7 Workforce Management Challenges and How to Solve Them

No matter how well you research and prepare your workforce management strategy, you’ll inevitably run into hurdles and roadblocks related to:

• time and attendance
• compliance
• payroll
• hiring
• and more

Luckily, your organization can overcome all of these issues with the right response and automated software. Let’s explore how by diving into the most common challenges, as well as the proven methods to overcome them.

Common workforce management challenges

No business can overcome a challenge without understanding how it forms. Consider whether any of these seven issues have surfaced in your organization. (And if they haven’t, which among them you could face.)

1. Employee onboarding

It’s never enough to just hire employees. You also need to ensure your onboarding process efficiently prepares them for long-term success. Outdated processes that involve endless paper forms and boring training establish a lackluster precedent that could be hard to overcome later. Even worse, it could shut down and deflate the anticipation your new hires have for your company.

Your onboarding process shouldn’t quell that excitement. It should fuel it. At the same time, effective onboarding can prevent disengagement before it takes root.

2. Employee scheduling

Effective scheduling is key to helping your workforce thrive. Without it, you could risk over- and understaffing — both of which limit your employees’ abilities to reach long-term goals.

Plus, poor scheduling could create gaps in coverage, leading to poor customer support, dwindling sales and other issues related to your industry. Schedules shouldn’t be built with minimal head count or overcompensate at inappropriate times. Optimal scheduling is fluid, considering both the possibility for unexpected absences and peak periods.

3. Time and attendance tracking

Workforce management should place the right people in the best roles within your organization. Of course, this requires employees to be present. Without an accurate way to monitor who among your team is working and when, you might run into errors involving:

• payroll
• scheduling
• compliance
• change management
• long-term planning

If employees represent your organization’s most valuable resource, productive time-and-attendance tracking establishes a foundation for ensuring you direct them effectively.

4. Employee performance tracking

Your workforce can’t exceed expectations without clear goals. If you have an idea for what the ideal employee looks like in a certain position, you should have a reasonable idea of what metrics you should use to track their success. While it may differ for each role, the way you track employee performance should be consistent and free of bias.

5. Remote workforce management

Certain industries demand a wide-spanning workforce that isn’t limited to one location. Still, that doesn’t mean those organizations are excluded from the same issues that impact more stationary businesses. Effective workforce management should place your employees in the optimal position — no matter where they work.

6. Retaining employees

If an organization can’t effectively manage its employees, it’s unlikely to successfully keep them. By either overworking employees or keeping them in the dark about long-term goals and other processes, you unintentionally minimize the investment they could have in your workplace.

Again, effective workforce management focuses on the future, not just the present. Ensure that your strategy considers how the employees benefit from the organization’s success and incorporates opportunities for engagement into their regular work.

7. Compliance

Given the potential for fines, audits and penalties, any workforce management strategy needs to prioritize solid and consistent compliance. Unfortunately, without a way to proactively track and monitor new rules and regulations, an organization could unknowingly slip into noncompliance.

Additionally, compliance can relate to nearly every aspect of your operations, from hiring to payroll and every process in between. The ideal workforce management strategy should be built around consistent compliance, not constantly tweaked to address current and upcoming requirements. Your approach should also be supported with tech that ensures data security and automates tasks to eliminate payroll errors and other issues that risk your compliance.

Effective strategies for overcoming workforce management challenges

When it comes to workforce management, nearly every challenge can be overcome — or at least simplified — with the right software. As you build out your strategy, consider these tools and recommendations to help you address your biggest obstacles with confidence.

Automated scheduling

Maintaining your ideal staffing levels doesn’t need to be tedious, manual or time-consuming. Automated workforce management software has the power to quickly create and distribute schedules to all employees. That way they have clear insight into when they should work, and you benefit from consistent and automated coverage.

Beyond that, scheduling automation gives leadership clear insight into employees’ schedules and can produce real-time analytics to help track trends in labor allocation.

Tracking time and attendance

The right workforce management software will include time-tracking tools that simplify the process for employees and managers. An intuitive self-service experience makes it easy for employees to address missed punches and submit time-off requests. Likewise, those changes and requests should flow right to supervisor approvals, allowing them to review, edit and make a decision in real time — all on their mobile device.

Employee self-service

Don’t forget: Even if you’re the primary user of your workforce management software, you aren’t the only one who benefits from it. Remember, the tech relies on data that your employees enter. So why shouldn’t it be easy for them to manage, too?

The ideal self-service tech will:

• notify employees of tasks they need to complete
• engage them with an easy-to-use experience
• instantly connect them with answers to their questions
• help you strengthen your organization’s overall infrastructure

Automated payroll

Like scheduling, automating your payroll process can help prevent errors and ensure employees get paid accurately and on time. Ideally, your payroll tool should self-start each period, automatically identify errors and guide employees to fix them before submission.

When your payroll tool pulls from the same single database the rest of your workforce management software should use, it also minimizes the chance for errors caused by disparate data. Why? Because everything seamlessly feeds into payroll without passing through a separate system, so nothing needs to be rekeyed or manually verified.

Compliance solutions

If it wasn’t enough to manually track compliance requirements, tedious paperwork and reporting further complicates the process. The right workforce management software should automatically update alongside new and emerging guidance, removing the stress from your overall compliance burden. Additionally, the right tech allows you to automate necessary reporting in government-required formats, allowing you to proactively prepare for audits and conduct your own internally.

Tools and technologies that solve modern workforce challenges

Paycom offers comprehensive workforce management tools in a truly single software with just one login and password. Since Paycom uses just one database, workforce data flows seamlessly and automatically between those tools to ensure accuracy and full-solution automation.

From automated scheduling to payroll and an intuitive onboarding experience, Paycom allows you to engage, motivate and develop your workforce with ease. And with IWant™, the industry’s first command-driven AI engine in a single database, you can instantly access accurate employee data from anywhere — all at your command. And your employees can easily get the answers they need about their data without having to wait on their manager or HR.

Workforce management challenges: FAQ

What is the biggest challenge facing workforces today?

As the nature of work changes, so do employees. Shifts in their expectations and an organization’s ability to adapt to them requires agility, understanding and willingness to change. Emerging laws, transitions to and from remote work and regulations around the use of AI also present new hurdles that employers must reconcile to be successful.

What are the challenges in managing a complex workforce?

With a diverse workforce, organizations need to effectively engage every employee. Automate and simplify any core HR process, so your HR professionals have a greater opportunity to focus on employees and enrich those employees’ experience.

That said, organizations should note that more widespread operations will also include more compliance requirements. Employers need to ensure they follow the specific rules and regulations for everywhere their employees work.

How can companies handle workforce management in remote work environments?

With intuitive and fully mobile self-service software, organizations can effectively manage their workforce from anywhere. Invest in software that offers an easy-to-use, self-service experience that employees of any generation or working environment can easily access and operate.

Can workforce management systems support global teams?

Yes. For example, Paycom offers tools to manage both international and domestic employees in a single software with:

• training on global and local topics
• location-specific onboarding and offboarding
• global compliance support
• and more

What should I look for in a workforce management software?

Beyond specific functionality, look for workforce management software that:

• operates in a truly single database
• offers a fully mobile self-service app for employees and managers
• proves its commitment to security with industry certifications
• automates core HR processes without the need for separate apps and systems
• empowers employees at every level with a command-driven AI engine