How Small Businesses Can Free up Their Time with Workforce Management

Remember Fred and Barney’s punch clock at the gravel pit? Workforce Management (WFM) hasn’t been around for quite that long – but it may surprise you to learn it does go back over a century. It was in 1888 that Willard Bundy, a New York jeweller, invented the first mechanized time recorder controlled by a clock movement (called the Bundy Key Recorder) which revolutionized hand-written time sheets. Over a century later, WFM solutions have advanced by leaps and bounds, especially in the last decade.

Beyond the tracking of employee time, today the best solutions can help you save on labour costs, expedite your planning, simplify scheduling, and efficiently manage projects and tasks within your organization – all via a few clicks from a desktop, laptop or mobile device.

Here are the top five reasons a WFM solution can enhance your organization:

1. Improve operational efficiencies
   Some of the most common reasons SMBs fail are cash flow issues, uncontrolled growth and business inefficiencies. The right WFM solution will help to ensure your business operates at peak efficiency, and that you maximize the productive hours and specialized talents of your employees – so you remain operational for years to come.
2. Control logistics and day-to-day staffing needs
   With these modern workforce management solutions, you get a window into your projects and staff workloads like never before. You’ll instantly see if a project is running behind and requires more resources. By easily reviewing projects, you can then determine which workers to reassign to get a project back on course – and make it all happen seamlessly to keep your operation running smoothly.
3. Improve staff communications, morale and data flow
   When you give your employees easy access via a WFM platform to view their schedules, notify you of changes, and make vacation requests, all while displaying their benefits information and other pertinent data, you not only empower and engage them, but dramatically save time while improving the attitude and reliability of the entire organization for the better. With everyone participating in the accurate updating of timely information on a WFM solution, you’ll run a tighter and happier ship!
4. Improve compliance – and avoid costly penalties
   The best workforce management software allows you to track and monitor hiring, payroll and scheduling activities, alerting you to any occurrence that may put you at risk. This includes minimum age requirements, overtime scheduling and other concerns that may put you in danger of legal or compliance violations. By maximizing efficiencies and minimizing penalties and errors, your workforce management solution may quickly pay for itself many times over.
5. Save yourself time!
   Use your workforce management solution to ensure no-one –including you, the owner – wastes any more time on unnecessary administration. With the new cloud-based solutions, you can have a window into your organization from anywhere, real time. And that can bring you some much needed freedom as well as peace of mind!

But don’t just take our word for it – hear how Ellesmere X-Ray Associates were able to modernize and simplify their practice with a single solution that integrates payroll, time and attendance, as well as scheduling.