THE COMPLETE WORKFORCE OPTIMIZATION GUIDE IN 2024
What if we told you that you only need our workforce optimization guide to improve efficiency, increase productivity, maximize customer experiences, and minimize costs?
The phrase “do more with less” or “work smarter, not harder” fits the bill when thinking about WFO. Let us tell you why.
This comprehensive guide will walk you through everything you need to know about Workforce Optimization.
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WFO experts:
Lean Solutions Group
What is Workforce Optimization?
Workforce Optimization
Workforce Optimization Implementation
What is Workforce Optimization?
Workforce Optimization is a powerful business strategy that aligns people, processes, and technology. By combining these three pillars, companies can access workforce insights that help them develop successful improvement strategies, gain efficiency, and deliver on customer expectations for more.
THE IMPORTANCE OF A GOOD HIRING AND RECRUITMENT PROCESS: THE THREE PILLARS
The main driving force of all businesses is their talent. Therefore, it makes sense to consider employees as a critical part of company success. According to Gallup’s report on employee engagement, companies with a highly engaged workforce have 21% higher profitability.
Regardless, recruiting and retaining top talent has become a hurdle business leaders face, considering that most companies are still working through labor shortages and mass resignations. In fact, CEOs are holding back from scaling and focusing on a “wait and see” strategy, which for some, is synonymous with avoiding financial risks.
Nevertheless, SBI research shows that company leaders are slowly shifting their growth approach to more risky and innovative ones. Those committed to their growth plans during 2020 far outpaced those who selected a more agile and lean growth strategy.
Unfortunately, not all companies can afford to be in recruitment mode constantly. Hence the need for partnering with workforce augmentation experts, who, through experience and established processes, can source top global talent at a much more reasonable price.
Once companies have a robust workforce of engaged employees, it’s time to focus on creating efficient processes within all business areas. The perfect way to start is by auditing your current processes, finding those operational gaps, and focusing your efforts on eliminating waste. By identifying those areas of improvement, you’ll be able to create targeted action plans to correct them.
Your performance dashboards and other company metrics will become your ally, as they provide the insights you need to know exactly where to focus your improvement efforts.
Take workforce analytics, for instance. By diving deeper into your team’s performance, you’ll be able to unveil opportunities for changes to process or to close gaps in technology. These changes will enable your team to avoid repetitive or time-consuming tasks, improve their productivity levels, and therefore feel more engaged at work.
Additionally, the key to creating efficient processes is experience, as it provides the know-how for each essential step for a specific business area and the possible bottlenecks you may encounter.
For example, a company with years of experience in staff augmentation fully understands recruitment, vetting, onboarding, and training as they are constantly executing these processes. Therefore, they’ll be able to cut down on waste and focus on those crucial parts of their operations to ensure efficient processes.
To ensure efficiency, companies are heavily relying on technology and software implementation. The great thing about technology is that you can implement whatever software you consider makes sense according to your company’s needs and maturity.
Through software development, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science, Business Intelligence, and Automation, companies can create a tech infrastructure that’ll enable them to monitor and manage critical business areas such as employee performance and quality assurance. Technology also allows businesses to scale operations with lower barriers to entry than ever before. Today, technology must be a central part of strategic planning at any company.
Technology can also powerfully impact processes. For example, by leveraging the simulated training platform Symtrain, Lean Solutions Group shortened the new agent training program for customer service from 5 weeks to 3 weeks without any drop in productivity or quality levels one-month post-training. By aligning technology with the right people and process, one investment will save the company an estimated $6 million in lost productivity over 12 months.
Five Benefits of
Workforce Optimization
As mentioned throughout this guide, there are numerous benefits when implementing workforce optimization as your business strategy. Let’s dive into a few:
Flexible and Scalable Staffing
Flexibility and scalability are two critical aspects customers are searching for, especially when discussing building a robust workforce. Markets are still in a volatile state. Therefore, companies are looking for ways to stabilize their workforce to respond quickly to the market’s needs.
