Building a business that channels its focus on controlling costs and balancing employee and organizational needs is a tough feat in a world where labor costs outweigh all other business expenses by a landslide. Businesses need a way to verify employee schedules, view labor spending updates in real-time, and build a workforce that quickly responds to change- ideally in one single system.
This is where Workday Scheduling comes into the spotlight!
Workday’s scheduling software plays a big part in improving the employee experience. This software allows you to easily build automatically generated employee schedules and assign workers to specific shifts based on qualifications, availability, and more. Workday will save your organization time, money, and so many unnecessary headaches with scheduling and labor optimization and provide increased transparency to keep your organization running smoothly.
This article covers the key benefits and features of Workday Scheduling, as well as how to get started with it so you can retain and support your staff. Let’s get into it!
Workday Scheduling Can Help You Retain Your High-Value Employees
In what’s been called “The Great Resignation,” more than four million people left their jobs in 2021, with nearly half of them representing frontline and hourly workers in the healthcare, retail, hospitality, and leisure industries.
Many of these frontline workers said they left their jobs due to COVID-19, but the pandemic wasn’t the only reason they did so. People used the time during the pandemic to reflect on what they wanted from their work, including better benefits, more flexibility, and career growth.
To address the tight labor market and support frontline workers, employers must make changes to give employees more control and flexibility. That’s why Workday launched the Workday Scheduling tool.
What is Workday Scheduling?
Workday Scheduling is a comprehensive workforce management system that helps organizations optimize scheduling and labor. It provides a real-time view of labor spending, workforce analytics, and productivity information.
The system’s intelligent scheduling functionality automates the scheduling process and takes into consideration worker job qualifications and previous shift patterns. Even better, it integrates with the entire Workday suite, including Workday Human Capital Management (HCM), Workday Time Tracking, Workday Absence Management, and Workday Labor Optimization, ensuring all your workforce data is in one place.
Key Features of Workday Scheduling
The suite of offerings allows organizations to transform the worker experience and address workplace challenges before they happen. Some of these features include:
Workforce Analytics
With access to information on sales and productivity at their fingertips, managers will find it easier to compare and monitor data in real time, allowing them to make data-driven decisions. For example, retailers can monitor labor costs as a percentage of sales and revenue per hour of labor for a store so that adjustments can be made quickly to meet business goals. Increased access to in-depth scheduling through Workday ensures that your business processes are optimized and time and money resources are consistently put to good use, not wasted.
Employee Empowerment and Engagement
Whether you’re a company executive, department manager, or any other type of employee, Workday’s scheduling tool lets you control your experience with its self-service options. Through the scheduling and labor optimization tool, workers can update their availability, track scheduling updates, and even set up notifications for shift changes and overtime options, even from their mobile devices.
With their Workday scheduling software, managers can also take charge of their workforce with real-time insights and time-tracking data to increase productivity throughout their organization. Increased accessibility allows managers to keep track of labor needs, automate scheduling processes, and better prepare themselves and their organization for future labor changes.
Scheduling and Labor Optimization
A comprehensive dashboard helps organizations manage day-to-day operations, monitor trends, and take action on time and absence issues as they arise. Keeping an eye on daily labor costs across all your locations assists managers in optimizing your Workday schedule.
Additionally, this feature can help save costs by adjusting schedules and supporting employees’ needs. Generating schedules and highlighting errors or warnings automatically based on time and scheduling data from previous periods sets Workday’s scheduling software apart and helps your workforce run more seamlessly.
Functional Workforce Flexibility
Everyone knows that sometimes things come up unexpectedly in the workplace and wreak havoc on employee scheduling. Instead of putting all the pressure on your Human Resources manager to magically fix any and all scheduling issues that arise, wouldn’t it be nice if a scheduling and labor optimization software could do that for you?
This is where Workday shines. Employees can update their shift and role preferences and swap shifts from their mobile devices. Automatically updated shift assignments, built-in employee suggestions, and objective “Replace Worker” scores are just a few of the features of Workday shift schedules that allow for an unbiased, flexible schedule that can quickly react to change, no matter how big or small.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Workday’s AI technology allows businesses to automatically adjust schedules based on labor costs and other factors. The technology evaluates thousands of scheduling scenarios and matches worker preferences against business needs. This is extremely valuable in industries with fluctuating labor demand, like retail and hospitality. For example, retailers can use this AI technology during those busy holiday shopping seasons to help retain employees by prioritizing shift preferences while still meeting staffing demands.
Benefits of Workday Scheduling
Workday Scheduling allows companies to improve the overall worker experience. Workday aligns with worker availability and skills to staff shifts while ensuring that employees are not under or overworked. Add in a new focus on career building, learning, and skills building, and it’ll be easier than ever for employers to retain their high-value staff better.
Here are some other benefits of the tool:
- More control over labor costs with a single source of data
- Management time saved by generating schedules
- Improved employee satisfaction with input on preferred schedules
- Employee self-service functionality via mobile device
- Seamless integration with the Workday suite of workforce management tools like human capital management and more
Getting Started with Workday Scheduling
When used to manage labor costs, Workday Scheduling can give organizations a competitive advantage without hindering service or staffing. Thanks to its AI technology, quality analytics, and comprehensive dashboard, managers will be amazed at how much it helps improve the frontline worker experience
If you’re interested in improving your scheduling and labor optimization, you think this tool is right for your organization, or you’d like to learn more about it, Surety Systems is here for you.
Our senior-level Workday consulting team has the experience and know-how you need to succeed, whether that’s with implementing Workday Scheduling or with any other sort of Workday project.
Contact us today to get started.
