Every business, no matter the sector, faces change and uncertainty. These include market fluctuations, changing consumer preferences, weather events, compliance requirement updates, and staffing requirements, to name just a few.

Retail chains, for example, face fluctuations in online orders and consumer demand based on seasonality. Meanwhile, the healthcare industry is a 24-hour operation that requires staffing around the clock and strict adherence to state and federal mandates.

This is where workforce management software comes into play. With automation that adapts to shifting demands, any industry can be more agile and effortlessly adjust when faced with market volatility or unforeseen challenges.

Leveraging AI-driven demand forecasting, labor budgeting, and optimized labor planning allows enterprises to automate otherwise time-consuming tasks while achieving new levels of precision and accuracy.

Key Summary

• Legion’s Workforce Management (WFM) Software makes it easier than ever for businesses to adapt to industry-wide changes through intelligent, automated, employee-centric WFM.
• Delivering fair and predictable schedules while remaining up-to-date with state and federal compliance laws can prove particularly difficult for multi-state and global businesses without advanced WFM software.
• Legion Frontline Communications doesn’t just deliver consistent and transparent communication across the organization; when employees feel valued, engagement rises, delivering a healthier profit margin and improved customer experience.

The Role of Workforce Management Software in Enhancing Agility

Workforce management isn’t just about scheduling and timekeeping anymore. WFM platforms produce a treasure trove of data on employee activities, preferences, regulatory and compliance affairs, and schedule adherence.

When AI is used to optimize raw data, it transforms into actionable insights and operational efficiency skyrockets. In addition to efficiencies gained through automation, continuous improvement with machine learning optimizes data, delivering new levels of accuracy and precision in labor optimization. With this renewed sense of power, businesses ensure they’re making smarter decisions that will pay off each quarter.

Scenario Planning Capabilities

With Legion Demand Forecasting, businesses can forecast business demand by channel and location daily. Legion WFM synthesizes historical and current data, including events such as the weather and holiday sales.

Demand Forecasting automatically reforecasts and regenerates labor guidance as new data enters the system.

Legion Labor Budgeting combines long-term forecasts with complex labor standards and scheduling rules to create precise budgets. With AI, Legion can handle more complexity in how labor or budgets are spread across weeks, for example. This ensures that financial goals are tightly aligned with day-to-day operations.

Labor Budgeting creates dynamic budgets by quickly modeling what-if scenarios and directly adjusting total budget hours. Budgets are generated in a matter of minutes and are automatically regenerated as things change. Being able to forecast the future like this allows companies to simulate operational scenarios, prepare for future disruptions, and increase productivity.

Automated Scheduling for Unpredictable Demands

Legion’s Automated Scheduling automatically generates targeted shift offers to fill open shifts quickly. The entire process from shift offers to approving employees’ claims for the shift and then updating the schedule with the updated reassignments is automated. The labor guidance can also be regenerated automatically based on sudden changes in staffing, demand, or availability. Employees reap the rewards as they experience gig-like flexibility, something a large percentage of the workforce is looking for these days.

Based on the data the software analyzes, labor needs are automatically matched with employee skills and schedule preferences delivering schedules that meet business needs and employee preferences 96% of the time. Removing the guesswork reduces human error, cuts time spent managing scheduling by 50%, and eliminates natural biases.

Compliance With Changing Regulations

Compliance is perhaps one of the most daunting tasks any enterprise will face. Legion WFM Software delivers peace of mind and automated application of your compliance rules and policies.

Pre-built, up-to-date compliance templates ensure predictable and compliant schedules. This includes ensuring schedule fairness, providing shift bidding based on skills and seniority, and ensuring that collective bargaining agreements are met.

Managers receive automatic alerts, regular updates on labor laws, detailed reports, and full audit trails, taking the guesswork out of one of any enterprise’s most crucial elements. In addition, a schedule score instantly warns managers if their actions accidentally violate labor laws.

Communication Tools Within WFM Software

Legion Frontline Communications ensures clear and transparent communication, enabling managers to enhance coordination during unexpected business changes, such as weather-related closures or rapid shifts in operational strategies.
Legion’s award-winning mobile application helps companies empower employees with polls, surveys, a built-in chat, a newsfeed, and more. Boosting employee engagement is a win-win, especially when sharing kudos, creating a colorful culture, and providing direct updates is easy.

Engagement can be gauged with reports on clicks, views, likes, and comments. When the lines of communication are open, greater transparency arises. Targeted, real-time messaging ensures team members are kept informed, and managers can better understand employee satisfaction. The Legion mobile app is widely adopted with a 4.8 rating in the App Store.

Leveraging Data Analytics For Proactive Decision-Making

Operational dashboards, strategic insights, and reports within the WFM solutions provide leaders with actionable insights into labor trends and productivity rates, enabling proactive measures against anticipated disruptions before they impact business continuity.

Monitoring attendance in real-time is challenging. Managers in highly distributed workplaces or large shops often need greater visibility into their employees’ clock status. Tracking trends is also a laborious and time-consuming task.

With Real-Time Attendance, managers receive a simple, comprehensive dashboard that refreshes every minute and provides real-time visibility into scheduled activities and employees’ weekly hours, clock-in/out status, meal break information, and employees approaching overtime. With this information, managers can refine the schedules for their locations as needed in real time.

The most successful enterprises are proactive, not reactive. Analyzing the past allows one to predict the future, which emboldens enterprises to adapt to changes before they happen.

With the perfect budget plan in place, based on accurate, granular demand forecasted through machine learning, enterprises increase operational efficiency.

Success Stories of Adaptive Enterprises Using WFM

Rapidly Expanding Veterinary ER Company

Any enterprise that’s scaling will face unforeseen challenges. An expanding veterinary ER company implemented Legion WFM to support scaling from 3,500 to 13,000 staff members.

Thanks to a fast adoption rate, they were able to eliminate manual scheduling, which would’ve proven cumbersome, time-consuming, and inefficient at that level. It also enabled the ER clinics to staff emergency services, track employee skills, and mitigate multi-state compliance risks.

This will not only impact their current business model but will also help them scale. With schedule flexibility, recognition and rewards, and instant access to earned wages, this veterinary ER company has positioned itself as an attractive workplace to prospective employees.

Companies Can Successfully Adapt to Changes and Challenges with WFM Software

WFM software provides a strong foundation for driving agility and maximizing labor efficiency and employee engagement simultaneously. Sophisticated platforms are critical in creating enterprise-level resilience as operations flow more fluidly, and employees feel they have a greater say in their lives.

Here at Legion, we will help you foster agility and operational excellence so you are ready to face any uncertainty head-on. Schedule a demo today to learn more.