Human Capital Management Blog

No matter what industry you are in, workforce scheduling can be a time-consuming, error-prone, and downright frustrating task. You need to match up employee availability, skill sets, and preferences with fluctuating business demand in order to maximize productivity and profits. To boot, poor schedule management can lead to increased employee frustration, decreased engagement, and higher turnover. The right employee scheduling software helps you put the right employees in the right shifts at the right time to minimize labor costs, overtime, and compliance risks and maximize business performance. When starting down the path of reviewing employee scheduling software, here are 10 questions to help guide your journey.

In a 2015 Harris Poll, 74% of respondents said that their company needed to be more data-driven (ie. fact-based) in workforce decision-making. Not a surprising statistic, considering only 27% of C-suite executives found their HR team able to provide them with actionable analytics to improve their decision-making. There are useless Human Capital Management (HCM) analytics—then there are HCM analytics that drive business decisions. As far as business leaders go, leave the “useless HCM Analytics” to the academics. What good is it to tell me that my turnover rate has dropped 3% on key employees when reducing key-position turnover has a negligible impact on bottom-line performance? So how do you start quantifying HCM analytics that can have a measurable impact on business performance?

Through a recent partnership between Kronos Inc. and analytic.li, Benetech now offers a new suite of analytics dashboards that combines the robust employee-performance, time and labor, and payroll data of Benetech’s HCM suite with business data from outside the system to gain clear insights into how business initiatives impact business performance. The new analtytic.li dashboard simplifies the effort and investment traditionally associated with launching a workforce analytics program.

With low unemployment and the competition for top talent at its peak, employers are seeking better ways to develop an engaging work environment that attracts and retains top performers. A recent Harvard Business Review article cited an internal study by Facebook on why employees chose to stay at the company. Researchers found that employees who stayed found work enjoyable 31% more often, used their strengths 33% more often, and expressed 37% more confidence that they were gaining the skills and experiences they need to develop their careers. In other words, employees want: to be in a place where their skills are both valued and developed, and feel like they are making a contribution to the success of the organization. An employer’s recipe for engaged and loyal employees, therefore, entails talent development, performance feedback, and opportunities for continued advancement in the organization. Here are 3 areas where Human Capital Management technology can help.

Putting the right people in the most pivotal roles as quickly as possible—that’s the new competitive advantage. Most of us remember firsthand or recall from film the Miracle on Ice—the story of the USA hockey team that upset the world-champion Soviets in the 1980 Winter Olympics. When questioned about his strategy and player selection coach Herb Brooks in the Disney telling of the event responds, “I’m not looking for the best players, I’m looking for the right ones.” Want another sports movie analogy—try Moneyball. It captures the true story of Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane and how he used human capital data to build a leading team on the league’s smallest budget that won a record-breaking 20 games in a row.

As of today the proposed NY Employee Scheduling Regulations are still pending, but Governor Cuomo’s prospective bill certainly has employers’ attention. The new regulation would require employers to extend call-in pay to employees when failing to give appropriate lead time before a shift or canceling shifts last minute. More specifically, the NY DOL proposed regulations state employees would be eligible for call in pay for the following situations:

The flu has been miserable this year, lasting upwards of 2 weeks in some cases. Worst of all, once it enters your office or classroom it’s only a matter of time before it runs the table across your workforce.

In war, the victor’s write the history textbook. In marketing, those with the bigger marketing budgets define the industry terms. Human Capital Management (HCM) is indeed something new that businesses need, and HR Tech companies are expanding their technologies to help businesses put HCM strategies into practice. But the average mid-market business owner doesn’t know what HCM is, and technology companies don’t have time to educate them. Therefore, in marketing the term HCM often comes with a parenthetical message (Hey, we’re still talking about payroll, and time-tracking, and all the daily HR stuff you are familiar with). Because of this, HCM technology gets put in a box of “HR Streamlining technology” or "a full workforce management suite." But those are severely deficient definitions. More than just a suite that simplifies daily HR and personnel management, true HCM technology helps organizations begin the journey of applying the science of HCM in their organizations.