Automation of Manager Experience

• Task: Approving time off
  • How: Some offerings today allow the WFM system to automatically approve or deny time off requests without manager intervention. The system does this by ensuring that the employee submitting a time-off request has accrued enough time off and that the time taken does not compromise shift coverage, safety requirements or “blackout” periods. Commonly, these systems will provide the requestor with some visibility on who else has approved time off to set expectations and/or provide a visual hint as to whether they should pick another time-off slot, or not before formally submitting their request.
  • Benefit: Many line managers dislike “simple admin” such as checking if a given shift or day is adequately staffed before approving or denying a time-off request. Having the system do this for them can add up to many minutes in a week and collectively many hours/days across a large organization. This is valuable time that can be used for more productive purposes.
• Task: Intra-day management
  • How: The best-laid schedules are often upset by unscheduled absences (due to illness, accident or other circumstance). Many newer WFM solutions help managers overcome these challenges by delivering to their smartphones or tablets a list of available and suitable replacements for the absent worker. Simply selecting which workers to notify results in them being contacted via their preferred means (such as text, email or automated phone notification), and the first worker that responds gets the shift. Automation can speed up this process by not only providing a list of most suitable candidates, but also deciding which are most suitable and generating the message to send to the employees. Thus, all that the manager has to do is confirm the selection to trigger the process.
  • Benefit: This process enables the supervisor to quickly get a replacement, which should: reduce the disruption to customers due to the absence of the employee; improve the employee experience, as employees can pick up more free shifts more quickly; and also reduce the time managers have to spend administrating the WFM system in response to the absence.

Employee Experience

• Time capture and approval — Some leading organizations have enabled geolocation so that workers can easily check in for their shift on their mobile device based on proximity to their normal work area and without having to queue to use a time clock. Usually, business rules are configured to prevent early check-in (or “store” workers’ requests until the actual shift begins and then punch them in automatically if they are still within proximity). Notifications can be set up to remind workers of required breaks, as well as to ensure proper end of shift (“You have reached the end of your scheduled shift time — press OK to end your shift”). Not only does this enhance the employee experience of the workers, but it also reduces the workload of the supervisor, who is able to quickly review and approve time and has to resolve far fewer time-punch errors.
• Labor scheduling — While demand-driven scheduling optimization has been a requirement for certain industries (particularly retail, hospitality and healthcare) and has been delivered by a number of advanced WFM solutions over the past decade, organizations have come to realize that it is not enough for a schedule to be optimal only from a business standpoint. The tightening labor markets in these industries has resulted in a drive to improve scheduling visibility, flexibility and fairness, with the goal of an improved employee experience due to better work-life balance and better retention over time. The following are representative capabilities:
  • Preferences — Workers are able to indicate preferred shift days and timings, as well as any days where they do not wish to be scheduled, and can regularly update preferences based on their changing needs.
  • Visibility — Workers are able to quickly and easily view schedules for the upcoming weeks to spot any potential issues.
  • Flexibility — Workers can resolve any scheduling issues by trading/swapping shifts based on adherence to defined business rules (such as the suggested replacement having the proper training, schedule availability and seniority), with little to no need for involvement by the supervisor.
  • Transparency — Some of the newer WFM solutions enable workers to rate their schedules on a weekly basis, and that feedback becomes part of the input driving the scheduling optimization engine, with the goal of incrementally improving the number of “5 star” schedules for both the workers and the organization.
• Shift swapping — Most WFM solutions have the capability for employees to swap shifts, and some now offer the capability to automate the process of employee shift swapping with little or no manager approval. Once a schedule has been created and distributed, depending on the seniority/rights of the employee and consideration of other factors — for example, peak period coverage requirements and/or skills/seniority required — the employee may request to swap their assigned shift with another individual. In this instance, the system will search for eligible candidates and inform those concerned or allow the individual to provide a preference for who should cover them. Through automating this process, employees should be more quickly informed whether or not the shift swap has been approved, and also enable those employees that want to pick up extra shifts to do so more efficiently, providing employees with greater work flexibility.

