Why Automating Employee Management is Key this Year : In 2020 the most successful manufacturers were the ones able to pivot to work in new ways. But it’s hard to respond quickly to new demands when you’re drowning in paperwork. In many businesses managers are spending valuable time on employee management tasks such as tracking working hours, holidays and schedules often on spreadsheets.

Of course, it’s important these tasks are managed well but if you’d like your managers to spend more time driving your business forward and less time on admin, then automating these tasks is key this year.

Here are 5 employee management tasks you can automate with a Workforce Management system.

1. Tracking employee working hours

Tracking and approving employee working hours manually can be time-consuming and error prone. Automating this process eliminates manual recording, reduces errors and decreases the time spent creating a payroll file. You can choose to record time worked with Clocking or non-clocking options such as electronic timesheets. Managers review and approve their team’s timesheets online before they are sent to payroll. The upshot? a more accurate payroll file every time and more time for your Managers to focus on other strategies to help your company reach its goals.

2 . Leave management

Many companies still use email and spreadsheets to request and approve leave. Digging through emails in search of holiday requests and manually updating annual leave records takes time. With a Workforce Management system employee can use their PC, Laptop or mobile to request leave, cancel leave or review leave balances in real time reducing queries to managers. Managers can approve leave requests through the system and leave balances are always up to date. All in all, a much better experience for both managers and employees.

3. Scheduling/Rostering

Scheduling on spreadsheets is time consuming, it’s difficult to schedule very far into the future, it’s hard to incorporate last minute changes and it’s almost impossible to spot recurring trends or get useful business insights.

Automating rostering/scheduling means you can easily manage even the most complex rosters across job functions, departments, teams and locations. Drawing on information from the time and attendance and skills modules of your Workforce Management system means you can be sure you’re only including available employees whose skills match the jobs on your roster.

You can cost out rosters/schedules in advance and compare them to forecasted revenue and payroll costs. You can build fairness rules into the schedule to make sure no one person is stuck doing the less desirable shifts. Rostering becomes easier, quicker and fairer and rosters can be done further in advance which is proven to increase employee engagement. 

4. HR Information

Updating one employee record to reflect a new bank account or a change of address is easy but multiply that by hundreds of employees and it becomes a full-time job. With Employee Self-Service on mobile, desktop or laptop, employees can update their personal records to reflect changes straight away – no emails, no waiting for managers to confirm receipt and no copying and pasting information from one place to the next, everyone can be sure the correct information is securely stored in the correct place.

5. Skills and training tracking

For many employers, keeping accurate records of employee skills, training and certifications is not just a nice to have, it’s important for health and safety, regulatory compliance, identifying skills gaps and planning future training requirements. The more employees an organisation has, the harder it is to track, follow-up and verify their training and skills.

Using a Workforce Management system to automate learning and skills tracking means you can be confident that the information is accurate and up-to-date and considerably less time will be spent on it. Alerts can be set up to notify of soon-to-expire skills so you have time to organise retraining: protecting the employee and the business from any regulatory or health and safety risks.

In summary, if you’d like to have all hands on deck to prepare for what’s ahead now is the time to consider automating time-consuming employee management with a Workforce Management system.

To find out how Softworks can help make your working day easier and more productive, get in touch today or request a Demo here.

Email: hello@softworks.com  Tel. +44-1527-888-060

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