When it comes to workforce management (WFM), you have enough to do without added busy work. You’re mediating conflicts, managing expectations and reporting to executives — yet you’re still expected to create schedules and submit time-off requests for dozens (or hundreds!) of employees.
The only way you can do it all is by automating tasks that don’t require hands-on expertise. To help you determine the proper course of action, we’ll be answering these three questions:
- What is workforce management?
- What is team management software?
- How do I make them work for me?
Question 1: What is workforce management?
Workforce management is any process that maximizes the performance and competency of your company. Put simply, anything that keeps your organization on track can be considered workforce management. Executed well, workforce management gives every employee the tools and software they need to do their jobs, and it gives every manager the ability to measure how those employees are performing.
Workforce management includes:
- Recruiting
- Training
- Field service management
- Performance measurement
- HR & payroll
- Budgeting and forecasting
- Scheduling
- Data collection and analytics
While workforce management as a concept started mostly as scheduling and time management, today it’s focused more on integration, optimization and automation. That’s where team management software comes in.
Question 2: What is team management software?
One of the fastest ways to optimize workforce management is with software. Team management software is any tool that helps you plan, organize and manage resources.
Depending on the sophistication of the tool, team management software will:
- Track employee time by capturing every second, from any device, while monitoring overtime.
- Track expenses so you can assign the cost of materials or time to a client or project.
- Create schedules so you can plan projects while managing and monitoring labor.
- Manage costs by applying expenses before billing clients.
- Collect data you can use to more accurately predict job costs in the future.
Put together, team management software should help you control costs, allocate resources, control quality and make informed decisions.
Question 3: How do I use workforce management and team management software to my advantage?
This answer is simple: Find a solution that does both.
With team management software like Time Tracker, workforce management is built in.
Use Time Tracker to:
- Create and send out schedules in minutes.
- Submit employee time-off requests quickly and easily.
- Review, reject or approve employees’ hours and expenses prior to invoicing a client.
- Evaluate employee productivity.
- Track travel time down to the second.
- Run real-time reports to make sure your projects are on budget.
- Increase profitability with accurate job costing.
It really is that easy.
Try Time Tracker.
Improve your workforce management today. Try a free, 14-day trial before you commit.