What is workforce management scheduling?

Workforce Management Scheduling: Definition, Features, and Benefits

What is workforce management scheduling

A Guide to Workforce Management Scheduling

In the current business climate optimizing your workforce is essential for staying effective and competitive. The most important aspect in optimizing your workforce is management scheduling. What is workforce management scheduling? This article will look at the importance of scheduling for workforce management as well as the difficulties associated with it, as well as foremost strategies to conquer these obstacles and develop an efficient scheduling process.

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What is workforce management scheduling?

What is workforce management scheduling? WFM scheduling or workforce management (WFM) scheduling is the process of making and monitoring employee work schedules in order to meet business’s operational needs and service levels of agreement. By using WFM planning, it is possible to maximize the utilization of your workforce and ensure that employees who are needed are on the job at the appropriate time to offer customers excellent service.

WFM software provides you with predictive analytics and integrates with other business tools to help you make more efficient decision-making regarding staffing, while traditional spreadsheets are heavily dependent on manual input and data analysis.

Types of scheduling in WFM

  • Automated scheduling: WFM software's capacity to create efficient and automated schedules for staff will allow you to improve the efficiency of your staffing. By resolving the issue of availability, demand and other requirements, WFM software gives you quick, accurate schedules.
  • Task-based scheduling: If your company is more focused on tasks and you plan your schedule to accomplish tasks, then task-based WFM scheduling will meet your requirements. These work sequences guarantee that a specific task is accomplished in a given time frame in order to meet operational requirements. Task-based scheduling allows for greater flexibility in scheduling your schedules as staffing is according to your workload requirements.
  • Real-time scheduling: As the day progresses, you may discover that the circumstances are changing the volume of tickets you receive and the capacity of your team fluctuates. Real-time scheduling makes sure you have enough workers to handle inflows based on your operational needs when they shift. By shifting employees around according to breaks, activities or working hours you ensure that work is completed in spite of the varying demands of each day.
  • Shift swapping or trading: The shift-swapping scheduling allows your employees to trade shifts or swap shifts in order in order to meet their demands. Businesses that require flexibility in scheduling can benefit from this type of scheduling.
  • Optimized shift scheduling: Creating plans that increase your employee's productivity and efficiency while also reducing the cost of labor is known as optimized shift schedule. It is the process of developing an efficient, systematic process that prioritizes the needs of both your company and your employees.

Benefits of Using a WFM Solution for Scheduling

WFM scheduling tools can reduce the cost of labor and improve efficiency by making sure that the appropriate people are in the right place at the correct time. Employers might also discover that this technology aids them in:

  • Create flexible schedules: Managers generally can assign shifts based on department, job, or location. They might be able to release the entire schedule that covers a certain date or time frame, or restrict it down to just one employee’s schedule or a single shift.

  • Manage scheduling changes with ease:  The collaborative features enable the design of schedules that satisfy the requirements of both the company and the employees. Managers are able to communicate new shifts to employees who may then request to cancel shifts, swap them, or ask a colleague to take over the shift. Certain timekeeping software also allows employees to indicate their availability prior to the time.
Benefits of Using a WFM Solution for Scheduling
  • Optimize labor resources: WFM scheduling software can make use of delivery schedules, sales data and occupancy statistics to forecast the needs of staff. By using these forecasts of labor, employers might be able to design schedules that reduce understaffing and overstaffing.

  • Maximize workforce productivity: The majority of managers use WFM scheduling to measure specific employee performance like how long it takes them to accomplish certain tasks, or those who provide the most quality of service or sales per hour. This method of focusing on employees may permit supervisors to fill jobs based on qualifications such as certifications, experience and qualifications.

  • Address complex scheduling needs: To address the complex needs of scheduling Without reliable information it can be difficult for big retailers that have thousands of locations to develop schedules that remain within their budget. But, those who are able to reduce just the smallest amount of inefficiency every week with WFM analysis and labor forecasts could see substantial savings.

  • Support regulatory compliance: Certain software for scheduling employees allow for the enforcement of guidelines within the software, which can help adhere to regulations. Employers, for instance, can establish minimum hours between shifts and maximum hours for each day or week.

