How to Solve the Top 5 Workforce Management Pain Points?

Inconsistent manual processes can lead to inaccurate data, excessive or insufficient staffing, and costly errors in scheduling and payroll calculations, wasting valuable time for HR and finance teams. When a company has multiple categories of workers with varying pay patterns, types of work, or tasks to be completed throughout their shifts, these issues become even more complex.

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Challenge 1: Poor Planning and Scheduling 

Aligning employee availability with business needs is a time-consuming but crucial process. Some companies use spreadsheets to create schedules, which are not only time-consuming but also difficult to update and track. While adding a point-scheduling solution may help, companies still lack the ability to communicate schedules and updates to employees effectively. Moreover, managers using point-scheduling solutions cannot view sales insights, labor demand forecasts, employee availability, working hours, and overtime in one place.

Solution 1: Align Workforce Supply with Business Demand 

The visual scheduling tool in SuitePeople Workforce Management offers a combination of forecasting, employee scheduling templates, workforce deployment models, and sales data to prevent understaffing or overstaffing. The intuitive and dynamic interface of the visual scheduling tool allows you to easily create, edit, and reassign shifts in one place. Managers can view the entire workforce and understand business operations, thereby improving employee efficiency, reducing costs, and increasing revenue. Additionally, employees can use the mobile app to pick up shifts, swap shifts, or drop shifts, creating a better employee experience and sending requests to managers for approval, ensuring no shifts are left unfilled and business operations continue smoothly.

Challenge 2: Poor Communication and User Experience

When managers fail to communicate effectively, it can lead to negative employee sentiment, burnout, and errors in hours worked and payroll. Effective leaders should consistently keep employees informed about the latest schedules, make necessary changes, and promptly answer questions about working hours. Using text, email, and phone calls to convey information is not only time-consuming but also leads to poor communication and makes it almost impossible to track conversations, arrangements, and approval requests for changes.

Solution 2: Provide Personalized Support 

Establishing a culture of communication and trust can greatly benefit your employees. Efficiency-focused leaders create two-way channels to ensure people can work according to plan, request time off, and raise questions.

With the SuitePeople Workforce Management mobile app—a centralized communication hub for managers and employees—companies can ensure employees understand their shifts from anywhere they work and are compensated accurately and promptly. This helps eliminate communication breakdowns and time-consuming tasks such as discussing schedule changes, tracking conversations, or reviewing disputes during working hours.

Challenge 3: High Overtime Costs 

Overtime can be one of the highest labor costs generated by a business. Excessive overtime expenses can stifle business growth and increase employee burnout. Managers also need visibility to understand when employees are working overtime and the reasons behind it. Manual processes and disparate systems prevent managers from linking overtime hours to sales, location, and productivity and efficiency metrics.

Solution 3: Reduce Overtime Costs 

Workforce management solutions should not only monitor working hours but also automate payroll processes. SuitePeople Workforce Management provides a visual scheduling tool that gives managers all the information they need on one screen, including sales data, labor forecasts, working hours, and accrued overtime. With the scheduling tool, managers receive notifications when employees are approaching overtime limits and how much overtime they have accumulated, allowing leaders to adjust schedules accordingly.

Additionally, SuitePeople Workforce Management can help payroll administrators calculate overtime pay in various ways according to local, state, and federal regulations, ensuring accurate compensation for employees. Furthermore, SuitePeople Workforce Management automatically applies your company's specific rules when creating employee schedules and approving overtime.

Challenge 4: Inaccurate Time and Attendance Tracking 

Organizations need to ensure employees are starting work at the right time and are expected to begin their tasks on schedule. Traditional paper and time card tracking systems can lead to errors and confusion when employees forget to clock in or out. The problem worsens when the timing process is not available or standardized across different work locations, such as project sites.

Solution 4: Eliminate Errors in Time Tracking 

Instead of requiring employees to use paper time cards, allow them to clock in on computers, tablets, or mobile devices, eliminating error-prone manual data entry. SuitePeople Time Clock allows employees to clock in on geo-tagged Android or iOS mobile applications or via Android or iOS tablets with PINs on-site. For organizations that require enhanced security for employee time and attendance, NetSuite Workforce Management offers photo capture and biometric fingerprint verification.

Challenge 5: Time-Consuming Manual Processes 

Managing a company's most expensive resource—employees—across different systems can be very disruptive to HR and finance. When a company uses multiple vendors or custom solutions to schedule time, collect time, calculate wages, and run payroll, it increases the risk of data integrity issues. Maintaining workforce data across different systems can also lead to other risks, such as information loss, inconsistency, and inaccuracy, and for IT, multiple systems may mean costly maintenance and operational solutions.

Solution 5: Deploy Employees with a Unified System 

By matching sales data and forecasts with employee schedules, you can align your business strategy with labor supply. You can also reduce compliance risks by keeping all time and payroll data in one system and automatically transferring data between the payroll rule engine and the payroll system.

SuitePeople Workforce Management not only supports scheduling, time tracking, and payroll calculations, but as part of NetSuite, your financial status is updated in real-time. With a unified system, businesses do not need to import or export data into isolated payroll systems; time, payroll, and financial information are seamlessly connected and communicated, reducing payroll processing time and ensuring accurate employee compensation.

NetSuite SuitePeople Workforce Management can help you eliminate redundancy and manual work, gain insights more quickly, and reduce the costs of human capital and technology.