Key Components of Cutting-Edge Workforce Management Systems

The Right Workforce Management System Can Change the Way You Do Business

In the past, workforce management (WFM) software was a solution focused on optimizing efficiencies, productivity, and operations. The employee experience was often an afterthought or came in the form of a bolted-on mobile app. Modern WFM software simultaneously maximizes labor efficiency and the employee experience. Automated, intelligent, employee-centric WFM solutions create long-term labor budget plans, execute fair and compliant schedules, and meet employee preferences and availability, creating a sufficient work-life balance for employees. Although that’s a lot of ground for one platform, it’s possible with the right technology.

Key Summary

• One key component of an intelligent workforce management system is its ability to leverage ML-powered demand forecasts and labor models to create labor budgets up to 18 months into the future.
• Auto scheduling can also reduce managers’ burdens, allowing them to focus more on employee coaching and revenue-producing tasks. 
• In a retail setting, demand forecasting should also be able to automatically factor in external variables, such as local events and the weather, and internal events, such as sales or promotions. 
• Creating dynamic budgets and forecasts that can evolve by quickly modeling what-if scenarios or directly adjusting the total budget hours provides more agility to businesses.
• Intelligently automated timesheets with deep integration with schedules ensure that timesheets and schedules are always aligned and save managers’ time with timesheet auto-approvals and schedule-to-clock exception alerts.
• Modern Time and Attendance includes pre-built compliance templates that are pre-loaded and ready to use and an extensible platform for easily configuring additional pay rules specific to your company, with no IT assistance required. 

Legion WFM enables intelligent automation across the entire workforce management process continuum by continuously learning from data, leveraging AI, and providing an engaging user experience. All of this is delivered in an easy, intuitive app that employees rate a 4.8 in the app store; almost 90% of customers’ employees use it weekly to check schedules and timecards, request time off, access wages early, and more.

When you automate routine tasks and enable managers to focus on what matters most, you can generate optimized schedules, reduce timesheet errors, and increase sales dramatically. Here are ten key features that can achieve all that and more. 

1. Long-Term Labor Budgeting

Modern workforce management software should be able to generate long-term labor budgets you can trust. Machine learning (ML) can create accurate, detailed labor forecasts, making it easy to model what-if scenarios. 

With Legion Labor Budgeting, we help enterprises set budgets 12 to 18 months in advance. Managers can also model what-if scenarios to identify profit-optimized labor decisions Budgeting is an ongoing process. Legion Labor Budgeting helps with monthly budget adjustments and creates a level of visibility that offers profound insights into tracking budgets to execution, identifying gaps, and making adjustments on a case-by-case basis. 

2. Demand Forecasting 

AI-powered Demand Forecasting automatically predicts demand across all customer touchpoints and locations, making it easy to adjust to dynamic business changes and model what-if scenarios, such as adjusting total budget hours, quickly changing inputs, and enforcing operating labor models. 

Legion Demand Forecasting is fully automated and based on mature data science. The Legion Demand Forecasting engine automatically delivers consistent, accurate forecasts weekly across all locations and channels to increase productivity and profitability across all your omnichannel operations. It learns patterns from historical data, predicts future values based on those patterns, and automatically handles your business’s scale and complexity.

Legion Demand Forecasting leverages AI to synthesize historical and current information about how customers make their purchases, local weather, promotions and events, and more. This allows the automated creation of optimal labor plans, budgets, and schedules, freeing managers to focus on revenue-producing tasks. 

3. Integration of Demand Forecasts and Labor Budgeting

An accurate demand forecast is pivotal because it predicts future labor demands. When a forecast is accurate, businesses can ensure the correct number of employees is scheduled at the right times. This meets business demands and avoids overstaffing and understaffing, leading to cost savings and improved employee satisfaction. 

With Legion Labor Optimization, you can automatically create down-to-the-minute labor models across all channels based on accurate demand forecasts. This gives managers actionable insights because it gives a fine-grained view of scheduling shift increments. 

Legion WFM automatically accounts for every type of workload, routine or flexible, providing helpful insights for labor planning. This allows you to see the total cost of the schedule, where the gaps are between scheduled hours, demand, and employee preferences, automatically adjusting to meet objectives. 

4. AI-Powered Scheduling

Auto scheduling software eases managers’ burdens and cuts time spent on generating and managing schedules. 

Sophisticated workforce management platforms like Legion WFM instantly generate optimal schedules that match business needs with employee preferences and skills, including the most qualified employee for a shift based on skills, performance, labor rules, budget constraints, and compliance rules. Legion AI curates shift offers automatically in seconds based on preferences, skills, and compliance factors. 

Legion’s automated scheduling software also includes a weighted Schedule Score that helps managers assess whether a schedule meets their objectives. With dashboards and tools, managers can see if their edits are improving or reducing the quality of the schedule. For example, they can see how the Schedule Score fares against the business’s key goals, including accuracy at peak and non-peak times, compliance, budget, and meeting employees’ availability needs.

Moving forward, the engine learns and continuously improves based on a better understanding of manager edits and changes. Only modifications that enhance the Schedule Score and do not violate any configured rules will be incorporated.

