Productivity monitoring for workforce management

What is workforce management?

Workforce management (or WFM), is a set of strategies, helping human businesses manage the processes related to employee recruiting, training, attendance, time management, productivity, and workload balancing. There are many solutions on the market helping employers with WFM automation. WFM solutions are not only intended to measure but also forecast employee efficiency. Automated WFM solutions help streamlining employee productivity. WFM optimizes work processes and saves employers time and money in many ways.

The main goal of workforce management is to optimize and simplify employee management, training, and scheduling.

Any setting, either in-office, remote, or hybrid, can benefit from using workforce management tools. Payroll accounting, scheduling, productivity and efficiency measurement, attendance monitoring, and many other features will allow companies to operate more efficiently. According to Forbes, workforce management, once implemented into the workflow, instantly increases productivity of the entire company and simplifies many routine tasks. In just minutes, WFM systems can plan work for every employee. There is no single WFM solution for every business. Each workforce management strategy is unique.

WFM & technology

There are many automated solutions for workforce management. And the larger the company is, the less possible for it to operate without WFM solutions. For example, shift forecasting solutions help assign employees to shifts. With solutions like this, employers avoid situations when there are not enough (or too many) employees, and when employees are overloaded or when workload is insufficient. WFM includes:

• Payroll accounting
• Scheduling
• Vacation planning
• Working time control
• Personnel efficiency analysis
• Employee work assignment

Workforce management solutions

Workforce management is very popular in large companies, precisely because with a large number of employees, it becomes much more difficult to ensure everyone is going in the right direction. The main WFM markets, according to statistics, are:

• The United States (245 companies)
• The United Kingdom (12 companies)
• Australia (12 companies)
• Canada (11 companies)

The lion's share of the workforce management market is in the U.S., so most suppliers are located there, the largest according to 2015 data, are:

• ADP
• Oracle
• Verint
• Nice
• Kronos
• IBM

Productivity monitoring software is one of WFM components frequently used in computerized offices. It helps a lot with workforce management. For example, productivity monitoring software WorkTime offers a non-invasive employee monitoring, designed to effectively measure employee efficiency/productivity, attendance, computer active/idle time, applications/website usage, overtime, and many other indicators.

Productivity monitoring software is one of WFM components frequently used in computerized offices.

WorkTime for workforce management

Not only can WFM effectively improve employee productivity, but WorkTime offers tools present in many WFM solutions. Using WorkTime companies evaluate and manage their workforce based on the metrics:

• Productive time
• Unproductive time
• Weekend work
• Overtime
• False overtime
• Attendance
• Absence

This is just a small part of WorkTime's employee monitoring capabilities.

Avoid any concerns about employee monitoring with non-invasive WorkTime

Employee privacy and monitoring data safety is the main concern when it comes to employee monitoring. Most employee monitoring software on the market is way too invasive, offering features like screenshots and keystrokes recording. WorkTime is the only non-invasive & safe employee monitoring solution on the market. According to the Clutch study, 15% of employees surveyed believe that invasive monitoring makes them less productive. However, this problem is solved by the right choice of employee monitoring software or workforce management systems. With the right tool, employees and companies don't have to worry that their safety is at risk. For example, the most common function of today's monitoring programs is a keylogger. This tool is very invasive as it captures all content, for example, passwords. WorkTime offers its keystroke counter instead, which only shows how often the keyboard is used but does not capture the content itself. According to Forbes research, employees working in companies that use invasive monitoring to monitor employees (webcam recording, message interception, microphone tapping) are 32% more likely to take breaks from work for fear that they are being watched every second.

What are the benefits of workforce management?

Workforce management is a must have for any business. It has long been used in leading companies (Amazon, Meta, McDonalds, Yahoo!, Microsoft), moreover, this tool is in greater demand in companies with large numbers of employees, precisely because it relieves managers from routine activities. The main advantages of WFM:

• Workforce planning
• Workforce analytics
• Leave management
• Providing system access to contractors or freelancers
• Payroll
• Employee performance management
• Time tracking
• Scheduling

In addition to the benefits of managing a full-time staff, WFM provides a wide range of management for freelancers or contractors, which is important because controlling freelance workflow is very problematic.

WorkTime employee monitoring is designed to monitor freelancers or contractors.

According to Forbes, workforce management systems are very important for any company.

Employee performance metrics in WorkTime

When measuring employee productivity, WorkTime uses a huge variety of indicators, all of which can very accurately determine how effectively and productively an employee works during work hours, or even outside of work hours. Some of the indicators are:

• Active time
• Time used
• Productivity/efficiency
• Non-productive time
• Time away

The main advantages of WorkTime are the model of non-invasive monitoring, as well as the ease of implementation in the work process, low cost, and a wide range of tools for companies of all sizes and industries. Thanks to WorkTime indicators, you can perfectly measure and evaluate employee productivity better than specialized workforce management systems.

Top 5 employee performance metrics to track

The above indicators for tracking are the most basic for any monitoring system, but according to WorkTime there are 5 categorically important indicators that we use for tracking:

• Learning and development
• Teamwork
• Effectiveness
• Quality
• Productivity
• Productivity progress

These 5 indicators are extremely important for proper monitoring; they are the ones that mostly determine the quality of an employee's work. And because WorkTime tracks productivity progress, this makes it a great tool to estimate effectiveness of different work settings (in-office, hybrid, remote), or different work schedules (9/80, 4 days, and other flexible schedules).

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos WFM styles

“Many of Amazon's policies were designed to prevent workers from becoming lazy.” - the former vice president told The New York Times. Jeff Bezos's policy is very simple, as he believes people are by nature very lazy, so in his warehouses he has cameras to closely monitor every action of employees. It is a common practice at Amazon to fire employees for one unproductive day. Elon Musk has a similar policy, after buying Twitter he immediately fired half of the company’s 7,500 employees, and the rest were sent a letter stating that those who are not in the mood to work seriously should quit immediately and not drag it out. And for those who agreed to continue to work, he explained that they would have to work very hard, and perhaps even sleep in the offices.