Workforce Management Scheduling Challenges

The way people work is changing as is the way that organizations manage their scheduling. However, for the majority of businesses it’s not as simple as receiving a request, and then sending workers to complete their job. There are a variety of typical scheduling issues they have to face that include:

  • Poor labor forecasting: Lack of labor forecasting access to the correct data and insight to their workers, organizations have a difficult time accurately predicting future demand from customers and the requirements for staffing. In addition, manual tools and unconnected systems aren’t able to produce the reliable historical data needed to comprehend the financial and resource shortages, then employ staff in line with. Over-scheduling, overtime, and over-scheduling result in the expenditure of more labor (without making enough revenue) while under-scheduling can cause frustration, delays and early burnout, which negatively affect the customer and employee experience.

  • Lack of flexibility: Providing services to customers isn’t an unchangeable, rigid procedure; however the tools teams employ aren’t flexible enough to deal with changes. Employees get sick and customers leave at the last second, and the employee preferences change over the course of. The outdated, manual scheduling tools (e.g. Excel spreadsheets, web-based calendars, whiteboards, emails) aren’t sufficiently dynamic to keep pace with. Therefore, when a sudden shift in the schedule happens–such as the employee who is sick–it causes a major disruption in the entire process. Staff schedulers are rushed to find an appropriate replacement or have to end the appointment completely and this reduces productivity and the satisfaction of customers.

  • Poorly integrated software: A lot of businesses purchase several tools in the hopes of assisting their employees. However, if they do not communicate with one another they become an obstacle to employee efficiency and satisfaction, and makes it even more difficult to access the necessary data to make well-informed business decision-making. Furthermore, if employees use software that isn’t connected to their computers to view and change their schedules, and accomplish their work daily They’re probably wasting precious time searching for the data they require to provide their customers with the information they need. In Back office work, scheduling professionals are struggling to design fully-optimized and efficient schedules with no integrated software that provides real-time transparency into the workforce. Because a poor experience for employees with ineffective, dissimilar software may contribute to staff turnover, it’s an important issue that has serious (and expensive) effects.

  • Manual data entry: Sadly the manual entry of data within the scheduling process remains an unavoidable reality for numerous teams. Staff schedulers suffer from stress and fatigue from handling manual scheduling entries and changes as they try to balance the needs of different resources, and trying to determine the availability of resources. The company suffers too as manually entering data is prone to errors, slow and time-consuming. It also causes scheduling bottlenecks, which can slow the whole process. This impacts the employee’s happiness, productivity, as well as income in the form of the stress of last minute, less customers serviced, customer churn and inefficient idle time.

How to implement WFM scheduling?

The implementation of WFM scheduling requires careful planning and coordination as well as the appropriate tools and technology. This is a step-by-step guideline to put WFM schedules into action:

  • Analyze workforce data: Collect the historical data on the volume of calls, trends in demand and measures of performance for employees. Examine the data to identify periods of peak activity, seasonal fluctuations and the need for staffing. For instance, after looking at data on calls from the past six months, it is possible to find days with the most busy calls.

  • Define scheduling parameters and policies: Set guidelines for breaks as well as shift lengths and conformity with labor laws. Develop scheduling criteria based on the preferences of employees, their abilities and availability. For instance, a beauty store has the minimum shift time at four hours and allows employees the opportunity to rest for 20 minutes after 3 hours.

  • Create a schedule: The next step is to construct schedules that examine the workforce and anticipate the demand. This involves assigning employees to specific shifts, while taking into consideration their availability, abilities, preferences, as well as the laws governing labor. It’s crucial to keep in mind that the schedules should be in line with the company’s goals to promote work-life balance and employee engagement.

  • Monitor and adjust: It’s essential to examine your schedules and make any necessary adjustments frequently. Here’s what you need to do review your schedule frequently:

    • Review key performance metrics, such as service levels, agent utilization rates resolution time, staff compliance, and satisfaction of the consumer to determine the efficiency of the schedules.

    • Find gaps and inefficiencies to adjust schedules to increase performance swiftly.

In addition to these steps, it is recommended to employ best practices for scheduling your workforce to improve procedures and ensure long-term sustainable workforce management.

Frequently Asked Questions

The purpose of scheduling work is to efficiently distribute workers to meet business requirements while maximizing productivity, minimizing expenses while ensuring satisfaction for employees. It is about the balance of staffing levels, skills demands, and preferences of employees to ensure a smooth operation and ensure that there is no over- or under-staffing.

Planning for workforce management ensures that your company has the appropriate quantity of highly skilled personnel at the correct time to satisfy the demands of business. It involves predicting the demand for labor, making efficient schedules, monitoring performance and keeping in line with labor law, usually employing technology and analytics to improve workforce management and lower expenses.

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