
3 essential tools for an effective WFM
For some time now, we have included in our vocabulary the term workforce management (WFM). It is related to achieving the effectiveness and efficiency of our employees with the goal of achieving productive excellence and quality of service.
Despite the breadth of the term, there are three ideas that stand out, from my point of view:
- Planning
Correct planning will allow us to correctly size our teams, allowing an improvement in absenteeism ratios and turnover control. In other words, we improve our productivity. Automating these processes is key for human resources departments as they can offer better solutions to their employees in order to better adjust shifts, vacations or tasks to be performed based on professional qualifications. An employee in the right place, at the right time, and with the right profile is clearly perfect management of our resources.
Planning by knowing our history and adapting it to the daily productive reality will allow us to predict a future adjusted to our organization, i.e., we will know exactly the people we need today and in the future.
- Dashboard
A simple and comfortable dashboard, in which in seconds we can see the status of our organization is key. The multiplicity of headquarters or delegations with different collaborators, agreements, or different productive typologies make it necessary for our headquarters to have a correct spatial vision of our organization. With this vision, we will be able to make coherent strategic decisions. We often do not know what is happening in our branches or the type of tasks performed by our employees. Centralizing data on absenteeism, payroll costs, overtime, labor laws, shift over, seasonality, rotation, skills, etc. will make us more competitive and efficient. In one click, seeing any point of our organization will allow us to lead successfully.
- Employee portal
Channeled through a mobile application, they improve the employee’s life within the company. That is to say, if the employee can see his shifts or vacations, if he can modify them with his colleagues or receive the payroll and corporate documents, it will improve his experience within the company. Recording from the cell phone in times of teleworking improves the comfort of time control. At the same time, corporate communication is one of the great beneficiaries as it facilitates communication between employee and company. The corporate culture reaches all parts of the company in a more efficient way.
In short, the digital transformation has fully entered our companies and one of the bases to carry it out successfully is the solutions that workforce management can offer.

Written by José Ramón Villaverde
José Ramon is a WFM specialist and has extensive experience in human resources. Given his passion for culture, he was the host of the television show ‘La nueva ruta del empleo‘. His greatest hobby is writing, being the author of 4 books: ‘Otto, (Editorial Hades 2019)’, ‘El baile de las ortigas (Editorial Haces 2017)’ and ‘Deconstrucción de una lágrima (Editorial Hades 2014)’ and the non-fiction book ‘Películas, buenos consejos y cómo encontré trabajo‘.