Key Trends in Workforce Management and New Challenges for HR

Abstract

© 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/ert.21428 By its simplest definition, workforce management refers to all of the processes and activities needed to maintain a productive workforce. As a business discipline, workforce management comprises several distinct areas, including time and attendance tracking, staff scheduling, absence and leave tracking and compliance, employment-law compliance, and the emerging area of fatigue risk management. Although workforcemanagement transactions have been automated for decades—dating back to the onceubiquitous punch-clock—the discipline has evolved dramatically in recent years and is now used in savvy organizations and HR functions to measure and improve labor effectiveness and efficiency. As workforce-management technology becomes more advanced, it enables organizations to automate a larger portion of critical labor activities, freeing up time for other strategic initiatives. In addition, the detailed information provided by these software solutions gives employers much greater visibility and insight into their workforce processes, which enables them to operate more nimbly and make better-informed decisions based on actual data. The employers that move beyond the long-standing “punch-in/ punch-out” approach to workforce management and implement the tools and processes that enable them to better align employee schedules, activities, and costs with business objectives are the most likely to see measurable gains. In light of factors such as an increasingly aggressive regulatory environment and increased global competition, organizations have been forced to reevaluate their workforce-management systems and strategies with an eye toward more robust automation and greater coverage for compliance requirements. One notable regulatory expansion is the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which has already been a catalyst for some workforcemanagement process redesign and system investment. Several trends define the ways in which organizations are shifting their approach to these pressing issues. To identify and explore these trends, WorkForce Software and Workforce conducted an extensive survey of HR professionals in organizations of all sizes, industries, and geographic distributions. Released on October 7, 2013, some of the significant findings from the “Workforce Management Trend Survey 2013–2014” are summarized here.