By Natalie B. Hoffmann, CPA.CITP HKP President

Human resource professionals have a lot on their plate when it comes to work force Management. Between entering payroll, to open enrollment, to HR law compliance,it can be daunting and overwhelming trying to keep up with changes in your company and in employment law.

Plus, the time spent managing compliance takes away from other projects you’re trying to implement. Engaging a workforce management provider can help speed up those routine tasks, make sense of compliance, and get you back to working on your business. When you can delegate routine tasks and organize your data, you create more opportunities to allocate more time and resources to mission-critical projects like growing your business.

There are endless ways a Workforce Management Solution can benefit your business by improving your workflow. Here are the top eight ways a workforce management solution can help you increase productivity:

1. Simplify Processes – When you choose to engage a workforce management solution,you consolidate and simplify several HR and payroll-related processes into a few simple steps. With an all-in-one system, you eliminate redundancy and time spent entering employee information. Plus, human capital management systems capitalize on technology’s ability to track your employees’ time, PTO, benefits and your company’s compliance with regulations like health care law and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), saving you a lot of time and guesswork.
2. Manage Compliance – HR law compliance can be confusing and costly. Work force management solutions can help you keep track of the number of full and part-time employees you have, the hours they work, their various salaries, and your employer responsibilities. By compiling and sorting this information into reports, staying up-to-date on your compliance becomes easier and less overwhelming, potentially saving you from significant penalties down the road that could arise due to improper management or reporting of your responsibilities.
3. Secure your Data – Today’s HCM technology is designed with your security in mind. You can set viewing and updating rights, protect your company’s most sensitive and private data, and mitigate the risk of a data or confidentiality breach. When your data is centralized and protected, you gain peace of mind knowing your company and employee information is safe and secure in this uncertain cyber security climate.
4. Protect your Knowledge Base – If you are currently operating with one or two individuals who manage your HR, you risk a loss of company knowledge if that individual decides to leave the organization. With a workforce management partner, you secure that knowledge with a centralized and protected database;plus, you gain additional experience from a team of professionals dedicated to your business.
5. Access to Specialists – Working with a workforce management solution opens you up to a knowledge gold-mine from professionals who have diverse and deep experiences with HR, benefits compliance, and workforce management with companies of all sizes and structures. By using their collective experience and training,HR consultants can find solutions for your unique situation, and the third-party perspective can help uncover inefficiencies, inconsistencies, and miss-management within your current processes. The outside experience helps you gain perspective on your own business and present new ideas you may not have considered.
6. Receive Support – If you have a question about your payroll or you need a special report for internal or external purposes, having access to a team of customer service professionals when you need them is invaluable. Because they know and understand the technology and your business, dedicated customer service professionals can help you develop the unique reports your company requires and set up automated processes to help your system run the way you need it. A great customer service team can help you feel more confident in your HCM knowing you have a partner you can turn to when you need to troubleshoot a problem.
7. Engage Employees – Workforce management systems today allow employees to view and keep track of their personal information and data including their time clock, paystubs, benefits enrollment, PTO requests, and more. Engaged employees are often happier because they feel empowered to view and update their information when and how they need to. Plus, it saves your team time fielding requests for individual information and managing open enrollment periods and paperwork.
8. Grow your Business – When you are able to delegate tasks, easily manage compliance, protect your data, and consult with experts when you need, you save your business significant time and money. The resources spent managing data and compliance on your own can be reallocated to more mission-critical projects like growing your business or improving other processes.

Originally published on storify.com, June, 2017.