What is workforce management? A practical guide for HR leaders
The term workforce management (WFM) refers to all of the processes used by employers to effectively plan, track, and manage their employees’ working time, absences, activities and productivity whilst adhering to necessary legislation and compliance regulations.
For HR leaders, workforce management systems bring together people data, processes and practices to help answer questions like:
- Who is working, and when?
- Where are we losing productivity due to absence or understaffing?
- How are we planning to handle busy periods, peak seasons, important projects or special events?
- How do we balance flexibility with operational coverage?
- Are we compliant across regions, contracts and policies?
Workforce management focusses on how work is planned, tracked and optimised on a day-to-day basis, and how those insights help to support longer-term workforce planning, making it an essential areas for most businesses across different sectors – and especially those with larger workforces.
Workforce management has become a strategic priority
Workforce management is no longer just an operational concern. Several global shifts have evolved what is needed from effective workforce management, including:
- Hybrid and flexible working models, reducing visibility into working patterns
- Rising absence and burnout, impacting productivity and morale
- Labour and compliance requirements becoming more complex across different regions
- Senior leadership expecting data-driven decisions
Without a joined-up, efficient way of tackling issues like these, HR teams and people managers can get stuck reacting to problems rather than preventing them through proper planning and scheduling.
Effective workforce management gives employers the data and control needed to support both the organisation’s operational needs and the employees’ experience, without relying on outdated or manual processes.
The core elements of workforce management
Workforce management encompasses several different areas of running a team of employees. Together, these areas present a complete view of how work happens across the organisation.
1) Absence and leave management
Handling when employees are unavailable – either due to sickness or holiday – is essential for ensuring adequate coverage, identifying any absence patterns and risks, supporting employee wellbeing and maintaining policy compliance and fairness.
We know it’s important that employees take regular breaks from work for a deserved mental and physical rest, but if too many employees request to take the same dates off work, scheduling timetables and making sure operations are covered becomes challenging. That’s where your absence management policy needs to clearly outline any specific rules and conditions that come with requesting time off – such as that leave may be granted on a first-come-first-serve basis, or at least two employees from any one team must be available at all times while others are on holiday.
Managing these scenarios with employees helps to create a fair and transparent environment, and helps HR and people managers to get a clear picture of their teams’ absence and holiday usage and patterns.
2) Time and attendance tracking
Time and attendance tracking is vital for showing when work actually happens, not just when it’s scheduled to happen.
For organisations, good time and attendance management helps to support fair and accurate pay, visibility into overtime, compliance with working time regulations, insight into workload distribution, lateness or time theft, and any areas of under-utilisation.
When combined with absence and leave management data, time tracking provides a much clearer picture of workforce capacity.
3) Scheduling and shift planning
Scheduling ensures that staffing levels align with operational demand.
Effective scheduling helps organisations to avoid over or understaffing, support flexible working arrangements, reduce reliance on overtime or agency staff, and respond quickly to unplanned absences.
Organisations that have a mixture of employee contract types will find scheduling software incredibly helpful at planning out timetables weeks or even months in advance. Doing that gives a clear picture of how many hours of input are actually expected to be worked, therefore making output much more reliable and easy to forecast. Combined with time and attendance metrics, such as clock in clock out data, and/or project tracking timesheets, organisations can gain enormous visibility over what is really going in their workforce, and where improvements or changes are needed.
Rules-based scheduling also ensures that you have the right people doing the right jobs, covering available shifts at short notice, and ensuring that despite unplanned absences or a surge in operational demand, the work continues to be completed as expected. Using scheduling software enables organisations to be much more agile and responsive to operational changes, without causing disruption or confusion across your workforce.
4) Workforce analytics and reporting
If you’re using a workforce management system, then you can access a whole host of analytics to help understand how your workforce and the organisation operates as a whole.
Analytics allow for:
- Spotting trends in absence, time and attendance (such as a frequent bouts of short-term absence, lateness, or persistent use of overtime)
- Forecasting future workforce needs
- Supporting evidence-based decisions at board level
- Moving from reactive reporting to proactive planning to ensure that operational demand, and employee wellbeing and experience, are always considered
Workforce management vs HR systems: What’s the difference?
Many organisations might have HRIS (Human Resources Information System), payroll, or ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software in place, so where does workforce management fit in?
While HR systems typically focus on employee records and transactions, a workforce management system focusses on work patterns and availability. In short, a HRIS tells you who your employees are, a payroll system tells you how much they are paid, and a workforce management platform tells you know how and when work happens.
The most effective organisations integrate workforce management with their wider HR ecosystem, rather than treating it as a standalone function.
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How does workforce management support HR leaders?
What are the benefits of implementing a workforce management system? For HR professionals, supervisors and people managers, workforce management can deliver value in several key areas:
1) Improved visibility and control
A centralised view of absence, time and schedules removes blind spots and reduces reliance on manual records, planning, and reporting.
2) Better employee experience
Clear policies, self-service tools, and fair scheduling help employees feel supported and trusted, especially in flexible working environments.
3) Compliance
Consistent workforce data makes it easier to apply policies fairly and meet local labour regulations across regions. This is especially true for large organisations that have a mix of field and office-based employees, split across multiple locations, functions and departments.
4) Strategic workforce planning
Reliable workforce data enables you to forecast demand, identify risks, predict turnover, make evidence-based decisions, and plan for growth more confidently.
Improvements in each of these areas also enable HR and line management to go a step further, with real-time absence and scheduling insights to manage employee sickness, burnout or fatigue risk, and ensure that service and operations levels are maintained. Having useful time tracking and scheduling tools in place also means you can facilitate flexible working – such as through shift swapping options and flexi-time hours.
5) Budget management
Knowing how, when and where work is taking place in your organisation allows you to assign a cost – whether that be billable hours, overtime costs, or the cost of having to arrange temporary cover or agency staff. With proper management, you can begin to identify areas where savings can be made, or where more budget is needed to meet requirements.
The benefits of workforce management software
As organisations grow, workforce management becomes increasingly difficult, especially for those relying on manual or siloed systems and processes.
Depending on sector, certain organisations rely heavily on workforce management software to arrange employee schedules according to availability and demand, such as healthcare services, manufacturing, and logistics.
Different employees with varying types and level of skills and/or qualifications will be required in some areas, sometimes at short notice, and planning that in a manual way requires its own role in and of itself.
Coupled with factoring in annual leave, sickness absence and overtime, it’s vital to have visibility over who’s in and who’s off to ensure services and output remain stable, predictable and consistent.
Software can help to simplify and even automate these intricate processes, with scheduling tools that allow you to set rules based on employee skill level, experience, location and availability for weeks and even months in advance.
To add in a level of flexibility, shift swapping and dropping are also options, giving employees the chance to request to change their shifts, and advertising those newly available shifts to other staff members.
Software systems like this eliminate the need for complicated, error-prone and confusing spreadsheets, and keep everything in one centralised location – where managers and HR can keep an eye on timetables and make small adjustments where needed.
Workforce data quality is also vastly improved, giving you real-time, accurate insights into your teams activity and output. Reporting functions enable the extraction of key data to analyse, leading to informed decision making and highlighting any areas where improvement is needed.
To sum up, workforce management can be seen as an essential foundation needed to run an organisation.
As our world of work continues to evolve, we are seeing ever-more diverse and dispersed workforces, so the centralisation of data, schedules, and absence records is key to understanding how and when work is taking place. Doing so ensures that teams can thrive, and businesses can remain agile, adaptable, and successful.
See edays workforce management software →
