Today’s forward-thinking leaders know one thing better 一 workforce management is essential for aligning with their business objectives while optimizing employee competencies without compromising employee experience.

Workforce management holds promises for leaders to focus on building a positive and thriving environment for employees to exhibit productivity and efficiency, reducing turnover costs, and boosting customer experience that helps ramp up business growth.

An intensive necessity to facilitate workforce management effectively across organizations pushes for an IT spending surge in WFM software suites and tools.

Owing to the business-critical mission to foster WFM, Gartner predicts that by 2025, 80% of enterprises will increase investment in WFM applications to improve the experience for hourly-paid workers.

Another research report suggests the WFM market will reach $12.5 billion by 2030.

The WFM market growth is quite striking, emphasizing the need to focus on real-world Workforce Management Trends. It is significant that business leaders pay attention to the trends in workforce management in 2023 so they do not miss or overlook the essential elements in WFM and prioritize everything that matters to build a healthy workforce environment.

Read on to discover the most significant Workforce Management Trends in 2023.

Not just customers need enhanced experience to become loyal customers and expedite advocacy for your business.

Employees expect an excellent user experience at the workplace, irrespective of their roles and responsibilities.

As a leading workforce management trend, employee experience management (EXM) stays on top of the employer’s priority list to unleash every single effort to make each and every employee feel inclusive and valued.

For example, flexible scheduling, time and attendance, and absence management are essential to give employers convenient ways to plan their work and be productive at the workplace. Also, this effort helps maintain an effective payroll system in an ever-evolving work culture. This is especially critical for the worker segment, who get hourly-based compensation.

In addition, listening to what employees say about their workplace experience can help improve adaptability and loyalty.

Processes such as allowing employees to submit their feedback or have enough flexibility to plan their own schedules or manage work foster engagement and combat employee friction.

How to facilitate scheduling, feedback submission, etc

• Create automated workflows to manage unexpected on-call schedules

• Build app workflow automation for your HCM tools to allow your users

• To apply for time off requests

• To fetch information about available leaves

• To update timesheet

• To know the leave policy

• Create an automated email to request your employees for feedback submission

• Facilitate multi-channel time and attendance management

The less stressed and happier your employees are, the better for you to create a productive workforce.

But the challenge is that the mental health of today’s employees continues to deteriorate. Certain workplace scenarios, such as attending frequent online meetings or continuous interaction with devices, contribute to fatigue, burnout, and extreme stress.

Companies realize that they should care for their employees' mental health and well-being amidst the hybrid and remote work pressure. In fact, Global Human Capital Trends 2021 from Deloitte pointed out the views of 80% of 9000 survey respondents who support workers’ well-being as a top priority for an organization’s success.

The effective ways business leaders embrace to support a healthy environment that lessens the impact of mental health issues include,

• Supporting personal choices in planning work processes

• Restructuring online meeting norms

• Providing financial aid to restructure the workspace at home

• Organizing team-building events and fun activities

• Allowing for enhanced corporate benefits that extend to other family members (e.i., spouse, kids)

• Preventing employee criticism in the open

• Offering counseling or new well-being resources

In addition to facilitating mental health, workplace health and safety is also important.

• Be in continuous touch with employees during their business trips or off-site work using self-service-based devices that send real-time safety information and also support tracing and monitoring to prevent the impact of contact with contagious diseases or any critical event.

• Use tools and applications that are convenient to use for logging safety-related incidents and allow safety managers to take corrective steps immediately.

The world is boundaryless now and home to remote employees. They work from anywhere and anytime.

Some significant stats in support of remote work. 87% of American workers are willing to work remotely one or more days a week if allowed by their employers. On the other hand, a large section of workers, about 67% of respondents who are associated with computer or mathematical-based professions, want full remote work flexibility.

As Forbes reported that 97% of employees expressed disagreement about returning to the office fully, remote workforce communications must also be flexible.

