Workforce Management Automation: Strategies for Enhanced Efficiency

October 29, 2024

by Malysa O’Connor

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It’s no secret that managing an hourly workforce can feel like a juggling act. With changing employee expectations, compliance rules, and consumer behavior, traditional methods often leave businesses struggling to keep pace.

This is where modern AI-powered workforce management software steps in with intelligent, automated, and employee-centric solutions that maximize labor efficiencies and employee experience simultaneously. But what exactly does automating workforce management mean?

Unpacking Workforce Management Automation

Workforce management automation removes the daily tasks that prevent managers from focusing on more important activities, such as employee engagement and customer satisfaction.

Imagine a world where time spent managing and creating schedules is cut in half, timecard approvals are automated, and employee data is easily accessible.

Areas Ripe for Automation

Workforce management automation spans a range of activities from planning to execution and, ultimately, employee engagement. Below, we’ll explore each of these areas in more detail.

1. Planning: A Proactive Approach

Imagine being able to forecast staffing needs precisely, ensuring that you have the right people in the right place at the right time. Legion Demand Forecasting leverages historical data, market trends, and internal and external factors, such as promotions, upcoming holidays, weather, and local events, to give businesses the power of informed planning.

This move from reactive staffing to proactive allocation is critical, especially in industries with fluctuating demand like retail and hospitality. For example, efficient employee scheduling not only reduces labor costs but also leads to happier customers.

Have you ever been frustrated by long wait times or a lack of available staff as a consumer? By aligning employee schedules with predicted customer traffic patterns, businesses can minimize wait times, optimize staffing costs, and enhance the overall customer experience.

2. Execution: Streamlining Tasks for Optimal Efficiency

The day-to-day operations of managing a workforce often involve many repetitive and time-consuming tasks.

Consider the hours spent manually creating employee schedules, processing time-off requests, tracking time and attendance, and generating payroll. This is where automation excels, as many of these repetitive tasks can be fully automated, saving time and reducing manual effort.

Through intelligent automation, Legion Time and Attendance saves managers time by auto-approving timesheets and by providing schedule-to-clock exception alerts. In addition to the predictability and stability Legion Time and Attendance provides to managers and team members, it also reduces compliance burdens by automatically reporting violations and computing premium pay.

Eliminating manual processes also boosts employee satisfaction for both managers and hourly employees. Managers are freed from tedious tasks and can focus on more engaging and rewarding work. Meanwhile, hourly employees have greater autonomy over their schedules.

3. Empowerment: Putting Employees in the Driver’s Seat

Workforce management automation goes beyond simplifying tasks for managers and HR; it directly benefits employees by offering self-service options that boost their satisfaction, engagement, and retention. These features include flexible scheduling, easy access to view schedules, the ability to update preferences, request time off, swap shifts with coworkers, and even access to earned wages early. Automation also helps ensure that schedules align with both the needs and availability of employees and the business. Legion Automated Scheduling, powered by Legion AI, optimizes scheduling to match business demands with employee preferences and skills with 96% accuracy.

With Legion Frontline Communications, you unlock the power of digital employee communications through modern, schedule-aware employee communication software. Frontline Communications streamlines how hourly workers communicate within your organization and enables leaders to capture the pulse of employees to gain actionable insights on engagement. Through intelligent automation, you can also determine if messages can be viewed on or off the clock and use robust moderation tools to ensure communications are compliant. When employees have the tools and flexibility to manage their work lives, it translates to greater job satisfaction and reduced turnover.

AI That Enables Intelligent Automation

Legion AI enables intelligent automation of workforce management, maximizing labor efficiency and employee engagement simultaneously. Built with AI at its core, the Legion WFM Platform can analyze vast amounts of workforce data, identify patterns, and make predictions, allowing businesses to optimize staffing levels, reduce costs, and improve employee engagement. Think about these game-changing capabilities:

More Precision: Better Demand Forecast Results

Legion AI creates a unique model and forecast for every driver and location, delivering unparalleled precision and accuracy. Our advanced ML approach generates tailored models and forecasts for each driver, enabling you to predict items, foot traffic, sales, transactions, and more by channel and site. There’s no need to worry about model selection; Legion handles it automatically. By measuring the predictability of each driver, Legion provides a precise demand forecast, ensuring you receive accurate predictions without having to set or manage the forecast algorithm.

Smart Scheduling: No More Guesswork

Automated Scheduling powered by Legion AI identifies the best-suited employee to fill open shifts based on compliance rules, employee skills and preferences, and labor policies. Managers can ensure the most critical shifts, including peak hours, are filled first. Legion’s recommendation engine considers multiple sources of information, such as skills, availability, and past behavior, to automatically send shift offers to employees. Managers can receive a notification that the employee has accepted the offer, and the employee is automatically added to the schedule.

No more relying on gut feelings or outdated spreadsheets. Businesses that leverage Legion Automated Scheduling find it’s an easier way to save time and help their managers be more efficient.

Real-Time Visibility: Increase Schedule Efficiency

Legion Time Clock and Timesheets are deeply integrated with the employee’s schedule, ensuring alignment at all times. For instance, if an employee swaps a shift minutes before it starts, Legion Time Clock immediately updates, knowing exactly who to expect for that shift.

This deep alignment helps increase scheduling efficiency with automatic timesheet approvals. If a timesheet is within a certain threshold, such as an employee working a shift as scheduled, it can be automatically approved. By auto-aggregating attendance logs with schedules, you can also see who still needs to clock in for their shift, total scheduled employees versus clocks, timesheets approved by managers, or drill into specific location details to prompt employees with late timecard submissions.

Personalized Insights: Guiding Better Decisions

Data is only as valuable as the insights derived from it. Legion AI unlocks a treasure trove of actionable data, including predictive analytics, personalized performance dashboards, and recommendations that drive strategic decision-making.

Legion WFM enables intelligent automation to deliver deep insights and analysis needed to identify, monitor, and manage key trends for better operational decision-making. Strategic Insights enables instant, accurate analysis of employee engagement, manager productivity, labor optimization, and compliance trends through rich dashboards and powerful analytics, automatically synthesized from multiple data sources─no implementation required.

Imagine being able to identify employees who may be less engaged or top performers who might be ready for new opportunities. AI enables you to connect these dots.

Transform Labor Operations With Workforce Management Automation

Intelligently automated workforce management isn’t about replacing human interactions, but optimizing them for maximum efficiency, accuracy, and employee satisfaction. Legion WFM leverages AI to enable the intelligent automation of workforce management processes across the continuum—from planning and execution to empowering employees.

Businesses that use Legion WFM have achieved 13x ROI, cut scheduling time in half, and achieved a 96% match rate between business needs and employee skills and preferences—transforming labor operations and the employee experience.
As technology advances, workforce management automation will continue transforming how businesses manage their most valuable resource: their people.

Schedule a demo with us today. Together, we will help you transform your labor operations and enhance employee engagement.