Flexible Workforce

• HR leaders traditionally have not been involved in hiring and billing of contingent workers, limiting their knowledge about if they are disproportionally affecting overall workforce costs.
• Since their time and attendance data is not captured on the same application as hourly-paid employees, it can be cumbersome to determine if contingent workers finish their tasks at a faster rate/are more punctual than regular employees.
• As contingent workers are not included in the formal performance cycle, feedback on the quality of their work or their experience with the organization is often not well-documented. HR leaders often do not know if they are improving or detracting from overall workforce productivity.

Figure 2. Flexible Workforce and WFM

Source: Gartner (February 2018)

• Engage in a conversation with the current WFM vendor (and VMS vendor, if applicable) to understand the roadmap to include flexible workforce management support in their offering.
• Scrutinize workforce analytics data to understand the best alignment of the new emerging FMS providers for different skills requirements.
• Define a broad, unified set of common WFM practices that can be applicable to contingent workers and employees alike. This will improve the overall workforce sentiment and help bridge the gap arising from differences in business and regulatory compliance requirements.

Virtual Assistants

• User friendliness — An application with which you can interact via natural language should be innately user-friendly (assuming the NLP component has been sufficiently tested and developed). Gartner estimates that application training accounts for approximately 5% of annual recurring SaaS and training costs for WFM applications. Hence, any way that WFM applications can become more user-friendly and intuitive can potentially reduce the need for training support, and reduce recurring costs for WFM applications. There is also an added benefit in that interactions between users and the application may become faster, reducing the time taken for administrative tasks, although it is currently difficult to quantify to what extent this may improve operations or reduce costs.
• Unplanned absences — Absences can occur for multiple reasons and may take a variety of forms. A worker with a dynamic shift pattern may easily forget when and where their next shift is. Alternatively, a worker commuting may find their travel disrupted and so miss the start of their shift. Absences will always occur; however, with VAs we have the potential to do more about them. For example, a VA-enabled WFM application can remind workers of upcoming shifts ahead of time, or can proactively alert workers and managers if a worker will likely be late for a shift based on their location. It is perhaps tempting to feel that this application may be too invasive and crosses the “creepy line” (see “Workplace Analytics Needs Digital Ethics”), and this may well be true if the technology is misused. However, if used appropriately, and if the privacy of workers and managers is safeguarded, VAs applied to WFM could help organizations reduce the impact of unplanned absences.
• Scheduling and task management — Similar to unplanned absences, VAs could facilitate more effective swapping and assignment of shifts. While many WFM applications today have the capacity to alert workers to open shifts, through a VA and more personable communication, as well as a more user-friendly system, more open shifts could be filled more quickly. Furthermore, as well as assigning schedules, VAs could also communicate tasks to workers and track completion of tasks (an example of a vendor offering this type of solution is Theatro). Again, task or activity management is not new for WFM, but by communicating it on a personal level increased productivity could be achieved, as well as greater insight into labor operations.
• Clock-ins — Workers forgetting to clock in or out is one of the most common reasons for managers having to spend time administrating exceptions in the WFM application. A VA mobile WFM application can prompt workers to clock in and out when entering and leaving work, and then send a reminder if the prompt goes unnoticed. Taken a step further, a VA mobile WFM application in conjunction with some form of technology to determine worker presence (most likely either a Bluetooth beacon, geolocation, or some form of physical security equipment such as an access control system or video surveillance camera), could automatically clock a worker in and out and then prompt that worker to affirm that the time entry is correct via the mobile WFM, if employee attestation is necessary. This use of a VA in conjunction with WFM could save managers time in administrative tasks, make the workers’ lives easier as they no longer have to queue up to use a time clock, and may mean that no physical time clock is needed, thereby reducing the cost of a WFM solution (the average time clock costs $2,000 to $3,000 to purchase per unit, while service and maintenance costs vary from $250 to $500 per clock, per year).
• Reporting and analytics — Properly analyzed, WFM data contains the potential to improve operations. However, it relies on managers being trained and to regularly review data reports in order to have a meaningful impact throughout the organization. A potential VA use case would be to use VA as a delivery mechanism for data reporting and analytics. Doing so could make it easier to make use of data reports and analytics, as VAs could be used to alert managers to a new trend or issue identified by the analytics. Although the VA would not be the technology piece doing the heavy lifting here (that is done by the reporting and analytics tools), it would provide easier access to the results, meaning that managers wouldn’t have to spend as much time training to use these tools, or browsing through potentially boring data.

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