With the understanding that a best practice helps organizations achieve superior performance, then embracing the technology right for your organization would be a best practice. For payroll and human resources professionals, implementing and utilizing workforce management technology can easily increase productivity, save time, and reduce costs.

A common misconception is any technology is a best practice, but you need to look at your organization’s or department’s needs to determine the technology that will be most beneficial to you. Workforce management software automates the most common and complex interactions employees have with their employer.

When looking at the various aspects of workforce management, there are two areas where many organizations have not implemented technology or are using an antiquated, homegrown system – time and attendance, and scheduling. By automating these two functions of workforce management, you will implement a best practice.

Time and attendance software collects and manages time and attendance information; calculates and stores accrued time balances; distributes hours worked among jobs, customers or departments; manages compliance regulations; alerts managers to approve timesheets and other requests; and notifies HR to FMLA leave requests and other employee actions.

Automating the scheduling process saves organizations hours, because personnel does not have to manually determine how many staff members to schedule and when to schedule them. Scheduling software automatically performs the right calculations and generates the right schedule.

The benefits of automating your workforce management processes affect employees company-wide:

Empowers the employee:

• Employee self-service functionality
• Responsible for entering own hours
• Access to time-off balances
• Ability to bid on desired shifts
• Request time-off

Saves time for payroll manager:

• Compliance management to meet federal labor law regulations
• Tracks and maintains time-off accruals
• all pay policies so you don’t have to
• Easily make prior-period adjustments with automatic recalculations of applicable time-off, overtime, etc.

Supports management:

• Allows managers to easily review employees’ time
• Alerts managers to approve timesheets on-time
• Automates scheduling assignments based on availability and skills

Enforces HR polices:

• Supports attendance point tracking to enforce HR policies
• Alerts HR when pre-defined events occur, such as unexcused absences, frequent tardiness, etc.
• FMLA management to ensure employees meet requirements to take leave

Cost control for operations personnel:

• Supports labor distribution to track time worked against activities such as projects, tasks, and work orders, to better control costs
• Demand scheduling based on forecasted labor demand
• Overtime equalization to ensure fair distribution of overtime hours
• Tracks production incentives as defined by employer

Workforce management software is a sophisticated workflow and calculation engine that routes information between employees and supervisors and automatically enforces the organization’s business rules. The result – time and labor information is up-to-date and accurate, payroll costs are allocated correctly, and employees and managers can perform their jobs more quickly and with less effort. The software helps managers control overtime costs and maintain budgets.

The Hackett Group's 2007 Payroll Performance Study found that top performing organizations spent nearly 50-percent more on payroll technology per employee as compared to a cross industry peer group. At the same time, the top performers had 30-percent less per employee in payroll administration expenditures.

Embracing technology is a best practice. You just need to find the technology that best fits your organization.