The Workforce Management department ensures that your company’s workforce can meet the demands of your business. However, they are often relegated to contact centers. Instead, leverage their visibility into work, people, and business processes across all customer touchpoints. In addition, when the Workforce Management department is a strategic business partner, your organization taps into their ability to identify efficiency and productivity gains that maximize revenue opportunities. Here are five ways to maximize the value of your WFM team outside of the contact center.
Create a Vision for Your Workforce Management Department
The first step to moving your Workforce Management department from the contact center to a strategic business partner is to create a vision. For example, what do you want the department to do, and how do you want them to operate? Even more, how will they partner with other departments? Creating a clear vision shifts WFM from the contact center to a strategic business partner.
Partner Workforce Management With Other Departments
There isn’t a department that workforce management can’t partner with to execute business strategy. In today’s talent-based economy, the workforce is the most important tangible asset of most organizations. So here are the departments Workforce Management can strategically partner with for operational excellence.
Human Resources
Workforce Management should partner closely with Human Resources. The recruitment team needs solid projections of hiring needs based on future business demand. WFM knows the sales pipeline, customer retention trends, and non-performing employees. When Workforce Management is a strategic business partner to Recruiting, they enable them to better plan and prepare for the hiring needs of the business. When WFM and recruitment are connected the organization can avoid just-in-time hiring. Ultimately, meeting revenue and business objectives start with having the right number of employees to deliver on those objectives.
Additionally, Workforce Management can partner with Human Resources to help ensure performance and disciplinary processes are fair and consistent. Workforce management has immediate knowledge when an employee isn’t performing. As a result, they can surface undesirable productivity trends to Operations while also making sure HR is aware.
Finance
The finance team knows the contracts and understands the revenue drivers. Likewise, Workforce Management knows where inefficiencies and revenue leakage occurs. As a result, when WFM is a strategic business partner to Finance, the organization has a better chance of maximizing the revenue and margin of its client contracts.
The partnership between Finance and Workforce Management maximizes profitability. WFM can work closely with Finance to understand impacts to margin related to headcount assigned to client contracts. Additionally, knowing the revenue drivers enable WFM to pull levers that accelerate revenue by adding headcount. Conversely, they can reduce headcount to maximize profit.
IT and Infrastructure
Workforce Management is a strategic business partner with IT because they know the future headcount needs of the organization. As a result of partnering with IT, WFM provides support and guidance in the following areas:
- Equipment needs and purchases
- Licensing requirements
- Network capacity demands
- IT support services staffing
When IT leverages Workforce Management as a strategic business partner, it enables the organization to maximize their IT spend and avoid underutilized assets and network capacity.
Client Success and Service Delivery
The biggest headache of any Client Success team is having the right resources assigned to deliver on their client’s expectations. When Workforce Management is a strategic business partner to Client Success, there is tighter alignment between the team executing the work and client satisfaction. WFM uses data to determine how well client contracts are performing and the anecdotal feedback from Client Success helps them understand the quality of the performance from the client’s perspective.
Service Delivery can leverage WFM’s planning, scheduling, and resource assignment processes to maximize the support resources needed to execute. Doing so helps ensure the support functions aren’t bloated by overstaffing, leading to increased margins.
Sales
Sales teams want to sell. But, more importantly, they want to know the organization can deliver what they are selling. Doing so ensures the salesperson maintains a healthy and robust relationship with their clients. Workforce Management is a strategic business partner to sales because they ensure the talent within the organization can meet future demand. In addition, WFM can plan, prioritize, and optimize the staffing plans to meet the needs of the sales pipeline from the front-line to support staff, all the way to client management teams. As a result, WFM helps Sales decrease time to revenue and ultimately time to their commission.
Operations
In many ways, Workforce Management has been a function or process within Operations. However, when WFM becomes a strategic business partner, they help Operations maximize their potential. For example, they improve staffing levels to ensure the right people are assigned to the right tasks. In addition, WFM helps Operations ensure the employees have the present and future skill set needed to execute the organization’s strategic vision.
There is a direct correlation between the quality and effort of the supervisory teams and the output the front-line deliver. As a result, partnering with WFM to bring their monitoring, reporting, and allocation processes to the supervisory level increases efficiency. Additionally, it ensures fair, consistent, and timely performance management.
Culture Management
Culture management intersects all areas of the business. For example, the company culture has a dramatic impact on the morale and productivity of the employees. As a result, tightly aligning Workforce Management and culture management improves organizational excellence. In addition, the organization’s culture establishes the environment that enables the workforce to contribute and collaborate at their fullest potential. Consistently high performance isn’t possible when the work culture isn’t functioning correctly.
Workforce management understands the employees and the organizational drivers necessary to achieve its goals and objectives. Therefore, including Workforce Management in your discussions around cultural change and cultural improvement maximizes your effort while minimizing the disruption to employee productivity.
Change Management
Change management is a strategic priority for global organizations. But, unfortunately, it isn’t a well-developed capability across all departments. Effective change management requires proactive alignment and engagement across the entire business. Involving Workforce Management from the start of any change management helps the business partners manage and adapt to change more effectively. In addition, WFM can build performance degradation into its staffing plans, allowing the organization to meet its goals while adapting to the changes.
Identify Revenue Leakage and Maximize Billable Opportunities
Revenue leakage happens across the organization because many departments touch the customer. But, unfortunately, those departments don’t always plan, schedule, and assign resources using effective and proven processes.
Moving Workforce Management from the contact center to a strategic business partner helps organizations identify revenue leakage. Workforce Management can bring their processes to all client-facing departments to improve efficiency and productivity. Doing so reduces revenue leakage and maximizes client billable opportunities.
In today’s talent-based economy, the workforce is the most important asset. Despite that fact, the workforce is often not carefully planned, measured, or optimized outside of the contact center. Most departments within the organization are not sufficiently aware of the current or future workforce gaps that will limit the execution of their strategy. If workforce management and data-driven decision-making are a top priority for your organization, consider moving Workforce Management from the contact center to a strategic business partner.
The biggest gap between intent and execution is a lack of consistent objectives regarding the outputs of workforce management and a lack of consistent process by which organizations conduct workforce planning and predictive modeling. As a result, organizations need to move Workforce Management from the contact center to strategic business partner to enable operational effectiveness.
Last updated on September 5th, 2021 at 08:16 am
