When every minute counts, having an efficient workforce management tool is important for organizations of all sizes. The right tool empowers you to streamline operations, improve productivity and enhance employee satisfaction. But not all workforce management tools are created equal.
Learn about the must-have features of workforce management software when comparing options.
What are workforce management tools?
Workforce management tools include a wide range of software applications and platforms designed to streamline and automate various workforce-related tasks. These tools also deliver a broad spectrum of functionalities like scheduling and time tracking, compliance and risk management and employee self-service options. When used effectively, they provide organizations with real-time insights, streamline processes and optimize resources.
Benefits of using a workforce management tool
Workforce management software provides a number of benefits for teams, managers, individual contributors and the whole organization.
- Track productivity: See when, where and how work gets done to determine the best policies and processes for your teams.
- See availability: Balance workloads and create schedules more effectively with a broad overview of when employees are available or when they’re overworked or underutilized.
- Identify areas for improvement: Find common distractions and track daily progress toward goals or uncover opportunities to provide training.
- Streamline workflows and processes: Automate critical processes or repetitive tasks to free employees to focus on important work, or streamline processes by removing bottlenecks.
- Improve employee well-being: Quickly identify signs of overwork or burnout and empower employees to schedule time and tasks efficiently based on the different ways they work and manage well-being best.
- Enhance cybersecurity: Equip IT and data security teams with tools to stop possible breaches and ensure confidential information stays private.
- Track policy compliance: Ensure employees are following your policy when using company equipment or technology.
- Improve communication: Empower managers to have meaningful conversations around employee productivity solutions with real-time insight into how employees spend their time.
- Save money: Quickly spot resource misallocation to reduce costs, whether it’s time, equipment or even office space.
- Build trust: Provide transparency between employees and managers by demonstrating everyone is on the same page and working toward the same goals.
12 must-have features of an effective workforce management tool
Your organization will have specific needs for a workforce management tool depending on your goals, industry and workforce. To ensure maximum efficiency and effectiveness, watch for these key features.
1. Capacity planning
Understanding how much work people are available to do is crucial for determining employee schedules and future planning. Your workforce management system should empower you to right-size your headcount by bringing on new full-time employees or reassigning team members.
Look for a tool designed to uncover untapped labor capacity caused by underutilized employees and unbalanced workloads, allowing you to make adjustments so everyone’s doing the same amount of work. A tool with workforce capacity planning capabilities also helps you analyze the impact of changes like a reduction in force or reorganization so you can better support employees and reduce attrition.
2. Productivity tracking
It’s important to see how employees get work done and what influences performance. Productivity tracking data gives managers important insight for goal setting, training and policy setting. By analyzing productivity for individuals and teams, managers can provide better support to help employees do their best work and create more realistic performance goals. Additionally, the insights help managers spot signs of burnout, such as abnormal dips in productivity.
Productivity tracking capabilities also help leaders set policies that are equally beneficial to employees and the organization. Understanding what locations and schedules lead to the highest productivity makes it easy to create or adjust policies such as flexible work arrangements for teams or specific individuals.
3. Workflow visibility
Whether your team is working in-office, hybrid or fully remote, managers need to see the flow of work to accomplish goals. Choosing a workforce management solution that offers visibility into workflows helps you ensure projects stay on schedule while spotting bottlenecks to eliminate. For example, many managers optimize workflows by moving on from an inefficient tool or providing more training for an employee who’s taking longer than expected.
4. Location insights
Leaders today face a big question: Are employees more productive in a centralized office or working remotely? Location-based productivity data, such as the information ActivTrak Location Insights provides, answers this question on an individual basis for employees, teams and your organization. The tool helps you see where employees work and how productivity varies by location, making it easy to determine if you should offer remote work or require employees to come into the office. These insights also help you right-size your office, as you may find you can move to a smaller space and save money if employees are equally or more productive remotely.
5. Data privacy and compliance
With the expansion of remote work, data privacy and compliance is a major challenge for organizations. Businesses must ensure employees don’t create risks for the organization by failing to comply with legal regulations for how data is stored, shared and used. Your workforce management tool should include features that help you stay compliant. For example, ActivTrak offers data privacy and compliance features that allow you to create security alarms for risky actions, customize access to resources, and spot unusual activity that could be a cause for concern. By taking a proactive approach, you help prevent data breaches and maintain compliance with regulations that vary between geographic locations.
6. Personal insights
A Personal Insights dashboard shows employees how they’re spending their time, along with insights about productivity, workload balance and work-life balance. Giving employees access to this information empowers them to monitor personal habits and make adjustments to perform their best and stay on track for personal goals. For example, employees can use the data to understand the best times for focused work vs. collaborative activities like meetings. Employees also gain insight into activities that limit productivity, such as multitasking and common distractions. Gaining a better understanding of productivity inhibitors helps employees avoid or limit them.
7. Seamless integration with existing systems
Integration capabilities are one of the most important features of a workforce management tool. The right workforce management tool should offer integration with your complete tech stack, including tools used by employees throughout your company — especially human resources systems for attendance tracking, scheduling and hiring. Ideally, the tool should also offer integrations with other popular apps even if you don’t use them yet, so it scales with you as your stack evolves over time.
8. Compatibility with multiple devices
Many organizations allow employees to work on mobile devices alongside computers, and your workforce management tool needs to be able to keep up. Look for a tool that monitors employee activity across devices and operating systems, and that’s usable on both desktop and mobile devices.
9. Real-time user monitoring
The best workforce management tools provide real-time user activity monitoring insights so managers can see what’s happening on a moment-to-moment basis. This type of information is especially useful following a policy change, as the change management data reveals what’s working or quantifies the impact so you can make adjustments as needed. This also helps managers see live availability, which helps prevent disruptions, along with insights about how often employees take breaks and potential signs of burnout. While managers don’t need to check this info every day, it’s valuable to have this feature available for situations that warrant keeping a close eye on employees.
10. Predictive analytics
The right workforce data is useful for more than checking your organization’s performance against benchmarks. Today’s workforce management tools should also provide predictive analytics that look at historical data to predict future outcomes. This could mean projecting an individual employee’s performance to help with goal setting and planning, or it could relate to anticipating peak consumer demand so the company can ramp up hiring before a busy season. Using a workforce management tool with this feature helps you stay ahead of the curve year-round.
11. Intuitive user interface
A workforce management tool that’s too difficult to implement will quickly fall by the wayside with other unused applications, so it’s important to ensure the tool you choose is intuitive for all users. This includes employees who want to check personal insights as well as leaders who want higher-level executive dashboards. Of course, it’s still a good idea to provide training to ensure everyone knows how to use these features. Ideally, the tool should come with detailed walkthroughs and videos to guide new users.
12. Customization
No two organizations are alike and no out-of-the-box workforce management tool will fit perfectly without customizations. You should be able to customize your tool to your needs by creating reports with the insights you care about most and displaying them the way you prefer. Customizable dashboards are the most glaring use case, though you should also be able to customize settings like what data you collect and what websites or applications you restrict for employees.
Get a demo of ActivTrak’s workforce management tool
Selecting the right workforce management tool is a strategic decision that will significantly impact your organization. Leverage ActivTrak’s comprehensive workforce management tool for immediate access to all of the essential features — and more — to empower your employees. Contact our sales team today to learn how ActivTrak helps you streamline workforce management.
