Workforce management is a crucial, yet stressful and challenging task for many leaders. It doesn’t matter if you’re managing a centralized workforce in a single location, multiple teams in numerous offices and stores, or a completely remote workforce – it takes careful planning and execution. Most importantly, workforce management demands that you use the right tools in order to improve your profit margins, empower a productive workforce, and lead an efficient operation. 

Luckily, there are many ways you can better manage your employee collective in 2021, from leveraging your CRM system to reduce the unnecessary workload, to automating numerous tasks like support with the use of chatbots, and all the way to enabling mobile teams. The possibilities here are endless, so let’s take a look at the five great tech solutions you can implement right now to better manage your employees and take your company to new heights. 

Start by automating as much as you can

First and foremost, your focus should be on company-wide automation if you want to facilitate workforce management for you and your team leads, streamline workflow, and just build a happier employee collective. There is a lot you can achieve by automating menial and repetitive tasks around the company, and you can start by analyzing all departments and their processes. 

Look for inefficiencies and time-consuming tasks, but also repetitive processes that you can automate with ease. The more you can automate, the more time and energy will your employees be able to allocate towards meaningful, mission-critical tasks. You will find that nowadays there is a piece of software or hardware for every department that automates its processes at least in part, which is a great way to alleviate the pressure off yourself and your workforce.

Leverage your CRM system

Customer relationship management is a crucial process that allows you to build thriving relationships with your customers using relevant and actionable data. Naturally, every growth-oriented business nowadays should use a CRM tool for faster customer acquisition and retention, but you can also leverage this system to manage your employees in a more efficient and effective way.

It should go without saying that the right CRM tool can help ease the workload off of your managers and your employees, leading to a happier and more productive workforce. However, it’s the data that this system provides that allows you to make better managerial decisions and lead your employee collective towards better outcomes. Leveraging data, automating marketing and sales tasks, and streamlining processes using your CRM will allow you and your workforce to do a better job, more consistently. 

Track time and attendance

One of the most effective ways to better manage your workforce is to monitor their time and attendance through a comprehensive system that gives you real-time visibility of your workforce and your operation as a whole. Some of the best time and attendance software solutions on the market right now allow you to monitor your employees in real time across multiple locations, automate record-keeping, give your employees on-site and mobile clocking capabilities, automate timesheet approval, and more.

All of these features serve to ease your workload and allow you to devote your time and energy to guiding and aiding your employees, as a leader should, rather than wasting time on menial managerial tasks. Automating these tasks will also allow you to optimize your shifts and rosters to maximize productivity, assign the right people to the right tasks, and keep your employees engaged. 

Enable mobile access and work

Mobile technology is on the rise across the modern business sector, and you can use it to empower your managers as well as your employees to do a better job, more efficiently. Enabling a mobile workforce and providing your employees with the ability to work from anywhere and on the go is one of the best ways to improve efficiency and productivity, and allow your managers to retain real-time oversight and management of their teams.

You can enable a mobile workforce, for example, by investing in cloud integration for your business. Most importantly, integrating a mobile solution for your company keeps all data synchronized across your organization and all devices so that everyone has access to the right information at all times. This improves decision-making for your managers and allows them to focus on the employees that need their guidance the most.

Ensure ease of scalability

Last but not least, every workforce management solution you implement needs to ensure easy and seamless scalability. The solution needs to scale with the needs of your company so that when your workforce grows and your workload increases, you’re able to retain the same level of efficiency and productivity.

Be careful when choosing your software and hardware solutions, and don’t just focus on their immediate benefits – these solutions need to accommodate your immediate and long-term needs. Likewise, these solutions should also allow you to scale down with ease without sacrificing your ability to manage your employee collective in-house or remotely.

Wrapping up

Workforce management is a crucial task in any growth-oriented business, and it requires sound leadership as well as the use of the right tech solutions. Be sure to use these tips and tools to better manage your employees in 2021, and set the stage for growth and success in the years to come.