Blog

May 1, 2019

How to Use Workday HCM to Schedule Employees More Efficiently

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Human Capital Management (HCM) technologies such as Workday HCM have been game-changing for HR and People Operations departments. No longer is their labor reduced to tedious paperwork, although these routine tasks haven’t disappeared—they’re just being managed more efficiently. HR and Ops professionals have actually become more capable of taking on more ambitious projects, designed to improve the employee journey.

What is HCM Software

Human Capital Management software or HCM refers to applications businesses use to manage and maintain their workforce.

Ideally, HCM software is enterprise-class software that automates processes like payroll, overall employee performance, recruiting, onboarding, and training. All of this can be stored in a single platform that makes human resources work better within an integrated HCM framework. Analytics can then provide actionable insights to help increase productivity and efficiency.

While there is a myriad of HCM platforms on the market that help businesses to maximize the value of employee data, making the right investment decision is no small feat. Almost two thirds (62%) of businesses end up switching solutions because they find their initial platform of choice—usually a cheaper alternative— too limiting. This dramatically slows down user adoption and can jeopardize the momentum for change.

Instead of going for a more affordable and seemingly safer option, companies ought to keep a lookout for forward-thinking HCM vendors who not only offer robust features, but also form tight partnerships with other specialized platforms.

Enter Workday & Humanity, a joint venture that enables enterprises to get the most out of their investment by offering a single system of record for critical data.

What is Workday HCM and how it makes your business smarter

Workday HCM is a seamless, cloud-based system for financial management, human resources, and planning designed to help your business make data-driven decisions and grow with confidence.

But let’s go back to a February morning in 2005. In a diner in California, over breakfast, Aneel Bhusri and Dave Duffield decided to start a company specialized in SaaS for HR and finance. These IT veterans had already worked together and were accomplished executives in the industry, but their joint vision was to put “human” back in human capital management.

In their first decade, the Workday team disrupted the market by launching multiple applications for optimizing management efforts in finance, HR, and planning. By 2009, more than 100 companies around the world were relying on Workday as their partner for human capital management. In 2012, Workday made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange with great success.

Today, Amazon, Hewlett Packard, Netflix, and Airbnb are only some of the world’s leading companies that trust Workday as their enterprise HCM suite. The team from Nissan Motor Company claims that “the new system allows to utilize real-time global HR data to make Human Capital decisions that support Nissan’s growth objectives.” TripAdvisor reports a 50% reduction in TCO and a 30% increase in accounting efficiency, among other benefits, since becoming a part of the Workday family.

Workday HCM + Humanity: The next level of workforce management

Among its many features, Workday HCM also offers a basic employee scheduling functionality, optimal for predictive and repeating schedules. In order to support the need for robust, dynamic scheduling, the company has integrated, and partnered with, Humanity, a leader in cloud-based shift scheduling for the enterprise. This partnership enables Workday HCM customers to leverage the power and flexibility of cloud-based, mobile-first shift scheduling, while ensuring key employee information is tightly synced—without double data entry.

The key added value of the Workday HCM + Humanity partnership is a single system of record for employee data. This way, double data entry and data checks across multiple sources are virtually eliminated.

Workday HCM Humanity integration

Managers can not only ensure full shift coverage, but also strategically build skill-based schedules and assign the right staff member to the right location. This functionality is particularly valuable for line managers and supervisors who manage hybrid teams— remote workers, part-time employees, and full-time staff—as it gives them the opportunity to maximize productivity by ensuring that scheduled team members have complementary skills.

Since Humanity is cloud-based and mobile-first, the latest scheduling information is available in real-time. Both scheduling administrators and employees can access it on the device of their choice—desktop or mobile. Staff members can easily set their preferred working hours, notify managers about changes in their availability, as well as submit leave and time off requests.

Resolving last-minute unexpected absences or scheduling conflicts is now a seamless process—managers can instantly notify employees via the Humanity app, SMS, or email. Staff members are allowed to trade shifts independently, without managers having to track replacements down. This added value is particularly important for industries like retail, healthcare, and hospitality where dramatic demand fluctuations are a regular occurrence.

Humanity also supports demand-based scheduling, allowing managers to leverage business metrics, such as foot traffic, sales forecasts, and ticket volume, to automatically fill open shifts. This grants managers better control over labor costs while sidestepping over- and understaffing issues, and ensures top service for their customers.

Humanity’s acclaimed shift scheduling platform also simplifies labor law compliance. Managers can set up custom scheduling rules based on government regulations, while the app can automatically warn them about a myriad of scheduling requirements, such as mandatory breaks, overtime, minimum required breaks between shifts, and more.

With Humanity, Workday HCM customers can fully optimize the staff scheduling process, from accelerating the schedule creation to exporting accurate timesheets for payroll. Making rosters has never been simpler… or more powerful.