Far more demanding of quality and value, today's consumers are no longer satisfied with just standard goods or services. To create unique products with real value, companies need the right people with the right skills and experience. Knowing how to effectively manage your human resources can be your secret weapon today to give your company a competitive advantage.
Keep in mind that workforce forecasting is a strategic mechanism to anticipate staffing needs, reduce costs and improve team effectiveness, and not just another HR tool. It should be an ongoing process that combines careful analysis of information, implementation of advanced technologies and best practices, and strategic labour planning to ensure optimal allocation of workforce resources. After reading this article, you will know what is workforce forecasting, what approaches to planning are used, what labour forecasting models work best and how you can effectively manage your workforce in real-time with modern solutions and tools.
While some still see HR management as something like making work schedules and calculating salaries, successful companies employ workforce planning. It's essentially the science of balancing productivity, costs and business objectives, and it can be difficult to achieve in today's environment.
Proper workforce demand planning provides a business with a competitive advantage in the following ways:
· Lower costs of finding, hiring and onboarding employees.
· Avoiding downtime and delays in order fulfilment or production, which is especially important at critical times.
· Ability to react almost instantly to changes in demand and consumer behaviour.
· Optimisation of staff workload, which usually results in more motivated employees.
Simply put, proper workforce demand management can make your business more sustainable and predictable. Below, you will learn about the most effective forecasting methods so that you can choose the one that best suits your needs.
There are several labour forecasting models, and choosing a specific one depends on the characteristics of your company. For example, if your staff work on a fixed schedule - and the demand for your products/services is stable - then a static analysis will be sufficient. However, if your workload fluctuates and the market is volatile, then you need a predictive model.
Changing the approach to workforce planning, modern solutions enable the use of different workforce optimisation model variants. Thanks to rapidly evolving artificial intelligence, companies can now not only analyse the past but also predict their future needs. Here are the most popular technologies changing the labour market today:
1. Big Data allows analysis of behavioural patterns and market trends.
2. Artificial Intelligence and machine learning technologies capable of processing huge amounts of information and making accurate workforce optimisation forecasts.
3. Automated HR systems that combine shift management, salaries and employee productivity with analytics.
Although the implementation of intelligent HR solutions requires time and investments, with their help it is possible to achieve a significant increase in labour productivity. That is, these systems pay for themselves, and quite quickly.
According to Grand View Research, the workforce demand management market will grow through 2030 at a CAGR of around 12%. It will be driven by regulatory changes, cloud adoption, and the need to implement effective workforce optimisation strategies.
While it's hard to overstate the importance of forecasting, efficient use of the workforce is a top priority for a successful company. Ideally, every employee on any team should be maximising value throughout each working day. To achieve this, there are several important steps to follow:
1. Assess the current productivity of teams by analysing employees' KPIs and identifying their bottlenecks.
2. Ensure flexibility in workload distribution by allocating resources based on seasonal fluctuations and other factors.
3. Automate routine processes to minimise human labour in simple and repetitive tasks.
4. Continuously work on staff development, i.e., invest in training to adapt more quickly to change.
The implementation of labor optimisation tools helps companies to significantly improve staff efficiency, but the actual figures depend on the peculiarities of a given business.
Optimisation of a company's workforce is ensured through proper recruitment, training and restructuring. This requires solutions with which your company can effectively cope with any difficulties and crises.
Since companies - even those operating in the same niche - have their own unique characteristics, there is no single recipe for creating an effective workforce optimisation strategy. However, any strategy should take into account the following three important aspects:
1. The actual business needs, i.e., what specific tasks you plan to close with optimisation.
2. Flexibility. That is, you must ensure that you can adapt to change literally on the fly.
3. Implementation of digital solutions. Manual management is a thing of the past. Today, you need to implement effective automation tools.
Notably, according to recent McKinsey research, today's AI-based workforce forecasting software can predict staffing needs with 90% accuracy or even higher.
