A New Era In Workforce Management

By Erin Harris, Integrated Solutions For Retailers magazine

For many retailers, workforce management (WFM) remains a manual and decentralized process that limits the quality and consistency of customer service and hinders organizational visibility and control of labor costs and compliance. When functional areas such as marketing, loss prevention, merchandising, HR, and others within the retail organization use disparate tools to communicate, data can be mismanaged and unaligned with overall company strategies. Cue workforce management solutions and their importance within retail organizations. As consumers begin to resume their spending and as competitive cross-channel shopping rises, your workforce — at all operational levels — must be more prepared than ever to make the sale. The new era of workforce management has expanded beyond time and attendance to include scheduling, forecasting, customer relationship management (CRM), on-boarding, absence management, employee training, workload planning, engineered labor standards, etc. And, the solutions are available to retailers in the form they need — both on-premise and on-demand.