Workforce management is typically understood as a set of integrated tasks that if performed well help an organization improve the productivity and utilization of its resources. In most cases workforce management is a broad term which encompasses all processes from hiring to retiring of an employee in an organization. At a basic level most Workforce management tools help organizations store, retrieve and analyse information about critical parameters regarding their employees.
In this article we will look at workforce management from an HR perspective to understand what basic aspects need to be in place for one to derive value from the investment made in such software and tools.
Typical workforce management automation workflow should consider the following:

1. Time & Attendance tracking
2. Leave Management
3. Travel & Expense Management
4. Transfer and Promotions
5. Retirement or Separation
6. Post Separation

So you have decided to evaluate workforce management software? Great but before you look outside for the software, look inside within the organization to ensure that you get what you want and need to solve your current and future problems.
1. Capturing and processing attendance – especially in a distributed workforce environment
Recording employee attendance on a daily basis is the most basic task which has a direct impact on business profitability. According to industry estimates bad attendance records can cost your company crores of rupees, especially if it involves law suits. Unaccounted absenteeism, which is absenteeism which is not recorded & hence gets paid, is reportedly causing a lot of drain on companies in various sectors. To prevent this from happening you would need to critically look at your attendance capturing and processing systems and individuals. Typically if you find there is a lot of manual intervention then that’s a sign to worry as it would mean delays and errors. Advances in technologies in the recent past have ensured that the task of capturing, calculating, and processing attendance on a daily, weekly and monthly basis can be completely automated. With employee self service features employees then view & control their attendance records on a daily basis. Employees are thus able to apply for leave, get the same approved by their manager and the system builds complete transparency in the records of attendance.
HR can then move from worrying about processing attendance at the end of the month to identifying early signs based on employee attendance and absenteeism records.
The challenge of distributed workforce where it is important to capture attendance of the employee either in branch office or customer location becomes easier with use of Geo tagging and ensuring that attendance is marked only when the person is at a particular location.
2. Travel & Expense management within HRMS
When evaluating HRMS solutions this is often neglected aspect, however the fact remains that after leave & attendance this is the 2nd largest driver of transaction volumes in HR and accounts. Since most companies have daily travel requirements of diverse kinds, it is critical that accurate & timely information about the travel and expense is captured and processed. In a typical manual process this is fraught with delays and errors which can again indicate pilferage or missed opportunities. Here again HR or accounts department can move from simply processing transactions to actually analysing patterns of travel to negotiate with vendors to save costs. Travel & expense related costs are the 2nd most difficult costs to control and having an automated workflow around the same can help you put your arms around the problem.
3. Between 2 attendance cycles & beyond
In your workforce automation once you have solved the 2 big challenges its natural for you to look at the next frontier, which is really workforce analytics. Here you would want to look at analysis of your workforce via multiple parameters to help your drive your strategic objectives like inclusion and diversity. It would also mean that you need to record and capture all employee movements within and outside the organization. If transactions such as promotion, change in location and separation are being captured in your workforce automation solution then it allows you to look at patterns of these transactions over a period. Analysing this information can help HR raise important questions like why our internal rate of promotion is higher in one Business or one location vs the others. Why are we hiring almost all our middle management from outside? And so on.
4. Post separation
Often we forget and overlook employees once they have left the organization. However research has shown that positive employee experience during the exit process will increase their chances of coming back to the organization. More and more companies are now focusing on ex-employees and are driving initiatives to be in touch with their alumni to share news and other activities. However the first step here is to ensure that the person has access to his or her information like salary slip, Form 16 etc in a hassle free manner. Extending employee self service features to your past employees to give them access to such services is a great start in you maintaining a positive engagement with your ex-employees.
The objective of any workforce management software hence is to enhance productivity and efficiency of HR department while also providing employees and managers ease of use. It is important that HR stays focused on the primary objective of the workforce management software while ensuring that the solution is scalable to solve their secondary and tertiary challenges in future.

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