Your company tasks you to manage your company’s labor costs, among other things. How supervisors responsible for building those schedules directly impacts whether your company’s labor budget is optimized or over-spent. You may not be aware of all the ways you can save money and manage labor costs with a little data-driven workforce analysis.
Get Ahead of Overtime Costs
Overtime wages for non-exempt employees, whether planned or unplanned, adds up quickly. You can ask the workforce data many questions to help you analyze how overtime hours are being managed.
Who is trending towards overtime hours for the week?
Ask yourself this question daily. Maybe it's in a workforce dashboard or it comes as a system-generated report. Either way, watching for unplanned overtime lets you provide notice to management and their supervisor to prevent it from happening.
You can connect with the employee’s supervisor to make sure they’re not overscheduling on overtime. You might talk with HR about including how a supervisor manages scheduled and unscheduled overtime in their performance reviews.
Your company can also integrate its scheduling solution with the time clock so an employee who isn’t scheduled to work can’t punch in. If productivity goals demand more hours for the week, search the workforce system for the availability of workers who won't be pushed into overtime.
Are teams often relying on unplanned overtime?
If a team or department generates a lot of overtime, it could be a scheduling or staffing problem. Taking a deeper look into the workforce data can help you identify the cause.
If it’s a consistent issue across a number of teams and departments, a larger training on the issue may be warranted. You can also help your supervisors out by giving them the tools that make it easier for them to prevent mismanaging overtime hours, like an automated scheduling system that can flag scheduled overtime before it happens.
Is the planned overtime a cost-effective way to respond to shifting productivity requirements?
A related question to search for in the data is "how often does a team plan for overtime hours?”
A degree of overtime hours may be the most cost-effective method for handling demand increases. But it may not. You will never know until you look at the data and crunch the numbers. Calculate the overtime costs over a quarter or a year. Get with HR to compare that to the costs of hiring more part-time or temporary workers.
As your company builds larger workforce data sets, you can learn more from them. Analysis over time can improve the business's ability to predict demand and plan staffing without paying time and half.
Watch for Accumulated Sick and Vacation Time
The costs of absenteeism gets a lot of attention. Rightly so. But presenteeism is also costly problem.
"Presenteeism" occurs when employees come in to work when they really shouldn't. They may be a little under the weather but feel like they need to soldier through. They may fear feeling replaceable if they're out for a week on vacation.
Whatever the reason, presenteeism costs your company money. It's estimated to cost U.S. employers as much as $150 billion annually.
You can help the company save money by putting together a data-driven workforce program to spot potential cases of presenteeism. Start with reports that look at:
- average amount of annual sick and vacation time actually taken
- outliers who take little to no sick or vacation time, whether over the past year or during the course of their employment
The goal here isn't to punish employees who might be engaging in presenteeism. It’s for their supervisor or HR to have a productive meeting with the employee. Encouraging (or requiring) workers to take their vacation time or sending them home if they come in sick reduces burnout and keeps productivity high.
Avoid Labor Law Noncompliance Fines
A workforce management system like Workday or Oracle, is necessary to reduce your company's risk of labor law noncompliance. The field is too complex to rely on human oversight alone.
If you want to minimize the risk of noncompliance, someone needs to analyze WFM data to spot compliance vulnerabilities. Are people regularly taking less time at their meal breaks than the law requires? Are people not taking breaks? These are all grounds for potential hour and wage lawsuits.
Data-Driven Workforce Analysis Pays Off
Time clocks collect a treasure trove of valuable attendance data. Work with other supervisors and departments like HR, and regularly look at the WFM data to stay in control of labor costs. By making data-driven workforce decisions, you can help the company save on labor costs while also taking care of its workers.
What do you wish your WFM data could tell you? What’s the biggest drivers of labor costs at your company? Let us know.
TimeCom was purpose built to integrate with Workday Time Tracking and Oracle Time and Labor to bring these labor management tools to your department and to the supervisors. Our TimeCom for Workday timeclock solution includes automated scheduling functionality that provides a rich tool set to helps companies manage their labor costs proactively. If you’re a Workday customer thinking of implementing a scheduling solution, check out our AccuSchedule calculator to see how much our automated scheduling tool can save your company.
