The pandemic crisis forced many companies to implement quick solutions for remote work, turning to SaaS tools for online communication, collaboration, and security. The number of tools put into use skyrocketed. According to Okta, a software security company, organizations with over 2,000 employees used an average of 187 business apps in 2021, while smaller organizations deployed 89.
In workforce management, using a high number of tools increases complexity and often works against productivity. Team members end up spending as much time navigating the tools as they do on their work, a source of frustration and job dissatisfaction. Having too many tools is inefficient on cost, consistency, and utilization since there are bound to be overlaps in functionality and tools that are never used.
A simpler approach is to reduce your stack with a unified workforce management platform that is robust & reliable, providing solutions for daily operations and a digital environment for teams to enable work no matter where the workforce and teams are, and to collaborate.
Here are five ways workforce management software can fix your business tools problem.
Bring Everyone Together
Using a wide range of business tools throughout a company leads to divisions between teams. Information and expertise get siloed as each team develops its own workflows and knowledge expert for a specific set of tools. Bringing everyone together on the same platform saves money by consolidating information and eliminating the issue of tools with overlapping functionality, different processes, and excessive costs. It also helps eliminate the need to complete duplicate tasks and repetitive data entry when moving between multiple tools that have the same goals in mind.
Centralize Knowledge Sharing
Searching for resources and information buried in different business tools can be a source of frustration for team members. Sharing information usually means exporting and importing data from one tool to another. Each team may devise its own methods for data collection and management, making it difficult to share within the same company or department. Data is also point in time.
With a single workforce management platform, a single storage system allows messages, tasks, and documents to be searched, viewed, and organized. Centralized knowledge makes everyone’s job easier. It also helps management get an overview of company performance, which can be difficult or impossible when different software tools are being used for tracking.
Decreased Time for Setup and Training
Business tools should help teams increase their productivity. While it may seem like a good idea to use the best-of-class tool for every business need, investing in multiple apps is an efficient use of time, money, and can lead to disparate analyses as everything is point in time and dependent on specific data sources and method(s) of analyses. Each new tool requires time for setup and training, tasks which often fall to a team leader who already has plenty of other things on their plate.
These and other hidden costs often go unnoticed with decentralized tool support and maintenance, increasing demands on IT and training responsibilities.
With a single workplace management platform, setup and training efforts can be combined across an entire organization.
Customize Preferences for Your Organization’s (and Your Client’s) Workflows
No two team members work the same. No two teams work the same. This means no two workflows will be exactly alike. Everyone appreciates the ability to set preferences that reflect their own work style(s) without affecting other team members.
A single workforce maintenance platform makes it easier to improve workflows with personal preferences. It also makes it easier to standardize customization for a team or an entire organization to enforce consistency and compliance.
Saving Time, Money, Reducing Training Time, and Increasing Efficiency
No one should waste time at work, especially when it hurts the bottom line. Organizations need their teams to complete tasks without distractions but don’t want to spend a fortune on a wide variety of business tools. Switching to a single workforce optimization software that is the central hub for daily operations is the best way to save time, save money, reduce training time, and increase efficiency.
If your organization uses too many business tools, don’t think it’s a problem you can just ignore.
Switching between different tools is time-consuming, mentally fatiguing, and can yield poor user experience.
According to the 2021 Adobe Workfront report, “Nearly half of [staff] say they’re likely to leave their current job if they’re unhappy or frustrated with workplace tech.” I
If your staff & teams are spending too much time on the tools they use to get their job(s) done, it’s time to try a unified and modern workforce management software.