Higher Productivity Levels
By implementing WFO, companies can pinpoint bottlenecks and areas of improvement. Knowing where your operational gaps are enables you to tackle the issue and create a seamless and efficient workflow.
Additionally, the data your software provides gives you insights into performance-related issues. With the data, you can generate employee allocation initiatives or offer additional tools your workforce needs to improve their overall performance.
Cost Reductions
In line with the statements above, applying workforce analytics will give you a full scope of what your employees can do and how you can take advantage of their skills. This will generate cost reductions as you can optimize your customers’ resources and get more done by working smarter.
Quality Assurance
What better way to provide high-quality services than by being in a continuous improvement process? WFO focuses on finding more efficient ways to provide top-tier services. Companies implementing WFO will constantly revamp their internal and external operations to ensure customer needs are met and exceeded.
Improved
Customer Experiences
These improvements (higher productivity, data visualization, cost reductions, and quality assurance) enable you to provide higher-quality services, improving customer satisfaction.
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Flexible and Scalable Staffing
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Higher Productivity Levels
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Cost Reductions
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Quality Assurance
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Improved Customer Experiences
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WORKFORCE OPTIMIZATION STRATEGIES
Now we’ve defined WFO and mentioned its top five benefits. Let’s dive into the steps for a successful WFO implementation.
to the entire company.
Communication is vital any time a change happens. Making your management team and employees aware of what’s coming next will help them feel included and prepare them for the new implementation.
An effective way to do so is by initially getting your entire management team on board. Sell the implementation and let them know how it will benefit their workflow. With management and leaders onboard, they’ll trickle down the information to supervisors and team leads, who will continue the communication process until all company employees are aware of the new implementation.
Remember, WFO heavily relies on employees. Therefore, you must ensure your current workforce is engaged and ready to take on new challenges. There are many benefits employees are looking for in their jobs, but these priorities have shifted since the pandemic. Employees are now searching for career development opportunities, flexibility, growth, and other benefits that add value to them as individuals.
Apart from communicating the new implementation to the team, it’s essential to help them understand what WFO means and how it works. If required, create a dedicated training program that thoroughly explains the implications of WFO and how, for its successful implementation, people, processes, and technology must be aligned.
Get to know your employees’ skills. You can monitor your employees’ performance through software implementation and allocate each according to their skill set. Additionally, you’ll be able to take preventive and predictive measures to ensure you meet service requirements, even during the busiest moments.
Create improvement plans with the QA department. Power BI dashboards will provide insightful reports that allow you to visualize your team’s performance. With this valuable data, you’ll be able to find the operational gaps and start creating improvement plans for individual or group performance.
Data is not just for specific employee allocation strategies; it can also help you make better and more informed decisions about your business. Do you need to scale? Should you add new positions? Are your processes efficient? Do you need to add further steps or eliminate some for a more seamless operation? These are questions you’ll be able to answer by analyzing the data.
PARTNERING WITH WORKFORCE OPTIMIZATION EXPERTS
Workforce Optimization is a business strategy to help your company maximize customer experiences while minimizing costs. We have over 10 years of staff augmentation experience at Lean Solutions Group, which has allowed us to create efficient processes and successfully build mission-critical teams for over 500 U.S.-based companies.
We have established efficient recruitment, vetting, onboarding, and training processes that ensure your teams are up and running in 3 to 5 weeks.
Throughout the years, we’ve expanded to 4 countries worldwide in the hunt for top talent to fill essential business roles.Our alignment of people, processes, and technology allows us to generate results fast and provide high-quality services for our customers.
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Workforce Optimization is a strategy that will allow you to utilize the processes you currently have in place and optimize them to ensure better results without going over budget.
By aligning people, processes, and technology, you’ll be able to create a more seamless operation and improve your service levels, ensuring enhanced customer experiences.
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