What is workforce management?

10 of February, 2021

Workforce management is all the rage in the modern business world. It was first developed to improve performance levels in call centres, but is now part of every successful company’s plan. In this article, we explain what exactly is meant by workforce management and what strategies it entails.

What is meant by “workforce management”?

Workforce management (WFM) is a set of processes that an organisation uses in order to maximise the productivity and efficiency of its employees. It ensures that the company possesses all the necessary resources at any given moment, and that those are employed correctly in order to optimise the staff’s performance levels.

Having a good workforce management strategy comprises many benefits. It ensures that the company is neither overstaffed nor understaffed, and fights the various causes of low productivity at work. It is also about improving the employees’ work-life balance and thus reducing the employee absenteeism rate.

In a nutshell, workforce management optimises the organisation’s profitability by making sure that the right person with the right skills is assigned to the right position.

Is workforce management part of HR?

It would be more correct to say that HR is part of workforce management. Indeed, workforce management encompasses many tasks that are carried out by the HR team, for instance recruiting efforts and human resource management. But it also includes other activities such as field service management and budgeting.

What is the role of workforce management?

Workforce management encompasses various tasks that aim to maintain and increase the company’s performance levels. It involves:

• Human resource management is all about managing the employees and the people involved in the company;
• Field service management means keeping track of all the organisation’s resources that are located at the client’s property;
• Training management involves carrying out employee training to ensure that they acquire the skills best suited for the company;
• Employee performance management is about ensuring that the employees are productive enough to meet the business goals;
• Recruiting efforts include shortlisting, interviewing and selecting suitable candidates for job vacancies within the organisation;
• Budgeting efforts involve planning the allotting and spending of monetary resources for the company’s projects;
• Scheduling and forecasting efforts encompass the control and optimisation of resources in the organisation, so that staff deployment is in accordance with labour demands at any given time;
• Compliance tracking means making sure that the company adheres to all regulations and laws in order to avoid fines or lawsuits;
• Payroll administration makes it easier to manage payroll processes, for instance by automating the creation of payslips;
• Data collection and analytics include gathering workforce statistics and analysing them in order to provide ways of improvement and solutions to current problems.

What is good workforce management?

A good WFM strategy will ensure that all workforce-related activities are optimised according to the company’s resources and objectives. To achieve this goal, businesses usually use workforce management tools like a WFM software. This allows for the automation of most workforce management tasks, thus limiting the costs and time spent on workforce optimisation strategies. A WFM software is often integrated in HR applications like Sesame.