Imagine this — many months ago, your company signed up for a new workforce tracking software. You’re feeling excited about the possibilities for improvements but wary about potential problems. Regardless of how you feel, it’s now on your plate to evaluate and maximize. There are many different solutions in this competitive industry and you need to know if you are really seeing the full potential of the platform.
Here are a few things to consider when you evaluate your current workforce tracking software.
Has Your Workforce Tracking Software Made Operations More Efficient?
According to Kyle Antcliff, a vice president at Intradiem, workforce management software has three roles:
- To forecast volume and staffing needs
- To schedule staff
- To manage intraday activities
Each of these tasks should help make your operations more efficient and keep your staff focused on meeting deadlines. Experienced managers will know and evaluate the productivity of their staff. Ask your staff whether the new software has helped them work more efficiently.
If the answer is yes, great. If not, find out why by asking these questions:
- Was everyone trained on the new system?
- Has the new system been truly adopted or are they using their old habits?
Steve Langerud, a workplace culture consultant writes, “Less than 100% implementation compliance voids the practical benefits [of workforce management software].” If there is less than 100% adoption, find out why:
- Were everyone’s needs met with this product?
- Was every branch of the workforce consulted before choosing a solution?
- Does it make some tasks more difficult?
Measure your gains or losses in efficiency. A good evaluation must provide more than anecdotal evidence. Select quality metrics that reflect your business and measure them. Here are some suggestions:
- The productivity of your team is throughout the day
- Time spent on core activities and non-core activities
- The skew in work patterns between the top 20% and others
Has Communication Improved?
Whenever you implement a new system, your employees take time to become skilled at using it. Once they have been properly trained, your solution should improve communication and make it easier to meet deadlines.
Workforce tracking software should allow workers in the field to send questions, requests, updates to their managers, increasing communications efficiency. Because workforce tracking software preserves communication for every aspect of the job, it should preserve a communications trail in the event that a job goes over budget and past a deadline.
Here are effective metrics for evaluating whether your software has improved communication:
- Do your workers use communication features or do they still waste time on the phone?
- Do these features actually improve efficiency?
- Do you use communication trails to analyze jobs that go over budget or past deadline?
Finally; Is the Workforce Tracking Tool Being Leveraged to its Full Capacity?
Simply using workforce management software should improve efficiency and communication, but that isn’t all it can do. Are you leveraging your software to its full capacity? Here are benefits to fully using the data and analytics your software provides:
- Make better hiring decisions using data from all roles, business units, skills, and locations
- Analytics help take a more targeted approach to increasing or decreasing staffing based on the processes and roles in the organization
- Having all your data in one place allows different departments to collaborate at a holistic level
- Activity statistics can help assess and validate training and correlate it to expected results
To measure whether you are using the software in this way, here are some suggested metrics:
- How frequently do your departments use shared data to discuss the business as a whole?
- How frequently does your team use data to improve staffing decisions?
- Do you measure performance before and after training to assess its effectiveness?
A great deal of time, effort, and money go into choosing and implementing workforce management software. It will take just a little more to evaluate whether the software is truly beneficial for your company. You can dive as deeply into an evaluation as you want, but it all boils down to these questions: Has efficiency improved? Why or why not?
We are here to be a resource for anyone working with large teams, especially those in contracting relationships. If you have any questions about finding the best workforce tracking systems to manage your contractors and subcontractors, do not hesitate to reach out to here our team by clicking here.
Thank you for reading!
*This article is for informational purposes only. It is not intended to constitute legal advice.