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Building Agile Workforce Management: Everything You Need to Know

Updated: Dec 15, 2023 | Published Sep 23, 2021

The ability to quickly adapt to an unforeseen situation is a quality often found in small businesses, but unfortunately, this quality is often lost as the company grows, and the importance of workforce management is overlooked.

Indeed, although large companies have more data on which to base their decisions and have larger planning teams, they are not immune to unexpected events or fluctuations in the market. Being flexible is also more than ever a necessity with the current public health situation we are all living.

The question is—how can you stay agile while managing a complex structure? Here’s what you need to know about agile workforce management.

 

Technology

This is your number one ally to become more agile! Being on the cutting edge of technology is essential to stay competitive, no matter what industry you work in.

The strength of new technologies is in its ability to leverage artificial intelligence and automation to reduce errors and process more information quickly, all to benefit workforce management.

We know that the terms ‘artificial intelligence’ and ‘automation’ can be frightening or seem superfluous, especially if you are not very technology-friendly, but 38% of companies are using an automated management system in 2020 and 62% are planning to use one in 2021. That’s pretty reassuring! Many companies are turning digital, so it might be time to jump in!

Today, a multitude of affordable tools are available to you. All you have to do is compare them and choose the one that fits your situation. This way, you’ll avoid wasting time and the unnecessary work arounds caused by a system not adapted to the needs of your company.

 

Connectivity

Social media, Messenger, WhatsApp: We’re becoming more and more connected in our personal lives via apps and our smartphone, so let’s give a more important place for communicating in our professional sphere!

Better connectivity leads to an important thing: better communication. Being connected to your employees allows you to adapt quickly to a situation before it can become disastrous — think along the lines of an employee notifying you last minute that they’re not coming in today, etc.

What would you do?

  1. Find the employees that are qualified and available to work and then call them one by one until—maybe—one of them will accept the shift.
  2. Reach all the right employees in one click via text message, push notification or phone calls.

We know what we’d choose!

 

Data Quality

Managing a large company means having more data at your disposal. But, when the unexpected happens, it might be hard to study and take advantage of all of this information quickly. This process makes is hard to adapt efficiently to the situation.

With an algorithm that considers your union rules and/or the complexity of your organization, you can easily reduce how long it takes to comb through your data. Sometimes just a few minutes can change everything!

However, the first step to take towards this is to make sure that you have all of the most up-to-date information to use each resource to their full potential. You will then be able to ‘feed’ the algorithm to streamline as much of this process as possible and rely on the data you gathered.

Having all of this data centralized in one place is even more important. This prevents errors, and makes things easier for your whole workplace, too. Equipping yourself with a data-driven system that adapts in real time allows several people to work with the software at the same time, even if they are in different locations, and to always have the most up-to-date information.

 

The Benefits

  • Higher level of customer satisfaction, therefore more loyalty to the company.
  • Lower employee turnover: It is proven that a more flexible company makes happier, and therefore more productive, employees.
  • Better cost control by limiting overstaffing, overtime, and the use of expensive third parties such as placement agencies.

More about Merinio

At Merinio, our goal is to renew work environments by changing the perception of collaboration using human technologies. It means we take care of the time-consuming and repetitive tasks for HR and Operations Managers so that they can focus on what is most important: people.

We want to facilitate schedule, absences, projects, and dispatching management thanks to AI, automation, and direct communication processes. Since demand and available resources vary greatly in complex business environments, we provide our partners with an algorithm tailored for their own reality, to help them easily make adjustments while managing thousands of users at once without errors.

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