What is workforce optimization?

Workforce optimization (WFO) are practices and strategies that increase organizational and employee efficiency while using data to decrease operational costs. Businesses can implement WFO in every aspect of their company, from finance and HR to marketing and tech. With workforce optimization, your objective is to streamline your processes between all departments and employees to maximize your overall results. When you fully execute WFO, you can:

• reduce costs
• improve operational efficiency
• increase productivity
• improve consumer services
• maximize technology
• enable process automation
• reduce errors
• improve recruitment and retention
• encourage upskilling
• deep dive into valuable insights across your organization, regardless of role or industry 

Examples of workforce optimization

WFO works throughout many industries, such as restaurants, retail, finance, call centres, warehousing, manufacturing, and hospitality. Some examples of workforce optimization in practice include:

Performance management

Workforce optimization can track employee performance to ensure you position the best talent for the job. Task-tracking tools such as Trello or Asana enable employees to shift through and prioritize tasks. Organizationally, these tools help shift work in the most optimal direction. 

Skills management

Understanding the skills and knowledge of every employee gives you a detailed picture of the strengths and gaps within your organization. Targeted training and development programs can help you close skill gaps and determine if you have the necessary skills among staff to offer new products or services. 

Scheduling

Scheduling software can track performance data, attendance, and other metrics to create employee schedules. A scheduling tool is valuable for managing overtime and employee burnout and can help you decide whether to hire additional staff. Because workflow determines workload, this can also help with hiring temp workers. For example, the holiday rush brings higher sales, so you may need to update your workforce system, hire new employees, or add temp staff, depending on various factors.

Time tracking

Attendance and time-tracking softwares help keep you in the know at all times. They provide valid information, like whether employees check in late or early, or if employees clock in or out for their coworkers. Time tracking is pertinent in WFO as it enables you to look at scheduling to ensure adequate shift coverage across all business hours, locations, peak hours, holidays, and weekends. 

Benefits of workforce optimization

As staffing challenges continue to arise, employers must rethink and improve how they organize their employees and perform daily operations. Optimizing your workforce to improve efficiency and effectiveness is crucial for making your business stand out from the rest and attract a larger talent pool. Not only is this a sustainable competitive advantage, but it can make the difference between company success and failure. Workforce optimization comes with many benefits, including:

• Lower costs and higher revenue: Using automation in your WFO strategy brings actionable insights and real-time guidance for revenue opportunities. Over and understaffing becomes avoidable, meaning so does lost revenue on having too much staff for the job or not enough resulting in poor customer service. Workforce optimization also creates opportunities for upselling and cross-selling. 
• Improved customer service: An outstanding customer experience involves resolving their questions and concerns quickly and efficiently. WFO enables you to analyze your customer communication, understand the causes of customer behaviour, and use consumer retention strategies. Having deeper insights into your consumer’s habits helps you better meet their needs. Happy customers are typically repeat customers. 
• Increased productivity and efficiency: Having the right number of employees at hand helps you accurately forecast and manage customer demands. Matching your staffing level to these demands enables workers to be more productive and do their job more efficiently.
• Attract top talent, reduce employee turnover, and provide new opportunities: WFO improves employee training to ensure they fit the job well. When workers excel in their roles, they’re generally happier at work, which increases the likelihood of advancing within the organization. When you increase employee satisfaction, you increase customer satisfaction too. 

What are some workforce optimization solutions?

With the massive amount of data you can collect and analyze, technology plays a fundamental role in workforce optimization. Trying to analyze and improve your processes manually is almost impossible to achieve. WFO software is a streamlined solution that combines quality management, call recording, speech analytics, coaching, text analytics, feedback, and surveying to optimize workforce processes. Data analysis provides pertinent information such as:

• operational costs
• net promoter score (NPS)
• employee performance data
• customer satisfaction scores
• time spent per caller
• revenues per employee
• employee work schedules, time, and attendance

Workforce optimization software analyzes your business requirements according to the number of employees, availability, peak periods, budget, labour laws, skills, and contractual agreements to schedule, forecast, and optimize your workforce. With many WFO software out there, choose one that has the following: 

• Scalability: Your workforce optimization solution should scale across your organization, types of work, and different departments. 
• A good user interface: Your solution must be intuitive and easy to use to minimize the time and costs of adopting WFO software. It should also be modern, aesthetically pleasing, and provide real-time updates. A complicated interface makes real-time decisions more challenging. 
• Integration: For maximum potential, your WFO software should send and receive data to CRM and ERP software, such as Salesforce Sales Cloud or Microsoft Dynamics. Your chosen software should easily integrate with your current CRM and ERP systems.
• Value: Consider your total cost of ownership, such as purchase price or monthly subscription, implementation, and training, versus the value the software will bring to your organization.
• Full training and support: Choose a provider who implements, trains, and provides ongoing support as you adopt your WFO solution. 

How to use your data for workforce optimization

Because every workforce optimization strategy looks different, actionable insights and data analytics tailored to your business model and culture can help you identify opportunities and maximize success. Here are a few ways you can use data to achieve your key objectives:

Ensure you have a balanced team

When you pair hiring data with tenure, internal movement, and skills data, you unlock invaluable insights into crucial hiring decisions. Use this information to motivate employees, drive innovation, and improve retention. Ensure you have the right balance of employees by analyzing your shift, overtime, and productivity data to determine how to use full-time staff to reduce overtime or build a part-time team to offset the need for extended shifts. A balanced team also means having a good ratio of in-office and remote or hybrid workers. 

Optimize employee productivity

A balanced team also means having a mix of skills and experience on staff to increase productivity and boost employee morale. Do this by identifying and monitoring your top-performing teams and recreating the formula for teams who aren’t up to par. This can be as simple as offering coaching opportunities by pairing junior team members with more experienced ones to advance their skills. Analyzing your employee data reveals areas needing improvement and helps optimize team productivity. Setting realistic goals and providing adequate tools and training to help all team members succeed in their roles also increases employee engagement.  

Future-proof your organization

Analyzing your company’s productivity data helps you identify mentoring and upskilling opportunities. This data-driven approach future-proofs your organization by enabling junior team members to learn from senior ones who may be approaching retirement. Filling your company’s future roles with current employees is more cost-effective than hiring and retraining, and it’s also good for retaining company culture and boosting employee morale. When employees know they have an opportunity for advancement, they’re more likely to stay with your company. Investing in reskilling and upskilling programs can also attract and retain top talent while furthering the success and longevity of your organization.  

Regardless of your industry, a data-driven approach provides insights to make your workforce more productive and resilient during increasing talent shortages. It also maximizes productivity, improves recruitment and retention, encourages upskilling, and empowers your employees to do their best work.