Trending
Written by: Elaine Bennet | Bizzmark Blog
Do You Use The 7 Staff Management Best Practices? In an ever-changing economy, getting the right number of people in the right places at the right times, doing the right things is vital. Staff management is a complex task that involves tracking several moving parts. Fortunately, it can be learned and improved.
Workforce management (WFM) began as a staff scheduling method. It is essential to understand that effective WFM goes beyond putting schedules together. It is an integral part of keeping your team functional.
A solid staff management strategy can help your organization. It will improve its time management, forecast workloads and staffing needs, and provide analytical insight into the workforce. Workforce automation solutions and other innovative practices can result in massive cost savings for your company.
Let’s take a look at seven staff management best practices that can take your business to the next level.
1. Establish a workforce management team
Effectively managing your staff necessitates having a dedicated team of highly skilled people that can handle real-time management, scheduling, and forecasting. These teams have become common in many industries, including health care, manufacturing, and retail.
Their role is to maximize the performance levels and competency of employees for a particular organization.
To ensure your WFM team’s success, members need to:
- Have a strong understanding of reality
- Learn principles of efficiently aligning staff to demand
- Learn more complex algorithms, forecasting, and operations planning.
2. Consider hiring a workforce analyst
Larger companies with more complex operations will benefit from hiring a workforce analyst. The Analyst is responsible for collecting data on the organization’s staff, analyzing it, and determining trends.
Using these data, WFM analysts can create plans and operational goals for the company. They are also responsible for finding ways to cut costs and reduce budgets.
3. Track the time worked
One of the golden rules of staff management is tracking all the time worked by your employees. Besides providing an accurate payroll for them, time tracking can improve employee productivity and accountability.
It helps your team improve their time management skills and accurately record the progress of their work. Also, they gain insight into which tasks or projects are taking up too much of their time.
And with today’s state-of-the-art technology solutions, accurately tracking and visualizing your team’s hours, shifts, and costs have never been easier! Time and attendance software shows you who is working and where they are at all times.
Thanks to entire team visibility, you can manage staff more proactively and monitor your operations. Instead of filling in timesheets that have to be reviewed and approved by the supervisor, this smart tech tool saves time with automated timesheet approvals. Your staff can focus on more meaningful activities rather than unnecessary check-ins.
4. Keep track of employee performance
Consider evaluating your employees throughout the year. A detailed estimation once a year, with several check-ins, is typical in most organizations. An employee performance evaluation will show the areas where a team member is doing great and the areas that need improvement.
To learn whether your employees are putting in their best effort to perform their job, establish performance standards first. Make sure to always set clear and achievable standards for your staff, with measurable metrics and milestones.
Collect the data all year long and make a performance file for every employee. When a worker makes a mistake or completes a task successfully, write that down. When presenting evaluations to your staff, set up a meeting with each worker.
Focus on bringing up the positive marks first. And be sure to let them know how they can improve their future performance.
5. Prioritize setting targets, measuring, and reporting
When you have access to data, you can easily track relevant metrics that measure productivity and labor utilization. Automated time tracking tools reduce error-prone paperwork. The system minimizes payroll errors and helps companies better manage overtime and overstaffing.
As a result, there are considerable savings in time and money.
Measuring key performance indicators can help you determine where you need to improve to reach your goals and stay competitive. Measuring performance improves performance, and it’s critical in making informed decisions!
6. Provide training opportunities for managers and employees
Don’t underestimate the role of training in today’s workplace culture. Empowering your staff with new skills will improve efficiency and performance. Ultimately, your company’s revenue will grow, too. Encourage development, and give your staff a chance to learn and grow.
Note that one-size-fits-all models have been replaced. The new training modules are customized and designed to meet the individual needs, abilities, and goals of different employees.
Businesses like manufacturing, call centers, healthcare, and retail are schedule-intensive. Therefore, days or weeks-long training isn’t the perfect fit.
It’s essential to tailor more personalized alternatives that work in the context of these roles. For example, training content in shorter blocks can deliver better learning outcomes. They can prove beneficial in the environments mentioned above.
7. Forecast workloads
Using historical data, forecast models estimate future workloads. When it comes to retail business, these models can predict seasonality. For example, they will allow companies to prepare for Black Friday or other big sales that may boost traffic.
These forecasts can also consider economic conditions, delivery projections, and sales trends in your industry.
Forecasting accurately and planning better leads to efficient workforce scheduling. By harnessing modern computing power and algorithms, you can match shifts to the real needs and achieve workforce optimization.
Ultimately, effective staff management helps businesses to do the following:
- Reduce labor costs
- Streamline processes
- Empowers workers to support business goals
- Enable sustainable performance improvement.
Related: Do You feel Unproductive?