A Guide to Workforce Optimization in Corporate Settings

Workforce optimization is the process of maximizing your workforce’s efficiency while completing operational goals. Workforce optimization is bigger than a single company initiative, often spanning multiple business strategies with an overarching objective to save money, increase engagement and retention, and improve productivity. 

Companies face pressures to improve from every angle. As a leader, it’s imperative to continually look for ways to increase productivity and make or sell more units. Still, you should also go out of your way to give the customers amazing service, all while finding ways to decrease the budget. Workforce optimization describes a series of principles that help you collect data and analyze the workflows and processes of your company to find the right balance between these competing objectives. 

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Continue reading to explore the components of a workforce optimization process and tips for creating a workforce optimization plan for your company. 

What is workforce optimization, and why is it important?

Workforce optimization (WFO) refers to everything your company does to increase efficiency and cut costs without sacrificing customer experience. For example, a bakery owner might look at last month’s sales to predict the sales for the next month. Using that information, they might plan their market order to avoid wasting products they can’t use, then adjust their staff levels to reflect how busy or slow they think it will be. These actions collectively fall under the umbrella of workforce optimization. 

Although workforce optimization typically looks different from one company to another, the overall benefits remain similar. Advantages include improving customer experience, productivity, efficiency, employee engagement, and the operating budget. 

Better customer service and increased brand loyalty

You can use workforce optimization to improve customer service by analyzing data from past customer interactions to enhance future experiences. When you can deliver excellent customer service, customers often become loyal fans of your brand and tell their friends about the exceptional experience. That translates to increased word of mouth for your brand and customers returning. The data you gain from workforce optimization in this area will also help you understand who your customers are and what they need, helping you deliver the products and services they want. 

Increased productivity and efficiency

Workforce optimization can help you determine the staff levels you need to support maximum productivity and examine your processes to pinpoint areas where you can increase efficiency. Using past data, you can project the future demands on your resources to adjust staff levels accordingly, ensuring that your staff always has the right amount of work. Hence, they are not overloaded with work but always have work to complete. You can also use workforce optimization to look at ways to be more efficient in your internal processes, such as identifying and closing a performance gap or providing your employees with resources that allow them to work faster. 

Happier, more engaged employees

You can use workforce optimization to uncover skill gaps in your company and provide training to help your employees perform better at their jobs. You can also use data to look for other ways to show your staff that you support their professional development. It leads to staff members who are more satisfied and happy with their positions, which makes them less likely to leave for another opportunity. You can also use workforce optimization to understand if it makes sense for your company to offer flexible employment models, such as work-from-home or hybrid work, which can be attractive to some employees. 

Reduced costs and higher profits

The benefits discussed already—increased productivity, engagement, retention, and customer experience—naturally result in reduced expenses and higher profits. For example, maintaining appropriate staffing levels can save money on labor costs. By increasing employee retention, you can save money on recruitment and onboarding costs. You can spend less on advertising when your customers enthusiastically spread the word on your behalf. The combined benefits of workforce optimization can be a powerful driver for increased profitability.  

Methods and tools for workforce optimization

Workforce optimization relies on many strategies, methods, and tools ranging from quality management techniques to improve process efficiencies to software to help track tasks and manage scheduling. WFO can span every department of your company and become complex, so it’s vital to consider the methods and tools you use to analyze your efforts. 

Some essential components of a workforce optimization plan include: 

• Quality management: The tools your company uses to record how customers feel about their interactions, like what went well, diagrams, graphs, and check sheets, can drive process improvements. 

• Communication: Communicating your expectations with staff is a direct and highly effective way to achieve the results you want. Better communication also benefits performance and task management tools. 

• Skill management: You can use workforce optimization to track your employees' skills to stay ahead of skills gaps and strategize to increase your staff’s capabilities. 

• Performance management: Performance management helps you measure your employees’ performance and deliver feedback or additional resources to help them improve in their positions. 

• Scheduling: Workforce optimization offers insight into appropriate staffing levels for your company, and scheduling helps organize those efforts. 

• Workforce management software: Many companies use workforce management software to optimize scheduling, track tasks and time, and create reports for data-driven decisions. 

Tips for implementing a workforce optimization plan

Before considering the implementation phase, it’s critical to consider the company’s objectives, which should provide the framework for everything else. From accomplishing that to putting your plan into action, the following tips can help you stay on track and focused while implementing your WFO plan. 

Define your goals.

Understanding the ultimate goals you hope to achieve with workforce optimization is vital. It will help keep you and the plan focused and prevent you from pursuing workforce optimization metrics that won’t support your overall goals. Determine what success will look like and what metrics to track during your WFO efforts. 

Embrace data and automation.

After identifying the metrics to track, you’ll need to identify the best ways to capture and analyze that data. Accurate, timely data helps you make the most informed decisions. Key performance indicators (KPIs) help track real-time results and make rapid adjustments when needed. You can use artificial intelligence and automation to help you collect and analyze data faster and more accurately than with human power. 

Focus on the customer.

Ultimately, you need to focus on the customer’s experience first to ensure that your company offers a product or service that fits customers' needs and that they enjoy using. Workforce optimization efforts benefit from maintaining a customer-first focus and using customer feedback to drive optimization in other areas. The best operational decisions, such as offering employees training or providing them with resources to do their job well, all come back to the ultimate goal of serving the customer better. 

See employees as an investment.

In today’s ultra-competitive business environment, organizations that invest in their employees have a critical advantage. It makes sense since your workforce is a powerful resource into which you invest time and money during recruiting, onboarding, and training. Workforce optimization can offer insight into the best way to invest in your employees. For example, it could inform the training and development opportunities necessary to close skill gaps. You can also consider workforce optimization when recruiting and hiring new employees and look for employees who fit your company's culture and values. 

Getting started with Coursera

Workforce optimization is a continuous process that can help you improve your customer experiences, employee retention and engagement, productivity and efficiency, and your company’s revenue. Explore the process further while learning about implementing a workforce optimization program at your company with an online program like the Strategic Leadership and Management Specialization from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on Coursera. This seven-course series includes information about leading teams, designing organizational processes, and setting business and corporate strategies.  

Promote leadership skills throughout your organization by developing employees who innovate and inspire. With the Leadership Academy from Coursera, employees can learn the skills needed to lead your business into the future. With Coursera for Business, you’ll build effective managers at every level with beginner and advanced-level leadership content, including 40+ SkillSets to drive soft skill proficiency across the entire organization. 

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