When companies strive for improvement, they typically consider factors such as improved planning, upgraded technology, and incremental enhancements over time. But one important area they often forget is managing their employees effectively – workforce management!
If you have the right people in the right jobs at the right times, your business will run smoother, work more efficiently, and make more money. Operational excellence is all about making your operations as good as they can be. This involves making sure everything works well together, wastes less, and delivers more value.
What is Operational Excellence?
Operational excellence is a philosophy where problem-solving, teamwork, and leadership result in ongoing improvement within an organization. It emphasizes the need to continually improve processes and results, aligned with the business’s strategic goals.
Metrics to measure operational excellence might include improvements in customer satisfaction, reduction in operational costs, enhancement in product or service quality, and increased employee engagement and productivity.
The Role of Workforce Management in Achieving Operational Excellence
Managing your workforce well is key to making your company excellent. The purpose of workforce management is to ensure that your most valuable resource, your people, is managed effectively! Here’s why it’s so important:
Strategic Staffing
At a basic level, you should understand the patterns and changes to demand for your organisation.You should always have an idea of this, but using tools to track demand is definitely worth considering.
Once you understand demand patterns, you can better understand how staffing levels should operate for your team! Understaffing and overstaffing can cause havoc for your business. Understaffing leads to issues with customer satisfaction and productivity, while overstaffing increases labor costs and can lead to disengaged employees.
If you’re able to schedule your staff strategically, and based on data or patterns, you can ensure smoother operations, high customer service and employees that work a balanced schedule.
One of the most effective ways to streamline your staffing is through employee scheduling software. The right software can help you predict demand, match staffing levels to that demand, and ensure employees are not overworked or underutilized.
Training and Skills
A pivotable piece of workforce management is giving your employees the training and development they need in order to be productive, adaptable and capable in their roles. This all directly feeds into operational excellence.
If operational excellence is the ongoing improvement of the business, that should go hand in hand with the improvement in your staff. Offer tailored training programmes to your employees that directly support the strategic needs of the business. If you run a security guard management company, ensure you are offering training of safety, and adapting to technology for example. Or if you require armed guards, ensure you are tracking and managing licenses as needed!
Workforce management software like Celayix does offer tools to allow you input employee certifications and qualifications and track their expiry and notify you.
Effective Communication
Operational excellence requires effective communication – there is no denying that. Poor communication is the root cause of many operational issues and dysfunctions. Effective communication, on the other hand, can promote trust, employee engagement, and ultimately, operational efficiency.
With strong communication, employees have a better understanding of what they need to do, when and where. They are better aligned with the overall goals and objectives of the organization, and can work towards those goals productively.
Effective communication is important for managing your workforce. At a minimum, it ensures that you have the right people in the right place at the right time. It goes one step further however, by letting your employees know why they need to be doing what they’re doing, where they’re doing it.
Measure Performance
A lot of organization have great workforce management, but they fail to reflect on and measure performance as part of their operations. Effective workforce management that can contribute to operational excellence requires setting clear performance goals, and assessing progress on those goals.
Regularly checking how employees are doing helps keep standards high and encourages everyone to keep getting better. An important piece of the puzzle is also creating a company culture where constructive criticism is welcomed as a tool for growth and improvement.
Employee Engagement
It’s all well and good to have your workforce working well in terms being where they need to be at the right time. However, it shouldn’t stop there. If you want to achieve operational excellence, and long term sustainable improvements – you need to look at employee engagement.
An engaged workforce is more productive, and typically shows greater loyalty and satisfaction. Using workforce management to manage workloads, recognise achievements, and creating a culture of positive employee productivity will put you on track for sustainable growth.
Payroll and HR Functions
Finally, lets look at how HR and payroll can impact workforce management, and operational excellence overall.
Payroll is a crucial aspect of workforce management because it deals directly with compensating employees for their work. This includes processing employee salaries, bonuses, deductions, and taxes. Effective payroll management ensures that employees are paid accurately and on time, which is vital for maintaining morale and compliance with labor laws. Payroll is one of the business processes that should be managed well as one of the core principles of operational excellence!
HR is also critical for WFM and thus, operational excellence. HR is responsible for employee recruitment, onboarding, training and performance management to name a few. All of these things help to align your workforce with the business goals of the organization. They are often the ones responsible for managing employee development as we mentioned earlier!
If you have trouble with managing Payroll and HR tasks, you might want to try using a platform like Greenshades. They can make it easier for you to handle your daily Payroll and HR responsibilities with their user-friendly solutions! In an ideal world, you’ll use workforce management software that works nicely with your HR platform. Celayix partners with Greenshades in order to give our customers absolutely everything they need in order to achieve operational excellence!
Real World Examples
The best way for us to illustrate how workforce management can drive operational excellence is to look at real world examples.
Manufacturing is a great industry to use here as production is a direct measure of successful workforce management. Arguably the most popular and well-known example of operational excellence is in Toyota’s production system or TPS. Their Lean manufacturing system focuses on a culture of continuous improvement and waste reduction.
This approach emphasizes identifying and correcting system or process flaws instead of blaming individuals. It encourages every employee to participate in spotting and resolving issues, and it prioritizes making sure that every task the organization undertakes adds value for customers.
Conclusion: Making Workforce Management a Priority
Workforce management is more than just making schedules. It’s about using your team wisely to make your business the best it can be. By putting the right people in the right jobs at the right times, with the right skills and a good attitude, your company can see big improvements. If you want your business to be excellent, don’t overlook the power of managing your workforce well.
In order to take your workforce management to the next level, you should consider adding to your software set to include employee scheduling and workforce management software. These tools can dramatically enhance your employee scheduling processes, give you the data you need to make informed decisions, and ultimately, achieve operational excellence! If you’d like to learn more about how Celayix can help you level up your operations, check out a free, custom demo here!
