Guest Blogger: Mollie Lombardi, Aberdeen Group

 
While typically associated with service and call center organizations, workforce optimization is a discipline that is quickly gaining foothold in a wider range of business environments.Simply put, it’s a practice that effectively bridges the gap between short-term and long-term (something that Aberdeen has seen to be an enormous challenge for most companies) by combining scheduling, time and attendance, performance, and learning tools with forecasting and analytics. Aberdeen’s recent report, Workforce Optimization: Managing the Quality, Cost, and Speed Paradox, found a dramatic cause-and-effect relationship between workforce optimization and business results. Specifically, those organizations that had achieved the best capacity utilization, most effectively reduced the amount of time needed for scheduling activities, and made the biggest improvements in compliance also enjoyed the best retention rates, productivity, time-to-resolution for customer queries, and revenue per employee.
 
 
Successfully achieving these best-in-class results, however, is not an easy proposition. Not only is stakeholder buy-in necessary, but the successful organization needs a deep understanding of individual skills and advanced capability for collecting and storing data. Keeping everything up-to-date can also be a difficult task, particularly for industries with large hourly workforces and high rates of natural turnover, such as retail or call center businesses. However, the initial investment needed to put into place the right capabilities and tools to execute on workforce optimization is easily offset by the immense reductions in time and money spent on administrative tasks , as well as the significant improvements in employee engagement and performance.