Remote workforce communication pain points

• Office shifts vary by different time zones, asking for more streamlined processes in place to push the work forward

• Delays in project management and approval

• Limited flexibility in communicating workplace issues and seeking real-time assistance

Basically, the challenges of workforce communications are rife because most organizations lack appropriate tools or systems for their employees. To improve communications, leaders must take up proactive approach.

Remote workforce communication solutions

• Allow multi-modal communication platforms to support employee communications via mobile apps, browsers, enterprise software suites, social media, or messaging channels

• These tools are convenient to get on a real-time call or share documents for review

• Allow your employees to send or receive messages in groups or communicate 1:1 without violating workplace privacy policies

• Leverage workflow automations and design your rules specific to business use cases and streamline the most mundane work processes

• Seek project approval with automation that escalates the workflows once the task is submitted in the project management tool

• Get approvals for codes for a particular application development

• Put design work or marketing materials to work with timely reviews

• Reduce long wait time in case your employees want to apply for PTO but need HR assistance

• Allow ease of access to workplace information through FAQ-based questionnaires inside the employee chatbot

• Solve issues with tax policies and leave management

• Provide knowledge base articles through chatbot integrations with the enterprise ITSM platforms

• Get appropriate document links or access to folders that facilitate awareness of workplace policies

Workforce management trends highlight the immediacy of performance improvement with process efficiency. It means the modern workforce tends to do more meaningful work while delivering results with minimal to fewer errors.

But, when employees are engaged with repetitive or mundane administrative tasks, it is obvious that employees would get demotivated and bored, declining their interest in taking up challenging tasks or more business-critical projects.

A blog by UiPath highlighted that office workers engaging in administrative or repetitive tasks spend 69 working days or 552 hours completing them.

Repetitive tasks further wreak havoc on the company’s balance sheet. The annual business loss amounts to $5 trillion for lost productivity due to repetitive tasks, as suggested by Unit4, a global productivity study around 5 years ago.

Automation-led solutions are highly effective in reducing repetitive and mundane tasks in the workplace and allow employees to achieve more in less time.

Increase in human resource efficiency

Say an HR recruiter accomplishes a wide variety of administrative tasks involving recruiting, onboarding, offboarding, etc. Such tasks require crafting emails or letters for internal and external coordination. Automation can accelerate the delivery of work without much friction.

Composition of emails or interview questionnaires with ChatGPT

ChatGPT-powered interfaces or enterprise platforms that integrate generative AI can help reduce the time needed to craft emails, letters, and recruitment questionnaires manually.

HR teams can now be more productive in crafting these materials by providing meaningful prompts inside the interface to generate appropriate resources. However, it requires careful review to avoid any conflict.

Not just hr professionals but developers can also accelerate their coding processes with the help of ChatGPT-powered tools such as Codex or CoPilot.

These tools aim to improve the pace of the work process and the output's accuracy.

Eliminating friction from the employee onboarding process

A usual employee onboarding process consists of several processes, starting from getting the new hires to sign the agreement paper to introducing them to the team, company culture, or work processes, and provisioning appropriate tools, and so on.

These are repeated and mundane work that can be exhaustive.

A simple way to reduce the burden of repetitive tasks is to build an HR chatbot that enables you to create app workflow automation and take control of the exhaustive work process.Conversational AI chatbot solution providers such as Workativ can help you create effective automated workflows for onboarding and facilitate frictionless onboarding for your organization.

Auto-resolutions of issues through self-serve functionality

Everyday IT issues can be irritating and time-consuming. App workflow automation can provide seamless process efficiency, streamline IT tasks, and help the team work steadily.

Accelerating the time to fix IT issues

The most common workplace IT issues encompass,

• Unlock accounts

• Reset passwords

• Replace an old printer

• Provision a new application

By creating use cases for these issues, users can easily solve problems with ease. If FAQ-based templates offer accurate information or the knowledge articles provide help for critical issues, auto-resolution scales steadily.

