Workforce Management- Efficient Management of the Workforce in a Company

Workforce management or WFM consists of the total activities that are necessary to maintain the production workforce in a company. It is also addressed as HRMS at times. In simple words, workforce management means managing the complete necessities and requirements of the employees related to their work, such as;* Payrolls/benefits* HR Administration* Attendance & Overtime management * Training and development programs* Scheduling and forecasting* Career and succession plans* Emergency assistance * Tracking of workforce* Performance ManagementWorkforce managements basically means assigning the right job to the right person at the right time but this conventional approach has now developed into a much professional and integrated management system. Today's workforce management is very much a part of HR activities and issues. Scheduling of staff, forecasting the workload and planning the required resources for the particular job, managing time, budget and financial planning, research and analysis and monitoring the overall process are some of the basic function in workforce management. Workforce management can be handled in a professional and accurate way with the help of workforce management software but unfortunately it has been observed that only one third of companies all over the world are taking advantage of this technology to manage their workforce appropriately. In most of the companies the workforce is handled with the help of spreadsheets. But this sometimes results in recurring expenses, wastage of time etc. Scheduling is one of the key features of workforce management. It is very important to forecast the values and accordingly plan for the exact requirement of staff or resources to complete the production activities. Scheduling helps to evaluate the exact requirement of staff in the current situation as well the in future, enables handling of work load, holidays and availabilities of resources.Time management is another important factor. To do the overall time management for the process, maintaining the login hours, break timings, weekly offs, shift timings are the basic activities of time management. Flexibility in time is not recommended in some cases as it makes staff scheduling more complicated. Hence the time model should be set appropriately and accurately to experience professional and systematic flow of work. The employee's shift requests should be considered well in advance and the resources should be scheduled accordingly, as it helps in proper accounting of time and makes it easy to manage the work operations smoothly. Workforce management is very useful in optimizing the performance of the employees and it helps to manage the productivity as well as efficiency of the resources. The workforce management software gives us appropriate data which is very helpful in decision making process. Proper scheduling, perfect time management makes your workforce management effective and helps remove the hindrances in your daily production activities and also reduces the usually faced problems such as being over staff or under staff, and ensures that only the required amount of resources are been utilized. This also results in improved level of service and excellent performance by the staff.