In today's competitive world, a business needs every advantage it can get to stay afloat and even more so if it wishes to thrive. One way to accomplish this is to increase efficiency in all aspects of a company's operations. When running a business with dozens, hundreds or thousands of employees, managing and coordinating all of those workers is a major undertaking that requires serious thought in terms of the systems and tools used. There are the basic matters of scheduling workers, monitoring attendance, managing absences, tracking work hours, coordinating tasks and activities and the various systems and technologies for accomplishing all of this. These aspects of coordinating employees fall under the heading of what's known as workforce management, and the efficiency with which it's accomplished can be greatly increased with software devoted to this purpose.
What Is Workforce Management Software?
Basically, this type of software encompasses any system of programs or apps that help a business manage their staff more efficiently. As alluded to in the previous section, this software automates many of the aspects of coordinating your work force such as scheduling, handling absences, tracking tasks and progress on projects as well as overall work hours. There are hundreds of workforce management programs on the market serving companies with work forces ranging from a couple dozen employees up to large corporations with tens of thousands of workers. The more workers a company has, the more important it is to have the centralized, efficient management of these types of tasks that such software provides. It is basically the digital replacement of old-style employee management systems of paper schedules and attendance tracking as well as time clocks and punch cards.
What Are the Benefits of Workforce Management Software?
The biggest benefit of workforce management software to your company's operations is that everything related to employee scheduling and activities is all in one place. There's no more uncertainty about who said what as far as an employee claiming they were supposed to be off on a given day and that someone else who was supposed to take their shift didn't show up. All of this is entered into the software where every employee knows to look for their scheduling information. It also makes it easier for you, as a manager, to see at a glance how many people there are for a given shift and whether you can give time off to someone requesting it without being shorthanded. Such software enables managers and their workers to make better use of their time and decreases the chances for errors in scheduling and payroll. This translates into your workforce being able to spend more of their time producing the company's products or selling its services, which is what increases the company's bottom line as quickly as possible.
Popular Workforce Management Software
There are many different workforce management programs on the market. As with any software genre, however, there are some that are more commonly used or generally considered to be more advanced and stick out from the crowd. Below are three fairly popular programs for helping businesses stay on top of their workers.
- Infor Workforce Management Software – Their software brings all the functionality one would expect and then adds to this. One impressive addition to its already replete feature set is industry specialization. Infor realizes that companies in different industries have different employee management needs, so they've customized their software for industrial manufacturing, retail, hospitality, public sector and automotive just to name a few. It also has extensive integration capabilities with other programs and platforms to increase its capabilities even further.
- ADP WorkforceNow – This software gives managers data-driven insights into their workforce that help them make better decisions. A fully cloud-based program, it comes with features that HR professionals love while also being highly customizable, so it can serve your specific needs better. This customization includes the availability of numerous add-ons that provide advanced features such as multi-currency tracking, invoice auditing and custom reports.
- Paycor Perform – This cloud-based software is used by over 30,000 companies to track hours, attendance, payroll, taxes and even recruiting and hiring. It basically puts all aspects of a company's human resource department at the fingertips of managers who need specific information quickly, and they can access it from a desktop or mobile device.
