Reading time: 2 minutes
Car-sharing, ePayments, Netflix, driverless cars. What do all these have in common?
These solutions were birthed out of a need to optimize existing solutions that were less efficient or less reliable, or to cater to new problems birthed out of how the world is transforming (think ageing population). Herein we see a trend, or arguably a need, for people to constantly find and develop solutions that would better the practices of the past.
The keyword here is to optimize, or in other words, making the best or most effective use of resources.
While optimization is not a new trend, the ability for humans to leverage on advancing technology has enabled us to reach new levels of enhancing almost every single process that we have been exposed to. Likewise, our workforce practices can and should be optimized. The last thing you would want is an optimized solution for everything in “life” except for the things at your workplace.
So, what is optimizing your workforce all about?
At its core, workforce optimization is about integrating and simplifying workforce practices, mainly those that are operationally-intensive (i.e. scheduling, attendance, payroll, etc.) and workforce optimizers are the software behind making this possible. It provides a platform that consolidates the work policies, requirements and requests of diverse workspaces and ensures that the best possible practices are being achieved across its different functions. Taking it one step further, workforce optimization also enables businesses to analyze historical data, thereby providing users with not just a strong understanding of current workflows, but also enables a projection of the predicted workload.
As a business strategy, it enables businesses to raise productivity and efficiency in the following three key areas:
- reducing time and errors from manually-intensive processes,
- analyzing and forecasting optimal operation strength required as per demand,
- increasing employee job satisfaction.
Take the example of scheduling for instance, planning managers are expected to navigate a plethora of work policies on top of trying to accommodate numerous staff requests when it comes down to planning for the work roster. For workspaces with headcounts of over a thousand, just imagine the chaos brewing every time a roster is generated!
The workforce optimizer leverages automated algorithms developed with the specific purpose of consolidating these complex range of rules and requirements, to produce the most efficient outcomes for every user. To put simply, workforce optimization can be considered the next logical move in terms of embracing new-age tech solutions to alleviate universal, everyday business challenges. It equips businesses with a double-edged sword of keeping your clients happy (via increased labour productivity) and keeping your own employees satisfied.
At the end of the day, wouldn't most of us agree that everyone would enjoy working in an efficient and optimized workspace?
