Technology has done wonders for the business landscape; it continues to speed up routine, administrative tasks and improve quality. However, it’s your employees who remain your greatest assets. High-performing teams are your company’s keys to customer satisfaction and profitability. If your workers are struggling to keep up with customer demands and company performance goals, you may need to use workforce optimization to get back on track.
Workforce optimization is a set of strategic processes that aim to improve employee efficiency and productivity for sustainable business growth. While the principles of workforce optimization were birthed in the telemarketing call center environment, they have been successfully adopted by businesses across several sectors. Here are some benefits to expect when you put workforce optimization strategies and software tools to work in your organization.
#1 Higher Levels of Employee Personal Fulfillment
The idea that employment is just an agreement that exchanges a worker’s time for pay is flawed. While money is needed to live, most people want careers that bring them personal satisfaction. When they find this type of employment environment, they stay for years and grow. If they can’t find that type of workplace, they stay only long enough to complete their search for their next job.
Workforce optimization practices and tools allow you to analyze these key areas of your business operations that can bring joy or despair to your employees:
- Work scheduling
- Time and attendance management
- Performance tracking
By using workforce optimization strategies, you can easily match the right employees to the appropriate jobs based on their availability, skill sets, and past performance. Besides rewarding your star performers, you’ll have the insight to guide your other employees to excellence. Workforce performance analytics tools give your team members targeted views into their weak areas so that they can make effective changes to their work practices.
These strategies and tools also help you to find inefficiencies in your organization’s workflows. You’ll have the chance to change your processes to create a more productive and healthy work environment for your employees.
#2 Increased Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty
When you take good care of your employees, they will take better care of your customers. Customer satisfaction impacts your company’s profitability and future growth, and it’s a key area that’s addressed within most workforce optimization strategies. Loyal, happy customers indicate success for your workforce.
Besides getting input from your employees about their customer interactions, it’s important to find out directly from your customers how they rate your company. Many workforce optimization efforts support customer experience audits that allow you to identify the touch points that make the most impact on the customer experience and the customer interactions that need the most improvement. With the help of the customer experience audit and other analytics tools, you and your team don’t need to waste time guessing about how and when to engage customers.
#3 Extended Insight into Business Operations Leads to More Opportunities
Workforce optimization translates into empowerment for many employees. After they discover their weak areas, they get training for skill development. This encourages more collaboration among team members, increased employee confidence in his or her work abilities, and greater innovation.
Besides leveraging the growth opportunities that are connected to employee collaboration and innovation, you’ll also find opportunities for your organization through an analysis of its businesses processes. Changes to clunky processes free people, time, and budgets for activities that bring more value to your customers.
#4 Reduced Operating Costs
Have you ever placed a great employee on a project that doesn’t fit his or her skill set? The results are often embarrassment for the employee, a lot of wasted time and money, and unhappy clients. Workforce optimization aims to reduce the risk of occurrence for these mismatchesand make operating your business more cost effective.
Workforce optimization scheduling software brings information about your available workers and their skills into one central place. Managers who use these automated tools save labor dollars by glancing across a dashboard to see which employees are suited for available projects. Workers who don’t have the needed skills for a job won’t accidentally get placed on the schedule for that position.
#5 Attraction of Top Talent
Competition in most industries is fierce, and the ability to attract star employees has wide implications both now and in the future. Human resource managers resort to all types of recruiting perks to bring in the best engineers, data analysts, and financial service professionals to their companies. These practices include everything from telecommuting opportunities to bring your dog to work days. However, the best employees spot gimmicks a mile away and prefer the real value that comes from a smoothly run company.
As your company effectively applies workforce optimization strategies and software tools, it’ll draw accolades from customers, employees, and the communities which it serves. It doesn’t take long for the word to get around to top talent that your organization has the secret sauce for efficiency, productivity, and overall employee satisfaction.
#6 Lower Risk of Human Error and Compliance Failures
Regulatory complianceis a matter of life or death for businesses that operate in healthcare, defense, or financial services. Meeting legal requirements to operate become even more complex when you introduce contract labor into your workforce. Workforce optimization strategies allow you to input legal requirements into enterprise workforce management tools and assign workers to positions that fit their backgrounds.
When your managers use certain automated tools along with workforce optimization strategies, your organization will experience fewer human errors that could cost you contracts. Healthcare companies must comply with data privacy laws that are associated with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and their employees must be trained to help them meet their obligations to patients. With workforce optimization practices and software in place, you’ll be able to spot the right employee for every job at your company even if the person is a contract worker. This lowers your risk forHIPAAnon-compliance fines that reach up to $50,000 per violation.
Conclusion
While today’s businesses rush headlong into digital transformations, smart leaders make sure that their organizations’ employees are engaged, trained, and positioned to make the most of technology-based workplace initiatives. Workforce optimization strategies give you a systematic way of identifying performance shortfalls and making the changes that are good for your employees, customers, and company.
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