Workforce Management Featured Article
Workforce Management Offers Significant Benefits to Government Agencies
Once upon a time, “workforce management software” was essentially synonymous with “payroll.” Companies’ payroll departments would use the solutions as a kind of computerized HR clock to determine how many hours employees had worked, and use this information as the basis for paychecks and overtime. Even today, the overlap between the two concepts is still very strong. It shouldn’t be. Workforce management is so much more than payroll. This is especially true for state and local governments that are rushing to comply with incoming Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) that will go into effect on December 1 of this year.
According to Paul McCloskey writing for GCN, the new rules will force significant changes in how agencies manage their personnel records and what tools they use to manage those changes.
“The action by the Department of Labor changes the overtime eligibility threshold for salaried workers to $47,476 and will expand overtime pay protections to over 4 million workers within the first year of implementation,” wrote McCloskey. “The ruling is expected to have a big impact on the way federal, state and local government agencies manage their workforces, and is likely to require a surge of individual compliance calculations as well as the tools and applications needed to implement them.”
As a result, many government agencies are hurrying to update the way they engage in workforce management. They will need software solutions that can help them build new strategies and model various scenarios to make the right decisions and ensure they are in compliance with changes to the FLSA. Many software providers today offer a variety of tools and technologies for ensuring workplace compliance, collective bargaining mandates and requirements targeting government agencies.
New features available in workforce management solutions today can go a long way toward providing the tools government agencies require to comply with the law. In addition to time and attendance, these solutions often include analytics as well as mobile and cloud-based systems that automate the collection and management of information.
“That includes the ability to reach into workforce databases to find and schedule personnel with specific certifications, a capability that in certain instances can mean the difference between life and death,” wrote McCloskey, describing changing workforce scenarios in vital services such as fire and rescue, or police dispatch. Using the software, emergency services will be in a better position to find employee work teams and individuals certified to respond to critical events.
Newer workforce management solutions can use analytics to look back and forward in time to help optimize both employee and employer accounting for vacation and sick time, for example. It can help automate the vacation process by allowing employees to bid on time off based on pre-set criteria such as performance or seniority, which takes the guesswork and accusations of favoritism out of the process and leaves managers free to spend more time on other tasks. In the long run, these solutions can actually help save government agencies, as well as private companies, money.
“Longer term time management factors -- particularly those related overtime pay and time periods that affect labor costs -- have become significant cost calculations for government human resources managers,” he wrote.
Edited by Alicia Young