Workforce Management Tips For The Pandemic Era

The global response to Covid-19 contributed to the fastest transformation process in the workplace. Work from home has quickly become the new normal for worldwide professionals. From digitalizing the customer experience to engaging employees remotely, every business process has seen an evolution of sorts.

Workforce management or WFM is an interconnected series of procedures that an organization uses to maximize its productivity, which is very important today. Workforce management aims to ensure that the right number of people and employees can perform the proper role at the right time and place. You can easily influence your workforce for maximum performance and lower labor costs by using the right technologies, processes, and procedures.

WFM includes efficiently predicting labor needs and designing and maintaining personnel schedules to achieve a specific mission on a day-to-day and hour-to-hour basis. Workforce management is an automated process that helps you get the details to make smart business decisions.

Nowadays, the workforce has become mobile-first and more diverse than it has ever been. Let us know about the Mobile Workforce as it is an essential part of WFM. A mobile workforce is an employee community that is not related to a centralized physical location. It is becoming common due to the fact that technologies are increasingly user-friendly, easy to use, and affordable. Different kinds of mobile technology connect employees, such as laptops, smartphones, and other mobile devices.

Mobile Workforce

As service levels are constantly diversified and dynamic, the workforce of today is becoming mobile-first. With new technologies enabling a more comfortable remote work stint, leaders look for innovative ways to match the mobile workforce’s pace.

The usual working hours were nine to five. It is replaced by flexible working hours as 24/7 availability has been growing day by day. From looking for a job to maintaining a work-life balance, Gen Z wants everything on their hand. People are encouraged by the mobile workforce to cope up with it.

Factors such as flexibility, confidence, and transparency became essential to employees throughout the workforce during the outbreak of COVID-19. Millennials are searching for a more flexible working culture in which they are evaluated for their work.

Companies have adapted with flexible policies and work from home options that allow workers to log in and work from anywhere and anywhere in the world. Although Gen Z employees still favored flexibility, they often tried very hard to balance work and life. The mobile workforce looks for performance management, time management due to work requirements.

The following tips can help companies build a workforce management strategy to inspire workers, involve team members, and create workforce efficiency during this pandemic.

Increase Communication

Communication is an essential skill for a diverse workforce. It is necessary to have effective check-ins, ensure as much consistency as possible, and encourage transparency. Today, the modern workforce expects frequent and personalized discussions. They want to be kept in the loop and be a part of the everyday decision-making process.

There is a lot of uncertainty in the present economic situation, so communicating with the teams is essential across the company as much as possible.

Also,managers should include one-on-one assessments with their direct reports to ensure that they receive the help they need. If possible, try to conduct a virtual meeting to gather ideas, ask questions, and be simply a part of the discussion. Typically, when a person asks a question, others have already considered asking it. So, the whole team will learn from the frequent flow of conversations.

Don’t Skip 1-1s and Review

With too many happenings, many of us can be sensitive to skipping "non-essential" tasks with workers, such as performance reviews or one-on-one meetings. However, ensuring that the team has these details during a challenging situation is more crucial now.

Employees can feel alone and stressed in unusual cases. So you can consider growing your inspection pace. It is a perfect time to start if these daily inspections aren't already in progress. Try to ensure that workers are tied to a core value to add meaning and support your community by encouraging those living out your core value to inspire them to practice in person or virtual recognition.

Recognition

A distributed workforce means that workers cannot understand what the other departments were taking steps to help the organization during Covid-19. It is necessary to ensure that workers feel recognized for their valuable work and that recognition is noticeable in the organization to encourage employee engagement and satisfaction.

It is also essential to promote and provide recognition, particularly when employees are more likely to feel isolated and distanced from their work peers. Timely recognition will help to get the workforce, not only for management but also for workers.

One can manage it by promoting peer-to-peer recognition and making it accessible to the whole company. Encouraging peer-to-peer recognition with "shout outs" or virtual "high fives" remote team members bond together during these stressful times.

Motivate Employees to Use Mobile-first Management

We can use modern technologies in a changing work environment to increase productivity, efficiency, and compliance. Regardless of how much of your employees work from their home, maintaining a 'mobile-first' approach to management means that you increase the whole team's productivity. It ensures the workers can access tools and information remotely, and managers can also check the employees who are working with the team.

Besides, the digitization of 1-1 review and recognition points using mobile technology would also increase employee experience and customer experience even though everything is chaotic. These digital technologies will allow the organizations to view and manage their employees easily at the end of the day, allowing them to concentrate on the employees who work to lead the conversation forward.

As the workforce is becoming diverse, and circumstances change quickly around us, our work culture or saving grace will be the first important thing. While we face the consequences of COVID-19 in our organizations, culture can immediately move to the bottom of the priority list; organizations need to improve their connections to ensure that this precious element is maintained.

Conclusion

The pandemic period has encouraged all of us to support one another through these challenging times. People are learning how to work differently and adjusting to a remote work schedule. They also learn about the virtual ways to work and conduct virtual meetings that they may have used before the pandemic. This pandemic has bought the whole world together.

I hope the above four workforce management tips will help you develop your organization's workforce during the pandemic. If you have more tips about workforce management, let us know in the comment section below.

This article is written by Rashmi Rekha Deka. She works as a Content Marketer at Vantage Circle. She likes to keep herself informed about the HR happenings and write about topics surrounding organizational growth. For any related queries, contact editor@vantagecircle.com