The need for higher education industries to change the institutional strategies has never been greater. Lower student enrollments and decreased funding have resulted in the administration exploring options that can lead to lower expenses with increased efficiencies. Human labor costs are one of the major concerns for schools and universities and the prominent and timely tracking of these can ease the reporting process for awards and research grants and ensure that the budgets are on track. And that's where the workforce management system can help. Improving the process of all high volume transactions between HR and Payroll—in areas like employee scheduling, time tracking, and absence management, payroll management— can have a dramatic impact on labor expenses.
The higher education industry is still using manual-style workforce management solutions. And when visiting some schools and universities, you may find that there isn't a proper workforce management system set in place. With the old-school approach, educational institutions rely on the 'honor code' which majorly results in inefficiency. It has been often noted that time tracking and data analysis are not a priority in the education industry. Many schools generally do not track the time their teachers and administrators put in on top of the assumption level.
Workforce Management for higher education promises to help measure and optimize the time for all the teachers, administrators and support staff. A simple and standardized approach like this can help educational institutions save time and money, which is a top priority nowadays. Thus, it is time for the education industry to go beyond the traditional methods to hire, onboard, manage and pay their workforce.
What Is Workforce Management For the Education Industry?
Workforce management for the higher education industry is managing, tracking and scheduling lecturer's assignments in a standardized way in a single platform. It included everything from time tracking, attendance, clocking in, clocking out for teachers and administrators. This is basically one platform for the teachers and administrators to manage their workday. It is not only limited to clocking in and out but includes other functionalities to ease the work of the administrators. These functionalities often include but are not limited to - hours worked, vacation approvals, payroll history, payroll management, updating tax exemptions etc. Thus a typical workforce management system includes all these benefits and more for teachers and facilitators. This helps the administrators to manage and track all their employees and visiting professors and lecturers from one platform and at the same time watch out for unplanned overtimes. They can also assign and manage substitutions, or guest lecturers and facilitate approvals and payments from a single dashboard.
A report states that “Strengthening the education workforce envisions an effective education workforce at all levels in the system, with coherent approaches to the professionalization of teachers and other key roles throughout the workforce lifecycle – from recruitment and preparation to professional development and career progression to workforce leadership and management.” by Transforming the Education Workforce: Learning Teams for a Learning Generation. (You may read more about the advantages of WFM here. )
Why Adopting Workforce Management for Higher Education?
innovative HR software providers like Transformify offer effective and efficient workforce management for teachers and educators in schools, colleges and universities. The WFM manages all the administrative tasks like hiring, onboarding, assignments, approvals and payments.
As with the majority of the industries, especially with colleges and universities, people are at the core of success. The lecturers and support staff are mainly responsible for supporting academic and research-led success and which results in the success of the institute.
Transformify’s workforce management aims to deliver strategic insights about the strength and weaknesses of the existing processes and drive efficiencies. This approach ensures the alignment of the institute’s strategic business goals with human resources planning and activities. With these advanced data analysis reports, schools and colleges can easily pinpoint areas for change and positively manage their workforce and the strategic decision-making process.
Colleges and Universities shall be able to track, manage and analyze workforce-related information and rely on predictive analysis to support strategic decisions. They must also be able to react constantly to the changing market needs as well as industry and regulatory changes and trends.
For the above reasons, a workforce management system is pivotal to any institute's overall success. And so the educational industry needs a workforce management system that is capable, collaborative, efficient, intelligent, flexible and compliant.
Transformify’s workforce management system provides the below features, which are customized to the education industry to guarantee success.
1. Automated System to manage daily tasks with ease
At the very least, any system you use must be able to handle your daily activities and needs. Transofmrify covers all of your daily tasks including scheduling lecturer's assignments, communicating with administrative staff, gathering employee availability, managing shift change requests, tracking employee time and attendance, processing payroll, task management and more. In addition, the platform is completely cloud-based, so you can maintain a safe, digital record of everything, accessible at any time and from anywhere.
2. Easy collaboration and coordination
The educational industry requires a great deal of collaboration and coordination on a day-to-day level. For operations to run smoothly, staff members must be able to effectively communicate with one another: teachers, assistants, student workers, management personnel, custodial staff, etc. It should allow for your staff members to effectively communicate with each other.
3. Work with a Fully automated system
Many educational institutions are still dependent on outdated and inefficient technology to manage their workforce. And so workforce management systems are now created using recent technology to drastically reduce the amount of time and money spent on administrative tasks every day.
With WFM in place, all of your managerial tasks are fully automated; making and updating your schedule, managing employee shift change requests (i.e. time-off requests, shift trade and shift cover requests, etc.), gathering and storing key data points, calculating labor costs, gathering availabilities, creating and validating timecards, processing payroll and others.
4. Flexible system for the changing needs
Educational institutions are known to manage multiple departments like subject faculties, libraries, clubs, cafeterias, athletic departments, campus security, accounting department and more.
Each department has its own specifics, rules and peculiarities. Nevertheless, most workforce management systems are not built with customization options.
On the contrary, Transformify is fully customizable and you can customize the system based on location-specific settings, scheduling rules, department-specific settings, clock-in/out options, and more. In addition, flexible API allows for quick and inexpensive integrations with third-party tools if needed. These include but are not limited to ERP, accounting software, budgeting, project management and time tracking software, etc.
5. Data-Driven Decision Making
Another effective way to cut costs is through a data-driven decision-making process. Workforce Management enables you to make better business decisions through real-time data tracking, forecasting suggestions.
WFM allows you to keep track of all the most important business statistics: hours worked (scheduled and actual), labor costs (estimated and actual), sales, budgets, event and weather analytics, and more.
At the same time, WFM allows you to store your historical data so that you can make better decisions about the future. Want to know how many faculties you should schedule for a specific subject? You can easily look at data from similar projects or days from the past!
6. Compliance with labor law and local regulations
Not only is non-compliance considered a serious case of malpractice, but it is also potentially extremely costly; just 1 case of non-compliance can completely ruin a company. This is why most workforce management systems have built-in features to ensure you remain compliant at all times, and that by doing so, the rights and interests of both you and your employees and temporary workers are respected.
Thus, workforce management systems empower the Higher Education Industry and are designed to save you time and money while making your and your employees’ lives easier.
Learn more about how your educational organization can drive efficiencies with a new workforce management system.