Automated workflows can give business leaders a better way to manage mundane work and bring process efficiency, which also helps improve the employee experience.

We live in a tight labor market despite the growing recessionary effects or high inflation. Employees prefer ‘quiet quitting,’ leaving hr professionals struggling to refill these vacant positions.

As per McKinsey & Company, there is a 25% increase in voluntary quit rate compared to the pandemic period from 2019 through May 2022. Surprisingly, 65% of the employees who quit their jobs didn’t return to the same industry.

The bite of great attrition continues to grow for employers. However, employers can turn this phase into a positive result-oriented phenomenon by improving their retention strategy.

A better approach to performance management

McKinsey & Company reported that inadequate compensation is one of the most common reasons for voluntary quit. Leaders can improve processes for performance management and appraisal. It can include hard-word recognition, relationship building, and career growth.

Support returnship program

Many employees, especially female workers, need to take a break for a year or two for some inevitable reasons. Return-to-Work is a great initiative company can leverage to combat the great attrition impacts and tap the significant talent pool in the market.

Facilitate employee development

When a business works on projects that need an in-depth learning curve may be the reason for its workforce to struggle and delay the project delivery. Instead of letting people go, companies can plan to reskill and upskill their existing workforce. Because reskilling is always cost-effective compared to hiring.

The best way to encourage employee engagement and involvement in the L&D drive is to create great resources for an LMS system and make the materials available via chatbot workflow automation.

Workativ’s conversational AI chatbots can be powerful to fetch learning materials directly to the chat interface using the power of knowledge search AI. The search capability easily fetches related links to the appropriate knowledge articles or directs to document folders to efficiently help in employee learning and development.

So, addressing the great resignation and retention strategy is one of the essential workforce management trends in 2023, and employers here need to be determined about their objectives.

The gig economy's impact is large. The lack of financial flexibility of Gen-Z or millennials and the growing economic slump make contractual or freelance work culture a thriving demand for companies, especially startups.

It is imperative for companies to allocate appropriate software and tools to manage their schedules and payroll accurately. A lack of proper processes can result in freelancers or vendors leaving their jobs and reassigning hiring processes to HR personnel.

A positive company culture is more important for employees that help them thrive and grow. Some key workplace attributes are significant for employers that encompass 一

• a healthy work environment

• leader support & encouragement

• a collaborative approach such as workplace diversity and inclusion

Companies prioritizing these workplace culture attributes are twice as likely to grow their revenues and foster long-term employee loyalty. McKinsey & Company reported that companies with strong cultures could drive higher shareholder returns by up to 60% than those with average workplace culture.

In addition, PwC also shared that strong workplace cultures are effective in driving better business results.

Company cultures are an important attribute for workforce management trends in 2023. It is important for business leaders to pay attention to building great company cultures. One of the effective ways is to ask for employees' feedback and work on improving the loopholes that impact employee experience.

Hybrid work is nowhere to go; it is the future. Business leaders must be aware of this workforce management trend in 2023 and make strides to foster a flexible environment for employees to enable them to shuffle between hybrid, remote, and full-time capacity on-site.

However, it is not an easy arrangement for companies. It needs an appropriate strategy to enable operational resilience and optimize workforce performance, which further emphasizes IT spending to allocate appropriate resources to support the hybrid work model.

The work scenario has massively changed over three years since the pandemic. Having been through the recessionary challenges, businesses need to be decisive in reducing impacts on the bottom line by reducing the impact of attrition and operational costs from the balance sheet.

When many of these workforce management trends for 2023 ask for digital transformation to allow for workplace flexibility, employee engagement, and the utmost user experience, Workativ plays a crucial part in transforming the most pressing business objectives into reality.

Be it for facilitating effective remote work communications, employee engagement, or employee experience, conversational AI chatbots that make it easy to design app workflow automation help you build a positive work environment for your employees. To learn more about how you can effectively follow the workforce trends and support employee growth and retention, schedule a demo call with Workativ today.