About 37 percent of the global workforce are millennial, and the GenZs are expected to comprise 27 percent of the workforce by 2025! These generations grew up surfing the internet and expect their workplaces to be technologically savvy. Moreover, they need their workplace to be their happy place—in terms of money, management, benefits, and work satisfaction.
Moreover, how a company manages its workforce directly impacts how employees feel about them. The better they feel, the higher their productivity and chances of sticking with your company will be.
Having the right set of software in your arsenal is one of the best things you can do. They help streamline operations within your organisation, reduce workplace stress, and increase productivity.
Criteria for selecting a software
It can be overwhelming to select the right software, considering there are multiple options available today.
Here are three qualities you should look for in workforce management software.
1. Security
A cyber attack on your company can have several implications—revenue loss, operational downtime, reputational damage, stolen assets, etc. This is bound to happen in a hybrid work culture when employees use their personal devices from home without security protections.
Look for solutions that provide encrypted data exchange or have anti-spam, anti-phishing features and multi-factor authentication.
2. Integration
Imagine the hassle of switching between tools to chat with internal teams and external stakeholders! Luckily most workspace software have an integration feature that allows you to access all your software in one place without having to login separately.
3. Ease of use
You wouldn’t want to invest in a software your team finds challenging to navigate and end up not using it at all! Go with a tool with a low learning curve and high end features that makes your and your employees’ job more manageable instead of complicating it.
My top recommendations for workforce management software
There’s no one size fits all solution that can take care of all your business operations. For instance, the HR teams might need a solution to handle their HR operations, or the IT team might need a better way to manage their projects.
For your convenience, we’ve listed one software for each category of business verticals.
1. Perkbox: employee engagement
As per an employee engagement report, only 42 percent of employees in the state of Vermont felt that the morale within their department is good.
You see, bad morale is the silent killer of the productivity and performance of your employees.
Perkbox is an employee engagement tool that helps you connect closely with your employee and put them first. It allows you to recognize top talents within your organisation and reward them for their hardwork.
Here’s everything the tool offers to help you boost employee engagement.
- It helps you reward your employees with a variety of perks and discounts to make them feel valued
- You can build an amazing work culture by coming up with employee engagement ideas to keep them motivated
- It comes with a variety of on demand content to support employee well being
- It has admin features to help you manage and track usage, saving you time, money and resources
The best part? It seamlessly integrates with your favorite HR management platform, allowing you to quickly onboard and offboard users. Moreover, it lets you securely login and navigates through different tools with the help of single signon.
2. Leapsome: work survey platform
Managing employees would be much easier if only we could know how employees feel. The problem is most HR leaders don’t know how to measure their employee experience. Especially in hybrid work culture, it gets more challenging to know when an employee is unhappy or behaving differently than usual.
Luckily, we have survey platforms that allow us to checkin with employees and help them feel valued at work. They help you send out thoughtful surveys asking them remote work survey questions to know their experience.
Leapsome is one such employee survey platform that helps you run surveys of different kinds, including eNPS, engagement, and pulse surveys. It has an abundance of templates to help you quickly create surveys within minutes! It also offers people analytics to help you visualise and interpret the data your collect.
Additionally, it’s super intuitive, easy to use and scalable, and you can easily integrate it with your HR and communication softwares. It’s also fully compliant with GDPR and offers enterprise level security.
3. ClickUp: project management
It’s 2022, and if you’re still relying on sheets and documents to manage your tasks and projects, you’re missing out on a lot!
ClickUp is a highly versatile tool for project management that allows you to manage all your tasks and projects on one platform. You get to see your workspace in more than fifteen views, such as custom dashboards, Gantt Charts, lists, calendars, timelines, mindmap, and many more. Even the free version of it is loaded with features!
Here’s everything the powerful project management tool has to offer.
- A birdseye view of everything you’ve been working on—all tasks across every level of your organisation
- Ability to organise work in any view suiting your needs
- Easy nocode customisation
- Seamless collaboration with teams with features like whiteboard, proofing, email, chat, etc
- ClickUp docs to help you document anything on the go and share it with your team
- Realtime reporting to know what’s working and what’s not and measure your goals
- Global time tracking to have more control over time
4. Monday: HRM software
Manually handling HR operations such as onboarding, managing attendance, payroll, etc., is not feasible today.
Reason—the job of HR professionals is no longer limited to managing administrative and financial tasks. Their obligations have changed. They now also participate in the planning, development, and decision-making processes.
This calls for automating all time-consuming manual procedures and streamlining the entire HR management lifecycle.
HR management tools like Monday.com is your best bet to automate recurring HR operations and streamline them. It helps you manage employees effortlessly and provide the best experience.
You get access to every employee’s day to day performance
- It helps you attract top talents with your smooth onboarding processes
- It helps you retain employees with activities dedicated to employee wellbeing
- It has readymade templates to help you create your own workflow and specific use cases
- You have transparency in performance review processes
5. Microsoft Teams: team communication
The hybrid work culture has made it more difficult for remote teams to stay productive and accountable for their work. The issue arises when there is miscommunication, lack of engagement, and untimely updates between remote teams. This silo mindset hurts an organisation's vision and delays the team's progress.
Microsoft teams is a team collaboration and video conferencing platform that brings teams together irrespective of location. Users can text, video call, group message, or send voice notes to their teammates to provide realtime updates on their work.
The meeting tool has various features, including blurred backgrounds, viewing modes, breakout rooms, screen sharing, meeting recording, and live transcription. Moreover, if your company uses other Microsoft products such as Onedrive, Sharepoint, Powerpoint, etc., the collaboration becomes more intuitive.
The collaboration software also provides end-to-end encryption (E2EE) in all team communications, making it one of the safest tools to work with!
In a nutshell
These workforce management tools are the holygrails, especially when you manage distributed teams. They help you streamline many operations in your business—task delegation, team communication, time tracking, employee attendance, payroll processing, and so much more!
However, remember not to get overwhelmed by the wide variety available today—focus on what your business needs, what your employees need, and what you can do to keep them content and productive.