If there’s one aspect of leadership all organizations need to get right, it’s workforce management. How well you manage your people directly impacts all kinds of outcomes, from employee satisfaction to financial performance.
However, many organizations face significant challenges in this area. Overwork or micromanage employees, and you’ll end up with disengagement. But go too far in the other direction and you risk missing important goals.
And that’s just one of numerous pitfalls to avoid.
At ActivTrak, we’ve seen numerous workforce management scenarios play out at the 9,500+ organizations that use our people analytics software — and we’ve learned important lessons about what it takes to get it right. We decided to compile our findings into a quick, easy-to-follow guide.
In this article, we explore six of the most common challenges, along with practical strategies for addressing them — all based on real-world customer experiences.
1. Capacity planning
Proper capacity management ensures you always have the right people in the right roles. However, many business leaders struggle to get this right. That’s because many still view workforce planning through the lens of customer expectations: When demand for your products or services goes up, the theory goes, it’s time to hire more employees. If it dips, you downsize.
This simple approach isn’t necessarily wrong. But it does fail to factor in future demands and the company’s long-term vision.
Proper capacity planning goes beyond hiring, downsizing or even managing employee schedules. To optimize your headcount, you need to monitor productivity, ensure workloads are properly distributed and understand who's ready to take on additional work or more advanced roles. In other words: You have to determine how much work your current employees can do first, before making any significant changes to your overall workforce. The only problem? Many organizations lack the insights necessary to make these data-driven decisions.
The Solution: Workforce Capacity Planning Software
ActivTrak’s workforce planning software was purpose-built to simplify capacity planning. It automatically collects and analyzes day-to-day work behaviors to show you when employees are overextended or underworked. Many organizations rely on this data to make accurate staffing decisions and redistribute work as needed.
2. SaaS management
While it’s not the first place managers think to look, SaaS apps can have a big impact on your bottom line. That’s because most organizations pay for dozens — sometimes hundreds — of tools and licenses employees rarely use. Most IT and finance teams can’t see all the apps a workforce uses, let alone who uses them or how often. This leads to a lot of wasted money.
The Solution: SaaS Management Software
ActivTrak’s SaaS management software tracks app use across your workforce to show you who’s using what, and when. The software utilization reports show you which apps provide ROI and which ones you can safely get rid of. In fact, the data in these reports is so accurate many organizations rely on them to regularly assess and reduce SaaS costs.
3. Time tracking
As more organizations embrace remote and hybrid work, it’s hard to know how employees spend their time. In fact, gaining visibility into work is the number one challenge organizations face with hybrid teams. Managers often can’t tell if people overwork, underwork or have the right amount of responsibilities.
Time tracking helps with this. Once you know how your employees spend their work hours, it’s easier to identify and eliminate activities that hurt productivity — whether it’s costly ineffective meetings or lengthy commutes.
The only problem? Most time-tracking tools require manual entry. That means you have to rely on employees to self-report how many hours they spend on different tasks and projects. This often results in inaccurate estimates and best guesses, especially if you permit employees to wait until the end of each week to submit their time tracking reports.
The Solution: User Activity Monitoring Software
ActivTrak’s free time tracking tool automatically analyzes employee activity to generate reports for you. And because ActivTrak uses employee activity monitoring to continuously log work activity, you get an accurate snapshot of how people spend their time each week — no manual entries needed.
4. Disengagement
Confident your employees are engaged at work? You might want to reconsider that assumption. According to Gallup, only a third of U.S. employees are engaged. The rest are disengaged or, even worse, actively disengaged.
Left undetected and unaddressed, disengaged employees cause a lot of damage. They not only perform the bare minimum but also negatively impact broader workplace productivity and morale.
But unfortunately, disengaged employees aren’t always easy to spot. They might be good at their jobs but have no interest in the company’s mission. Or they might act happy when interacting with managers but complain to colleagues. This makes it very difficult to know when someone is burned out or resorting to quiet quitting.
The Solution: Employee Engagement Software
Unlike employee feedback and survey solutions, ActivTrak helps you spot the signs of disengagement with real-time employee activity data. You'll get detailed weekly reports on workload balance, work hours, focus time and more. Together, this employee engagement data makes it easy to see when someone is at risk of disengagement or already disengaged.
5. Security and Compliance
From labor laws and regulations to industry standards, the list of requirements business leaders face seems to get longer every year. And operational compliance is not something to take lightly. Overlooking just one requirement increases your risk of fines, penalties, lawsuits and legal disputes. Just one mistake can cost you millions and damage your reputation in an instant.
But even the most robust, up-to-date policies won’t do you any good if people don’t follow them. And if your employees work remotely, how do you ensure they’re following the rules?
The Solution: Employee Monitoring Software
Your ability to monitor employee activities is critical when it comes to protecting company data and ensuring compliance with your policies. That’s why ActivTrak’s employee monitoring software is packed with features to help you ensure compliance. You can spot unusual or suspicious activity as it occurs, and even create custom alerts based on your specific company policies.
6. Productivity Measurement
Next to disengagement and compliance, decreased productivity is one of the most difficult pitfalls to detect. Which is a problem, since productivity determines how efficiently your organization produces goods and services. But traditional methods for calculating productivity are complex.
The Solution: Productivity Measurement and Management Software
ActivTrak’s productivity management software automatically collects employee activity data to show you how, when and where people are most productive. Rather than using manual calculations, you can see exactly how productivity changes over time — and which factors influence it.
7. Flexible Employee Schedules
The benefits of flexible work cannot be overstated. It decreases stress, lowers the risk of burnout and boosts productivity. But while there are plenty of flexible work options to choose from, not every arrangement will work for every employee or team. Are your people more productive when they’re fully remote, or do they need some time to collaborate in person? Does the 4-day workweek help or hurt productivity? Should you create flex schedules or embrace results-only work? Without data, it’s difficult to know.
The Solution: Hybrid and Remote Workforce Management Software
ActivTrak’s workforce management software comes with location insights that show you not only where people work, but where they work best. Thousands of companies rely on it to understand how, where and when their employees are most productive — and to create flexible work policies based on objective data.
Overcome your workforce management challenges with ActivTrak
Let’s face it: As a manager, you have a tough job. After all, you’re accountable for all kinds of activities that are out of your control — how people spend their time at work, which policies they choose to follow, what apps they decide to use and so much more.
If only there were a way to measure it all.
With ActivTrak, there is. Whether you’re new to leadership or have been overseeing teams for years, our workforce analytics software eases the pain across all kinds of management processes. In fact, you can use one platform to tackle every challenge mentioned above — simply by viewing your ActivTrak dashboards. Get detailed insights on everything from productivity trends to capacity reports to SaaS app usage. All gathered from actual employee activities.
Sign up for your free account to get started today. And when you’re ready, get a demo to meet with a workforce management expert for more tips.