Thanks to effective workforce planning and forecasting, companies can improve customer service, increase revenue, reduce costs and even enhance their competitiveness, which is very important in saturated markets. Let's consider three cases where each workforce optimisation example clearly shows how strong the effect of implementing advanced methods of workforce forecasting and management can be:
· Afterpay. A well-known Australian fintech company operating on a ‘buy now, pay later’ model, it faced a workforce management challenge as it scaled its business. There was the problem of customers often facing long wait times while employees had unevenly busy shifts. By implementing automated workforce optimisation tools, Afterpay achieved a reduction in processing times as well as an increase in agent productivity and customer satisfaction.
· Topdanmark. This Danish insurance company also experienced problems in organising work schedules, which became more apparent as its customer base grew. Inconsistency of workers' shifts and high time spent on manual scheduling by managers became important challenges for Topdanmark's further development. By implementing the WFM Buddy optimisation platform, the company managed to increase staff productivity and improve working conditions for its employees.
· The Co-operative Banking Group. Like many other banks, The Co-operative Banking Group faced an increased load on its call centre. Many customers expressed dissatisfaction with the quality of services, as incorrect distribution of working shifts resulted in longer waiting times for call answering. The problems were solved by implementing InVision's WFM automation system. With the ability to automatically predict agent workload, efficiently allocate resources during peak hours and flexibly manage employee shifts, WFM helped to reduce call handling time and increase customer satisfaction.
The experience of the above companies shows how key business metrics can be improved by implementing workforce time management systems and optimisation tools. Moreover, by investing in such solutions, you get not only short-term benefits but also opportunities for sustainable growth in the long term.
In today's environment, optimising the workforce is hardly a feasible task for HR working manually because - especially in large organisations - a lot of information and analysis has to be relied upon. The use of unrelated planning, forecasting, scheduling and tasking tools is also likely to be a headache.
The only true solution here is to integrate a complete workforce optimisation system. The WFM market is growing year on year and today there are many solutions for different tasks. When choosing the best option for your business, you need to consider criteria such as ease of user interface, scalability and cost-effectiveness.
Capable of tracking key employee metrics, workforce optimisation tools help you monitor tasks in real-time to respond quickly to changes in workload. Let's take a look at the key features of such software solutions:
· Workforce activity monitoring. By analysing work processes and recording work time, productivity and pauses, these tools help identify bottlenecks and, as a result, improve work efficiency.
· KPI analytics. With these tools, you can identify your best workers by measuring turnaround times, sales, customer satisfaction and other important labour metrics.
· Automatically adapt schedules based on current worker utilisation levels and customer demand.
· AI-based algorithms to predict future staff workload.
· Ability to integrate with HR and CRM to combine employee and customer information into a unified system.
Ultimately, to effectively implement workforce optimisation you must invest not only in technology but also in employees.
One of the most important tasks facing HR departments (especially in large companies) is the management of employees' working hours. Any mistake in the accounting of working hours leads to overtime, which demotivates employees. These and many other problems are solved by implementing automated systems of accounting and workflow control.
In addition to accurately recording time, these solutions can automate the payroll process through integration with accounting and HR systems. They also provide work flexibility for employees, right down to the ability to swap working days and request time off via a mobile app. Moreover, time management systems ensure regulatory compliance, and this is important for international organisations as labour laws can vary from country to country.
Market conditions are constantly changing and it is therefore essential to accurately predict staffing requirements, especially over a long period. With quality workforce forecasting, you can avoid both shortages and surpluses of staff at peak times, thereby optimising costs and workflows.
It is an important process based on the use of modern technology to improve your employees' productivity and satisfaction (both employees and your customers). It is an ongoing process that involves monitoring productivity, making adjustments to work schedules and automating scheduling to help businesses adapt quickly to change.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies have provided a real breakthrough in the field of workforce forecasting, as they can process vast amounts of information to analyse historical data and even predict future trends.
Optimisation increases productivity by identifying and eliminating inefficiencies in various processes. The good thing is that it requires a minimum reasonable investment. Experience shows that the revenue gains from implementing optimisation systems far outweigh the cost of purchasing and integrating them.
Companies often acquire systems without considering the need for close integration with HR, CRM and accounting solutions. This can result in data silos that reduce the effectiveness of the system. In addition, over-automation without considering the human aspect can cause resistance from employees and reduce their productivity accordingly.
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