The WFC Group Blog

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In an interview with the New York Times, Kronos Incorporated CEO Aron Ain shared his belief that "the single largest component of a business that adds to shareholder value is great management, and the single largest destroyer of shareholder value is bad management." That's certainly not a far-fetched idea, considering we believe there's truth to the adage people leave managers, not companies. Great managers inspire strong performance and productivity while maintaining strong employee retention, so how can companies use management to their advantage? First it requires knowing what makes great managers.

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Last month, our partners at Kronos Incorporated announced their latest recognition. According to a new study called Best in KLAS by KLAS Research, an independent healthcare IT data and insights company, Kronos workforce solutions ranked highest for Time and Attendance in healthcare software and services.

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The pace of technological change affects all industries differently, but financial services seems to have a challenging reputation. It's clear from a recent Banking Exchange article that the need for digital advancement to offer the best customer service is widely recognized, but the pace of change is difficult to keep up with. While the latest mobile and web offerings may position institutions more strongly for their customers, without the internal systems to support your staff, the ideal level of customer service will be hard to achieve. However, with strong workforce management systems at their core, bank and credit union operators and employees can focus their attention squarely on delivering the service portion of financial services.

As a company with a completely remote workforce, we make an effort to bring our team members together throughout the year. We call these meetups "Connects" and use them as an opportunity to welcome our newest team members and align directly on our upcoming goals together. Getting actual face time with our remote colleagues is crucial to our company's continued growth.

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Recall your first day at a new job. If your experience is like many others, it probably consisted of a flurry of paperwork and a quick trip to the workroom floor. But although that's a common procedure, HR professionals recognize that it's a missed opportunity for setting new hires on the right path. A recent survey by Human Capital Institute and Kronos Incorporated (New Hire Momentum: Driving the Onboarding Experience) found that 76% of HR leaders viewed onboarding as a wholly underutilized process.

The biggest missed opportunity? As many as 60% of employers felt that integration into company culture should be the primary goal of onboarding, yet only 30% of their processes address people and performance. Onboarding is a new employees best chance to build an understanding of how they fit in and how their work contributes to the strategic goals of the organization overall.

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Major football games, basketball tourneys and awards season, oh my! Reasons to celebrate outside of work are numerous and help liven up daily grind, but they may also lead to loss of productivity. Unplanned absences like the millions of people who planned to call in sick or show up late after the Super Bowl have a negative effect on their team's ability to accomplish work, costing employers time and money.

But each of these celebrations is an opportunity to build culture and trust within the workplace—if managers take important steps in motivating employees to make responsible decisions. Awards season may have just ended, but March Madness upon us, so how can employers encourage everyone's love and celebration of their team while meeting their responsibilities to their colleagues and company?

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It may seem surprising, but even your most engaged employees may be a turnover risk, according to a new study by the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. On top of the nearly 70 percent of workers that feel unengaged in their work according to Gallup's employee engagement study, 20 percent of engaged employees in Yale's study reported feeling pushed past their limits. For them, burnout is a real threat which adds to employee turnover risk—and it can be measured and analyzed as a relationship between resources and demands. Many of these values can be monitored through configurations to workforce management systems, and workforce management consultants like The WFC Group can help!

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There's no question that compliance with regulations is viewed as important by both employers and employees. Adhering to local, state and national labor laws and quickly adapting to changes is crucial, but it doesn't come cheap. In a recent study called "The $100,000 Bill," Kronos found that more than half of surveyed HR professionals say the cost of adapting to each new regulatory change ranges from $40,000 to $100,000 on average. And although many businesses could manage better with 120-150 days to react, regulations can take effect as quick as 60-90 days. This rapid pace of change puts increasing tension on employers to keep pace and mitigate any additional costs from falling into noncompliance. There are three ways

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As an employer, there are likely many ways you may measure, analyze and report workforce data—from attendance to productivity to employee development and more. This data, often gathered through workforce management systems, is useful in making empowered and strategic decisions as a business leader. But performance data is useful to more than just managers. Today's workforce is also driven by personal data both in and out of work. And businesses could gain a lot by way of satisfactory employee engagement and productivity if employees were given access to their performance data. Here are a couple reasons why workforce managers might consider sharing performance data through their employee dashboards.

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Ready or not, here it comes. Actually, artificial intelligence is already here, integrated into much of the latest equipment and software solutions businesses rely on. No industry is immune. Any business operation can be automatically monitored, processed and analyzed by AI, making actionable insights out of otherwise unstructured data quickly. Many businesses are already benefiting from automated AI integrations. A recent study by Infosys called "Leadership in the Age of AI" found that 90 percent of surveyed C-level execs already witness measurable results from the use of AI in their organization.