All too often, managers spend more time on administrative functions than on strategic tasks that could improve the bottom line. Employees who suddenly can’t make it to work, “dog-ate-my-homework” tardiness excuses, and the like are productivity killers for your managers. While many organizations have policies that require absent employees to find their own replacements, managers are finding that the employee-selected replacements aren’t always qualified — and sometimes aren’t certified (!)— to fill the job.
Enter workforce management self-service, a game changer that saves organizations significant sums and enables productivity continuity. Aberdeen Group found that from 2013 to 2015, the number of organizations offering their employees access to self-service tools more than doubled—and the Best-In-Class are able to tie this increased access to information directly to employee satisfaction and engagement.1
Self-service complements traditional workforce management modules (time & attendance, scheduling and absence management) to keep pace with modern workforces and eliminate back-and-forth shift negotiations between managers and employees. Functionality like shift bidding enables employees to indicate interest in working additional shifts. Shift trading allows qualified employees to swap shifts, while vacation trading lets employees schedule their paid time off. Employee availability functionality lets employees indicate which hours and days they are available to work.
Let’s see it in action: An employee creates a shift trade request in your workforce management system. This request notifies all qualified employees who can offer a trade. The original employee reviews the offers and selects the trade that best fits their schedule. Eligibility rules and requirements established during system configuration take the guesswork out of finding replacements with the proper skills and credentials. In most cases, managers are not involved in the shift-trading process thus freeing up their time for more strategic and value-added tasks.
Here’s another real-life example of self-service in which an employee typically scheduled to work at 7 a.m. cannot start until 8 a.m. for the next week, as her spouse is traveling and she needs to get their children to school. Rather than the manager revising the schedule to accommodate (and potentially upsetting another worker who is scheduled for that 7 a.m. shift), the employee simply updates her availability for that week. When the manager creates the schedule, the change in availability is apparent and the manager schedules a different employee for that time. If the schedule had already been created, the employee could submit her shifts for trade.
But offering employees self-service options doesn’t guarantee increased efficiency and productivity--self-service capabilities are only valuable when they account for your unique business rules, labor legislations, compliance requirements, collective bargaining agreements and labor costs. Employees must not be permitted to bid on or trade a shift for which they are not trained or certified. At best, this results in lost productivity. At worst, your people are endangered and your organization is at risk of noncompliance. Make sure that your organization’s specific requirements are part of any evaluation of self-service workforce management offerings.
When properly deployed and utilized, self-service can improve employee satisfaction as workers are now engaged participants in the process. A recent Aberdeen Group report, “An Employee-Centric Digital Workplace,” points out that employee self-service encourages peer-to-peer support, empowering staff to communicate with each other. This in turn reduces HR’s support burden, allowing them to focus on more strategic endeavors.
See how self-service can help your organization: download a report from Nucleus Research.
1 "Want to be a Progressive Company that Retains Top Talent? Collaborate with the CIO on Mobile Self-Services." Zach Lahey, Aberdeen Group, September 2015.