A Workforce Management department is responsible for the effective allocation and utilization of employees. WFM’s expertise includes forecasting labor requirements, creating and managing staffing plans to accomplish the organization’s strategy and revenue objectives. WFM has primarily served the contact center, but they can apply those same tasks and processes across the organization. Outside the contact center, Workforce Management departments enable organizations to gain insights into critical business metrics such as time to revenue, maximizing client billables, increased margins, employee productivity, resource planning, and lower operational cost.
What Is Workforce Management?
Workforce management is an integrated set of processes that a company uses to optimize the productivity of its employees. WFM involves effectively forecasting labor requirements and creating and managing staff schedules to deliver the objectives of client contracts. The potential benefits of workforce management are
- Improved workforce productivity
- Better labor planning
- Lower operational costs
- Efficient time and attendance tracking
- Increased client satisfaction
- Higher margins
- Maximizing client billable opportunities
- Increased employee satisfaction
Even more, when you take Workforce Management out of the contact center and into the rest of the organization, you increase efficiencies and reduce waste. Take the processes WFM brings to the contact center to all client touchpoints, so you can maximize client billables, increase margin, and optimize employee productivity.
Why Workforce Management Matters Outside the Contact Center
The workforce management department is responsible for allocating and utilizing employees to meet an organization’s output requirements. They use a set of processes that lower operational costs and maximize efficiency. But, unfortunately, WFM departments are relegated to the contact center. Isn’t it ironic that the same principles to manage the efficiency of the lowest-paid employees don’t apply to the higher-paid knowledge workforce departments?
Instead, bring Workforce Management outside the contact center and to all departments with client touchpoints. As a result, the organization can dramatically improve its operational efficiency. In addition, WFM enables the organization to maximize client billables by reducing revenue leakage.
What Are the Benefits of a WFM Department?
A proper Workforce Management department improves productivity, resource planning, lower operating costs, higher margins, efficiencies, and maximizes contract values. Additionally, a Workforce Management department brings the following benefits:
- Improved payroll efficiency
- Improved job costing
- Better insight into workforce engagement, attendance, and productivity
- Increased training and coaching plans
- Improved processes to maximize performance
- Reduced labor cost waste
- Improved access to workforce-related data to improve HR productivity
- Increased operational agility by allocating the right people with the right skills at the right time to meet strategic objectives
- Improved employee morale
- More informed manager to employee communication
Workforce Management Processes
A comprehensive Workforce Management department deploys a range of activities that maximize revenue opportunities, increase profit margins, and improve productivity at the individual, departmental, and organizational levels.
- Forecasting – forecasting is knowing how many employees are needed to fulfill a client contract. But, even more, is the skills required of those employees. What contracts are ending that might free up resources? Can those resources transition to another contract, or would they need additional training? As a result, you can improve your headcount budget and reduce recruitment costs.
- Time and Attendance – Workforce Management helps all departments identify attendance patterns to manage better planned and unplanned absences or leaves. WFM analyzes the data to pinpoints gaps in coverage, improved payroll accuracy, job costing, and chronic absenteeism. As a result, the organization can identify and correct any revenue leakage.
- Employee performance management – WFM improves the organization’s understanding of employee engagement by focusing on the drivers of employee productivity. As a result of understanding how individual employees work helps the organization reward employees who exceed. Even more, they help align rewards to the behaviors the organization values the most.
- Staff allocation – Allocating resources to client contracts is a significant value a Workforce Management department can bring. Having too much or too few support resources servicing your client causes satisfaction issues for the employee and client alike. Additionally, too many support resources reduce the margins and cause revenue leakage. Therefore bringing Workforce Management into all client-facing teams improves staffing, increases efficiency, and reduces revenue leakage.
- Succession planning – Workforce Management departments are charged with ensuring adequate staffing levels across the organization. However, improper staffing creates revenue leakage and lower margins, not to mention potential employee burnout. Therefore, involving WFM in the succession planning process allows for improved resource planning to protect your client contracts and billables.
WFM Reduces Non-Billable Expenses
Understaffing and overstaffing create revenue leakage and reduced client-billable activities. Deploying WFM across your organization reduces administrative costs by identifying and allocating resources in an optimum way. Additionally, with WFM involved, you right-size the headcount requirements across all customer touchpoints. As a result, you lower costs, increase margins and maximize billable opportunities.
A well-designed Workforce Management department can implement a set of comprehensive tools and processes across the organization. Keeping WFM relegated to the contact center is wasting the value they can bring. Tackling the challenges of maximizing revenue opportunities and reducing revenue leakage can be addressed by bringing Workforce Management out of the contact center and into the rest of the business.
Last updated on September 5th, 2021 at 10:27 am
