Workforce management is at the centre of your organization’s success. It builds a solid foundation for your company to grow and expand. To keep your staff working like a well-oiled machine, you will need workforce management software with optimized features. This technology ensures every member of your staff performs at their maximum capacity.

Here are the nine workforce management software features that will improve your business processes:

Feature #1: Employee Management

Employee management is at the core of all workforce management software features. This includes planning, analyzing, hiring and managing human resources across various locations and departments in a global workforce context.

The workforce management software is used primarily for storing employee’s professional and personal data, their employment history, their responsibilities and tasks, and compensation details. With some higher end systems, the workforce management software will allow you to measure and identify the key performing areas of your business. This will help your organization to develop a cost-effective staffing strategy.

Feature #2: Attendance Tracking

Your workforce management software should have features for tracking and scheduling employees’ time off work. If not properly managed and tracked, the employees’ work absences could get out of hand. Too many unrecorded absences from work can adversely affect your organization’s bottom line.

The ability to manage and schedule attendance helps you to optimize work functions. It means work will not be interrupted or affected by the absence of an employee or two. Managers can monitor, view, track and manage leave schedules via a single software interface. The workforce management software gets rid of complexities and seamlessly integrates with the organization’s calendar and payroll.

Feature #3: Cloud-based Technology

In-house databases are no longer effective at serving an organization’s workforce management needs. Today’s workplace has undergone a major technological revolution. There’s a need for a cloud-based database that can be assessed and operated from different remote locations.

A cloud-based workforce management software allows companies to manage, maintain, and create a centralized database on the digital space. Users with relevant permissions can access the data information from anywhere and at any time. These cloud-based solutions are cost-effective, scalable, and do not involve installation hassles or software updates.

Feature #4: Dynamic Reports

One of the key workforce management software features is built-in reporting. This feature makes it possible for an organization to encourage data-driven changes, motivate action, and turn data into compelling stories. The software should be able to eliminate data silos by retrieving and blending data from multiple sources. The reporting data be used for employee assessments, networking, and other key functions.

Feature #5: User-Centric Design

An efficient workforce management software will display all the relevant reporting metrics through a single user-friendly interface. You should be able to generate a quick snapshot of the company operations, and also go in-depth to analyze the workforce with a greater detail.

The ability to customize the interface design is also an enhanced feature within a lot of the modern workforce management software. You should be able to customize the interface based on your unique needs, such as generating forms and reports through drag-and-drop tools.

Feature #6: Employee Self-Service Features

Through this feature, staff can view, manage and edit their data. This ability minimizes the workload of the HR department since it eliminates the need for clerical, mundane tasks. The ESS (employee self-service) feature comes with a multi-channel accessibility function.

Feature #7: Automated Notifications

Distributing actionable information to relevant people is a highly time-consuming workforce management task. It’s easy to send regular personalized updates to small teams. However, in large organizations, you need to focus these communications and updates to the specific people they are meant to reach. You need a way to deliver employee-specific alerts and confidential policy communication automatically.

A functional workforce management software sets off automatic alerts and notices to every stakeholder. It does this by first checking through clearly-defined user conditions. With this feature, automatic reminders can be sent, and policy updates communicated.

Feature #8: Defined User Roles

This is a critical feature of any efficient workforce management software. It should restrict certain areas of the database to only approved users. This is essential for data security. Not every user should get to see employees’ confidential data. Even for those with security clearance, access to employees’ information should be on a ‘need to know’ basis.

Feature #9: Data Reconciliation

You should be able to integrate a good workforce management software with other human resources systems. It should allow the staff to export and import data from third-party systems or spreadsheets. With automatic export and import of data, this feature lowers human errors and data redundancy in your organization. An workforce management tool should seamlessly sync data through duplication, updating, and scanning of data history without the need for human intervention.

To improve the efficiency of an HR department, the workforce management software should also allow seamless integration with other critical modules. With interoperability, other business solutions can effectively access and use data stored in a specific HR management solution. The tool should also occasionally allow access to data from other software and databases.