Delivering the Last Mile of Workforce Management (WFM)
April 17, 2023 / Workforce Management Blog
Workforce management (WFM) attempts to get people in the right place at the right time while managing compensatory time and compliance. WFM technology is nothing new to enterprise employers — organizations have spent years optimizing their back-office systems to support everyday operations. However, WFM’s legacy of being a back-office tool hinders its ability to fully benefit your frontline operations.
Standalone, workforce management does not meet the needs of frontline employees nor the needs of your business.
WorkJam delivers Workforce Management (WFM) to the frontline
WorkJam connects the frontline. Designed to meet the needs of frontline workers, WorkJam is a digital frontline workplace that has deep integrations into leading WFM providers like UKG, ADP, Blue Yonder, and Legion.
WorkJam’s super app delivers everything frontline workers need to do their jobs — including schedule management. Alongside communication, task management, and learning, WorkJam allows employees to view schedules, manage availability, and drop/swap/sign-up for shifts in a seamless user experience.
You’re probably thinking to yourself: I already have all this stuff.
Why is WorkJam different?
WorkJam takes all your existing employee data from your WFM and makes it more actionable with new front-end workflows.
Take shift swapping for example. WorkJam allows shifts to be swapped 5 ways:
- Direct Swap: Swap Shifts with a teammate
- Open Shift Pool Release: Broadcast the availability of my shift for the taking
- Open Shift Pool Swap: Broadcast the availability of my shift for a swap
- Offer Shift: Alert specific teammates to take my shift
- Direct Release: Give a teammate my shift
Flexibility is key. We all know that even when there are enough employees to satisfy the needs of the schedule, those employees aren’t always available to work. So, we made it easier for frontline employees to make adjustments. This lessens the schedule burden on manager time — saving managers 2 hours per week, 5% of their 40-hour week.
WorkJam’s Open Shift Marketplace allows enterprises to pool existing labor across roles, locations, and owned brands. By pairing learning data and task data with WFM data, WorkJam is able to broadcast open shifts to qualified employees. When employees self-select shifts, the data is passed through to your backend WFM through an open API. Compliance made easy.
Customer Story: A global apparel retailer manages 3 brands. Those three brands are often geographically close to one another, sometimes in the same mall. Prior to WorkJam, employees at Brand A were hired for Brand A, Brand B employees for Brand B, and Brand C for Brand C. Further, they were hired for a single location. Turning on WorkJam and enabling Open Shift Marketplace allows employees to work across locations and brand. The result? Less people are required to staff all locations and employees are more fully employed.
How does Open Shift Marketplace work?
WorkJam doesn’t just combine the 4 pillars of work — scheduling, task management, learning, and communication — we combine the data. We call it Workforce Orchestration®.
An example of Workforce Orchestration® is as follows: An employee who typically stocks shelves at grocery store takes training to learn how to pack and pick orders for curbside pick-up. The training is available in WorkJam. As soon as the training is complete, they see new shifts available in WorkJam. Passing the assessment that went along with the training passed a new job code to the WFM. That new job code is now attached to the employee record. The shelf stocker can now pick-up shifts from the pack and pick shift pool. When a shift is selected, the tasks assigned to that shift are automatically visible to the employee. WorkJam tasks can be assigned to shifts vs a location or person to allow for easy swapping. If the employee has a question, they pop open chat and fire off a question that other pick and packers can answer.
In other words: An existing employee became qualified for a new role, picked up a shift, and completed tasks without manager intervention. The 4 pillars of work — scheduling, task management, learning, and communication — work in concert with each other to create natural workflows.
WorkJam delivers the last mile of WFM.
