5 Best Practices to Manage Your Workforce in 2021

Workforce management is one of the foundational pillars of a high-functioning team, and a growth-oriented company. Without a doubt, your employees are your most valuable assets, and it’s important to optimize the processes that affect their productivity and zeal, the culture in your company, and the managerial processes that allow you to run an efficient workplace. Of course, all of this is easier said than done in these trying and unpredictable times.

Nowadays, managers and leaders must focus on employee well-being and their needs in order to create an efficient workforce, but they also have to use the right tools and methods to ensure productivity in a sustainable way. To that end, let’s take a look at the best practices that you can use to manage your workforce in 2021 in a way that will maximize productivity, efficiency, and employee satisfaction in the workplace.

Delegate employee management to team leaders

First things first, it’s important to take a structured approach to employee management from a leadership standpoint. As a leader in your company, you can’t expect to manage your entire workforce yourself. Because after all, you have other tasks that require your attention, and even though you need to be a presence in their lives, your employees need to have their own team leaders.

With that in mind, your first order of business should be to assign and train team leads. Team leaders are not there so much to report to you as they are there to be an extension of your authority. In other words, these specialists should take on the micro-management tasks of teams and departments in order to have a more hands-on approach to managing your workforce.

Track time and attendance meticulously

Once you have team leaders in place, it’s time to empower and equip them with the right tools so that they can manage their teams, create accurate and detailed reports, and create an efficient structure for your entire company. Because remember, one of your goals should be to eliminate department silos, and to make people from different teams work together. To achieve this, you and your managers need to use the right software.

One of the more important software solutions is the one that allows you to automatically track time and attendance. This will give structure to your entire organization and workforce, and allow you to manage your employees meticulously. Knowing exactly how your employees are utilizing their time helps you identify pain points and distractions, as well as inefficiencies in your processes so that you can work on resolving them using accurate data.

If nothing else, time tracking tools allow you to easily manage absence, vacation days, and more.

Create efficient schedules and rosters

Another crucial feature of your workforce management software is the ability for your managers to create rosters and work schedules quickly using smart features and templates. The right software should allow you and your managers to be highly flexible and agile when creating rosters, with the ability to change the work schedules on a moment’s notice to prevent understaffing.

It’s also important to take the employee’s needs to heart, and create schedules that not only work for your company, but also your entire employee collective. Keep in mind that one employee might need the extra hours, while the employee you initially had in mind for that shift could use a break. This is the kind of agile rostering you need in your organization to keep people happy, productive, and motivated.

Compile the data and make workload forecasts

Workload forecasting is essential for agile workforce management, because it allows you to anticipate the higher workload days and weeks, and prepare accordingly. To forecast in an accurate and efficient way, you have to use the software that automatically compiles workflow data, customer data, industry trends and fluctuations, and organizational data.

The right software will automatically do this for you, and using AI and machine learning, it can predict those high-volume periods where you’ll need more human-power and other important resources. This allows you to stay flexible, prevent pitfalls, and most importantly, avoid overworking your employees.

Keep the spirits high and build a culture

Last but not least, a big part of successful workforce management is building a positive company culture. As the leader of your company, you need to set the values that will serve as the pillars of your culture, and these will typically be trust, equality, honesty, transparency, and teamwork.

Once you have the right values in place, you should train and educate your team leads to pass these values on to your employee collective, and help everyone internalize them. Once everyone starts coming to work with these values in mind, you will be able to build a culture of productivity and happiness in the workplace, making workforce management infinitely easier.

Wrapping up

Managing your employees properly is one of the best ways to set the stage for growth and success. Be sure to use these best practices to take your workforce management to the next level using sound managerial principles as well as the right software solutions.