Whether you’re a municipality or public safety department, managing an agency workforce differs from managing employees at a plant. Public servants are equipped with a skill set that is unorthodox for the majority of 24×7 environments, as their goals are usually more abstract when compared to a factory environment.
In response, here are the top workforce management concerns unique to government operations—along with ways to overcome those hurdles.
1. Mandate for a Lean Workforce
The pressure to remove inefficiencies and improve services is not just driven by the will to progress, but a mandate directly from the Office of Management and Budget itself. When OMB’s Memo M-17-22 was announced in April 2017, agencies were tasked with submitting a proposal for how they will make effective cuts to their federal civilian workforce. Since February 2018, OMB has been tracking the agencies’ progress.
For those in HR and Operations, maximizing employee performance while reducing the number of employees continues to be a daunting task. Processes would surely be easier if you were able to automatically assign employees to the right task based on a skills matrix, generating a hierarchy of your employees’ performance levels to boot.
The good news is that it is possible if you integrate a qualification management system. There’s one tiny detail holding the industry back from jumping on implementations, however…
2. Outdated Legacy Systems
Being in the public sector, your employees want to spend more time on valuable, mission-critical work. It’s hard to do that, however, when lagging internal systems increase the burden of administrative work.
83% of federal employees from a recent Accenture survey say that being bogged down by this “technical debt” severely limits their ability to innovate, while 79% report that it inhibits their responsiveness to change. Wouldn’t it be better to save employees thousands of hours on data entry and processing, and to instead put that time into use coming up with strategic ways to better serve the public?
Those working for the public sector are no strangers to bureaucratic red tape. Between the layers of approvals necessary and the cultural resistance to change, it’s no wonder why the idea of digital transformation is daunting.
When considering new technologies, it’s easy to assume the worst: you’re going to have to get rid of all your current systems and start from scratch. But if you use a cloud-based workforce management system, the ability to integrate with your current HCM and ERP platforms ensures your internal systems communicate with each other succinctly—without overhaul.
3. Pressure to Cut Costs
According to McKinsey, reducing or optimizing costs is frequently ranked as a key objective (43%) when it comes to public sector transformation. This certainly contributes to the trepidation workforce management professionals have when it comes to considering any sort of technology advancement, whether it’s automated scheduling or a more holistic absence management tool.
HR and Operations are thinking ‘Sure, those things will certainly make their jobs easier… but is it really worth the money? And how can I get this approved in our already small budget anyway?’
That’s why any sort of WFM tool investment should help decrease your internal support and change management costs, as opposed to having them skyrocket. Bonus points if the system upgrades happen automatically without you having to purchase another tier of updates.
How Indeavor Can Help
There’s a way to overcome these challenges keeping your HR and Operations teams up at night: Indeavor’s proprietary solution, Indeavor Operate.
Our workforce management SaaS solution which offers clients an end-to-end, cloud-based employee scheduling, time & attendance, and absence management system. We integrate with your human capital management and enterprise resource planning systems to create a robust platform that provides you with real-time employee data.
Learn more or request a demo here.
