important?
When given real-time data and insight into your store operations, the impact your managers and store associates can have in the success of your business.
Plan for Demand
Match labor forecasts to customer demand, ensuring you have the right front-line teams at the right place at the right time to serve customers. Save time and eliminate guesswork and the need to manual schedule creation.
Optimize Labor Spend
Control labor spending with advanced budgeting and reporting. Identify trends, eliminate excess overtime and drive continuous improvement across your organization.
Provide Schedule Flexibility
Dynamically adjust schedules to fill labor gaps and share resources between locations. Multi-site scheduling capabilities enable employees to select shifts and locations that meet their needs.
Improve Employee Satisfaction and Engagement
Offer workers greater control over their shifts to boost morale and improve retention. Reduce scheduling errors with optimized schedules on a mobile-first platform that accounts for employee preferences for when, how much and where they need to work.
Stay Compliant
Ensure compliance and prevent fines with proactive tracking and highly configurable labor models. Ensure federal, state and local labor laws, union rules and internal processes are followed.
Make Smarter Decisions
Generate insightful exception reports to highlight areas needing attention. Automatically uncover opportunities to reduce waste and staffing inefficiencies.