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Government Agencies Benefit from Automated Workforce Management
It’s a general rule that the larger the workforce is, the more complex managing it becomes. Employees often have competing needs, and trying to manage everyone fairly usually results in someone becoming disgruntled. Government agencies, no stranger to large workforces, are often still reliant upon manual workforce management systems, which is one of the many reasons they carry a strong reputation for inefficient people management.
In manual systems, all the burden for workforce management falls upon managers, who often have many other tasks to cope with. Since the ratio of manager to employees is often high in government agencies, it becomes a lose-lose scenario for managers, and employee engagement falls, while expensive turnover soars. By taking some of the need for manual processes, however, government agencies (or large private companies) can share some of the workforce management burden, according to Tracy Coleman blogging for the Web site G2G Markeplace.
“Any time human entry is involved you have a potential for loopholes and inaccuracies, but automating that process pushes out the responsibility for the actual transaction to the employees themselves,” wrote Coleman.
Employees can, for example, seek to swap shifts with other workers with similar skills, and an automated workforce management system with the right permissions set in advance by managers, can automatically accept the swap. Workers can also request vacation time, and the system can grant it or refuse it based on a variety of factors such as seniority, the agent’s skills or even accumulated rewards for good work.
But there’s another reason why government agencies require automated workforce management. Many agencies use a rather quirky system to determine pay.
“Most computer systems in government use what’s known as an exception pay system,” wrote Coleman. “That means employees start the week with all of their work hours. Time is decreased based on exceptions that are entered in the system, whether it’s time off for vacation or a sick day. Positive pay systems do the exact opposite. Employees start the week with zero hours, and time is added as the employee clocks in and out or enters their work hours or paid leave.”
Add to this complexity the fact that government agencies must comply with the Fair Labor Standards Act, and the (seemingly) simple process of manually keeping track of workers’ hours starts to feel like a big headache. In fact, putting more responsibility for managing hours into the hands of employees could raise an agency’s likelihood of remaining compliant, according to Coleman.
“The reason is when managers assume employees are going to work 40 hours, and only enter exceptions, either the employee or the manager will likely forget to enter those exceptions,” she wrote. “Operating this way could also create a situation where employees feel bad about entering exceptions. It also puts control of an employee’s time and attendance in the hands of the supervisor. Instead, the Department of Labor would rather have that control in the hands of the employee, and that’s what automation does.”
An automated solution also saves time for managers and supervisors and increases the perceived fairness of managing workforce hours to workers. This, in turn, creates more engaged employees who are less likely to leave.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi