Workforce Management Software Features
Labor forecasting – Workforce management solutions help companies predict the number and types of employees necessary to meet anticipated demand and control labor costs.
Shift scheduling – Companies can use WFM solutions to plan employee work shifts according to availability, as well as provide notifications to employees when they are scheduled.
Time & attendance management – Workforce management tools let employees track the hours they have worked through integrations with time tracking products or built-in time tracking features.
Absence & leave management – With workforce management solutions, employees can submit paid time off (PTO) or leave of absence requests that managers can approve or deny within the platform.
Skills management – WFM solutions let businesses organize, sort, and view employees based on skills and qualifications in order to make smarter scheduling decisions.
Succession management – With WFM solutions, businesses can identify high-performing employees with potential to be promoted with minimal development.
Workforce analytics – Workforce management tools are designed to help analyze employee data and develop a baseline for evaluating and optimizing workforce management.
Self-service capabilities – Workforce management solutions provide employee self-service portals through which they can view their schedules, submit PTO requests, configure work availability and preferences, and self-schedule from available work times.
Mobile shift scheduling – Many workforce management tools offer mobile applications or mobile-optimized websites that provide mobile workforce management solutions. Many of these mobile applications facilitate communication between employees and managers around shift scheduling. Managers and employees can use WFM solutions to create or claim available work shifts and receive notifications on their mobile devices. Features such as leave and absence management, as well as time and attendance tracking features, are often included in mobile applications, allowing managers to approve or deny employee requests on the go.
Team communication – WFM solutions provide messaging solutions for team members or managers through built-in text or emailing functions and communicate scheduling or leave requests. Another great function of many workforce management tools is communication between management and employees. If you are managing a team, it can be easy to lose track of individual correspondences with each employee. Many workforce management tools allow you to communicate with employees inside the tool. This way you can make changes to a schedule and notify an employee all in the same tool.
Customization – Workforce management software allows administrators to customize the solution to accommodate their unique processes. This includes the ability to create custom objects, fields, rules, calculations, and views.
Cloud-based solutions – Cloud-based workforce management software lets companies and employees access the software anywhere.
Integrated application programming interface (APIs) – WFM solutions provide specifications for how the application communicates with other software. APIs typically enable integration of data, logic, and objects with other software applications.
Dashboards – WFM software provides an easy-to-read, often single-page, real-time user interface, showing a graphical presentation of the current status and historical trends of an organization’s key performance indicators (KPIs) to enable instantaneous and informed decisions to be made at a glance.
Reporting – Workforce management systems enable reporting of all data contained within the system. Typically contains standard reports as well as the ability to create ad-hoc reports.
Analytics – An emerging area of importance in workforce management tools is the ability to provide actionable workforce analytics about people in the workplace. The data collected by workforce management software includes information such as employee skills and time attendance, which can be used to uncover and report on insights into workforce efficiencies. Companies are also able to identify the likelihood of employee success and predict the need for certain skill sets.
Additional Workforce Management Software Features
Additional features that some workforce management solutions may offer include succession and contingency planning, as well as compliance and risk management.
