A hybrid workforce is key to keeping your business relevant and competitive in the market. 

In a study by Global Workplace Analytics, 82% of employees reveal they want to continue working from home even after the COVID-19 pandemic. To respond, businesses have to adapt to the changing work environments and culture. By leveraging remote workforce management software, you can digitize and streamline various processes to monitor and improve your employees’ productivity. This includes core HR functions such as time and attendance, payroll management, onboarding, and recruiting. 

To help you choose the best technology for remote working, here are some of the best features to look out for in a workforce management system.

Recruiting

The rise of remote work brought new challenges for your recruitment process, such as adjusting your skill-setting, considering differences in time zones and currencies, and more. 

Fortunately, an effective workforce management system lets you easily source, track, and hire top talents in just a few clicks. It centralizes all applicants’ data, making essential information accessible to your recruitment team. It also automates tasks such as publishing job postings, filtering candidates, and sending emails.

Some workforce management systems leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning for your recruitment process. It analyzes data and utilizes insights to help you make smarter hiring decisions. This ensures that its assessments are accurate and relevant to your business’ demands.

Onboarding

The lack of face-to-face interactions can limit how new hires integrate and adjust to your company. Hence, it is important that your workforce management system can help you onboard your remote workers successfully.

By using a workforce management system, you can digitize your onboarding process. It ensures that learning and training materials are accessible to your new hires anytime and anywhere. Moreover, it can serve as a platform for communication where you and your new employee can discuss expectations and concerns.

Having a unified platform for your recruitment and onboarding process means you can jump right into preparing and welcoming new hires as soon as they join your company. This ensures that nobody gets left behind in the process.

You can further improve virtual onboarding by designing and personalizing the user experience for your remote employees. Consider hiring or working with experts such as people with an online masters software engineering to create an immersive and seamless virtual experience.

Scheduling and time tracking

Shifting to remote work allows you to adopt a more mobile and flexible workforce. By utilizing scheduling functions, you can maintain a balance between labor costs and actual service demands.

With this feature, you can leverage real-time data to create the best schedule for your workforce. It examines your employees’ past performance and productivity to determine your company’s current staffing requirements. Moreover, you can use this feature to identify bottlenecks in your teams’ workflows.

Aside from optimizing schedules, this feature can also boost visibility and transparency within your workforce. It lets you keep track of their work hours, their productivity, and their tasks.

Payroll management

Payroll management is yet another feature to add to your list of remote team management tools. This allows you to track your employees’ payroll, benefits, absences and leaves, and bonuses. But more than that, it automates administrative tasks such as filing and approving necessary documents for payroll.

Thankfully, some workforce management systems offer built-in payroll management functions. It can provide you and your remote employees a self-service platform to access payroll, benefits, and attendance-related materials. This way, your workers can view information about their pays and complete any actions needed without further assistance from your human resource team.

Other workforce management software provides you with proof of delivery function. This is perfect for those who are working with freelancers and consultants. It automates invoicing and captures essential information and signatures to initiate payment processing for services rendered.

Performance management

Remote work makes it harder to keep track of your employees’ productivity. With everyone working in their respective homes, you can’t ascertain if they are slacking off during work hours. Thankfully, workforce management software provides you with tools to measure their productivity and evaluate their performance.

With the best remote team management software, you can have an accurate overview of your remote workers’ capabilities and outputs. It keeps track of their individual assignments, progress, and accomplishments. This way, you can properly evaluate and review their performance.

But more than that, you need software that allows you to communicate expectations, establish objects, and identify goals for your entire workforce. Having an end-to-end workforce management system ensures that your performance management remains consistent all throughout.

Reporting and forecasting

Nowadays, being data-driven is no longer a luxury for businesses. It is now a necessity if you want to keep up with your competitors. In fact, Statista shows that total business spending for data and analytics have reached $218.5 billion in 2020.

Hence, another feature to look out for in your workforce management system is robust reporting and forecasting functions. By using software, you can automatically collect and analyze data in all aspects of your workforce management. Moreover, it presents you with informative visualizations, enabling you to determine the strengths and weaknesses of your current strategy in just a glance.

It can also look into historical data and trends to accurately predict future possibilities for your business. For example, you have noticed that employees with a certain background are more productive compared to others. Having such knowledge, you now have more or less an idea of what qualities to look for during your next recruitment.

Integrations

Your workforce management system can have its own limitations. Hence, you would eventually need other tools for managing remote employees such as project management software or enterprise resource planning software.

Nonetheless, you can ensure a seamless and immersive virtual workplace by integrating your workforce management system with the rest of your digital solutions. This allows you to sync data across all your software and make it easier to switch from one task to another.

Just make sure to check out what other software is compatible with your chosen software. You can also contact your service providers to find out more about integrations and customization.

The right software for you

With the rise of remote work, it is high time you evaluate your current tools and strategy in managing your workforce. Running a virtual workplace means you will be dealing with new sets of demands and challenges. It will also require you to embrace full digital transformation in various aspects of your operations.

Invest in a remote workforce management system to make sure that you can adapt to the changing times. It provides you with a unified platform where you can control the different processes and practices of your workforce management through your preferred devices.

Choose the right software for your business by keeping in mind these essential features in a workforce management system. To give you a head start, you can also check out Transformify.