During schedule generation, Legion WFM’s multi-location optimization process automatically assigns employees across locations based on business needs and employee skills and preferences. This allows you to optimize your workforce across locations to cover critical needs during projected peak periods while avoiding costly overtime, protecting service levels, and offering increased flexibility for hourly employees. 

5. Time and Attendance 

Modern Time and Attendance goes beyond basic clocking in and clocking out. 

Legion Time and Attendance enables intelligent automation of timesheet approvals, corrections, and premium calculations. Using Legion WFM’s schedule-aware timekeeping, managers and payroll administrators can automatically approve timesheets or review and approve exceptions in minutes. It saves managers’ time with timesheet auto-approvals and schedule-to-clock exception alerts, and deep integration with schedules ensures that timesheets and schedules are always aligned.

Pre-built compliance templates for pay rules and extensibility to build additional pay rules without customization or R&D help minimize compliance risk. To protect your business, you can also restrict unscheduled clock-ins, track out-of-compliance inputs, and enable employee attestation. 

6. Consolidated Employee Communications

Attracting and retaining hourly employees is one of the biggest challenges businesses face today. One of the top reasons employees leave their jobs is poor communication with their managers. Modern, consistent communication can boost employee engagement, build trust and transparency, and increase retention.

Communication software can bridge the gap between hourly employees and the management team. In the retail workforce, this is particularly helpful because hourly employees have varying schedules and may have different access to communication channels than their salaried peers. Furthermore, when communications regarding schedules, company news, and so on are spread between emails, calls, and in-person communications, it leaves room for people to get left out. 

Legion Frontline Communications dramatically improves the experience of frontline hourly workers by providing modern, schedule-aware communications that create trust, transparency, and engagement.

Frontline Communications is embedded into the same easy-to-use mobile app employees use to check schedules or timecards. With built-in chat, newsfeed, announcements, polls, and surveys, managers can share kudos, build corporate culture, and empower employees with direct updates from management.

Managers can measure engagement with analytics and report on views, clicks, likes, and comments. Powerful moderation tools also quickly isolate and resolve improper use of communication tools.

7. Recognize Performance

Companies can increase retention simply by recognizing performance and rewarding employees. Team morale grows when transparent, fair, equitable, and quantifiable performance metrics are implemented. Regular feedback also helps to build trust. 

Legion WFM leverages intelligent automation for the human side of things. Key metrics automatically measure employees’ daily performance, allowing management to build performance tracking into daily routines. 

Performance is posted on a leaderboard-style dashboard. Trend analysis can identify team challenges and opportunities.

8. Intuitive Mobile App

This brings us to the importance of an intuitive mobile app. Legion’s mobile app has been voted number one by thousands of employees nationwide. With an average rating of 4.8, the app is adopted by almost 90% of customers’ employees.

With its intuitive design, people have a powerful tool right in the palm of their hands that contains: 

• Schedules
• Shift offers
• Attestation
• Time-off requests
• Shift trades
• Clock-in
• Modern communication tools
• Performance metrics
• Instant access to their earned wages

The Legion mobile app helps employees manage their work-life balance all from one convenient app. 

Since these tools are fully embedded in Legion WFM, they leverage policies, organizational hierarchies, roles, and permissions already set up in the platform, enabling faster rollout because no new app or IT project is required. 

9. Earned Wage Access

Earned Wage Access (EWA) is a financial tool that allows employees to access their earned wages before their regular payday. Legion WFM enables intelligent automation to support employee financial health and optimize operational efficiency simultaneously. Legion InstantPay enables employees to view how much they’ll earn if they pick up a shift and withdraw a percentage of the earned wages for those hours. Managers achieve better schedule adherence and clock hygiene and fill shifts faster.

Employee financial stress contributes to lost productivity and increased turnover. Offering Earned Wage Access can be a compelling benefit to attract new talent and retain existing staff. Legion’s approach highlights EWA as a key differentiator in the competitive labor market, helping HR teams to stand out to prospective and current employees. 

Earned Wage Access empowers employees and supports their financial well-being while helping businesses attract and retain employees. It can help employees cover unexpected expenses without using high-interest loans or credit card debt.

10. Compliance Templates

We touched briefly upon the impact accurate time and attendance reporting has on compliance. But, the right WFM platform will also be able to provide pre-built templates for ever-evolving Federal, State, and city labor laws while providing an extensible framework that makes it easy to build additional rules to ensure all your pay rules are accounted for without requiring R&D investment.

With Legion WFM, admins can centrally configure compliance rules, scheduling, and pay policies. 

Legion’s powerful, self-service capabilities through Control Center provide an intuitive UI that simplifies administration and operational management, allowing you to be up and running in weeks. Lightning-fast implementations and easy-to-use configuration templates accelerate and simplify the initial setup, making it all possible.

Start Building Your Future Today

Imagine a workplace where you can harness the power of AI to enable intelligent automation to maximize labor efficiency and employee engagement, while allowing for human control.

Ready for a demo? See how Legion WFM’s intelligent automation can help maximize labor efficiency and employee engagement from one intuitive platform.