VCS Blog

The public sector is responsible for ensuring public safety while effectively managing their workforce. With such important jobs on the line, it’s imperative that government workforces are armed with robust time, attendance and workforce solutions that best serve their most complex scheduling needs.

If you’re in search of a time and attendance solution for your agency, use the checklist below to make sure all your boxes are ticked to ensure you’re getting the most bang for your buck, all while reaping the best benefits.

In the public sector especially, employees work around the clock, which translates into complex schedules. With so many on the workforce, and each with very important jobs to do, it is crucial that employees with the right skills are place in the right position at the right time – to put it simply, there isn’t any room for scheduling errors.

Public safety employees have enough tasks on their plate, but the good news is: automated scheduling technology can help relieve some of that administrative burden – this way, they can remain more focused on the frontline.

Today’s business leaders are leveraging their employee’s time and attendance data to help make informed and impactful decisions for their respective organizations. 

While many might think attendance data simply notes who’s on the clock and who’s not, it actually goes far beyond those walls, making tracking employee activities and measuring engagement easier than ever before.

Read on below to find out more about what you can learn from time and attendance data.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, then you likely know that compliance management has skyrocketed to becoming the next best business practice.

With a wide-spread collection of internal policies, ever-changing regulatory requirements, and beyond, ensuring proper staffing coverage can present operational challenges for your HR department.  

The good news? This is where time & labor management solutions can step in and do the hard work for you!

Lessons learned from customizing scheduling software

It’s a given. When it comes to workforce scheduling, we can all agree we want to have the right people working in the right jobs at the right time. But the challenge is a bit more complex than many people realize – a one-size fits all solution simply does not exist. Whether in the public or private sectors, it is important to think beyond automation of the here-and-now needs of time and attendance to focus on the events of tomorrow. The former is pedestrian and limiting, the latter predictive and empowering.

While there are many software solutions promising to ensure this, many neglect to take factors into account that ensure legality and accountability, in addition to professionalism and efficiency. The devil truly is in the details, and solutions must be tailored accordingly.

I believe my story is an informative one, as I was faced with the formidable challenge of creating a workforce management system that could accomplish these goals in an environment whose stakes can, literally, be life and death: policing. Specifically, my potential customer was the police department of Princeton, New Jersey.

No matter the industry, employee satisfaction should be a topic that's valued and held in high regard within your workforce. In fact, a recent Gallup pole has revealed that 51% of workers are looking to leave their current jobs. So why is over half of today's workforce looking to jump ship from their current employer?

Although the initial concept of employee engagement has been discussed since the 1990’s, it has taken up to now for it to truly transform into a mainstream topic in today’s workforce.

My belief for the reasoning behind this is that recent technology such as workforce analytics can now show quantifiable proof of how engaged and dis engaged employees affect business revenue. In fact, disengaged employees are estimated to cost the U.S. between $450 billion to $550 billion, according to a Gallup poll.

I've also found that employees become the most disengaged when they feel undervalued and overworked, commonly due to unfair work schedules.

The VCS research team took to Twitter to see what employees are saying about their work schedules. You won’t believe some of these tweets…let’s take a look.

You've been looking into purchasing new employee scheduling software, but you don't know how to evaluate prospective vendors. We don't blame you, as there are hundreds of scheduling vendors who appear to offering similar products with different price tags. According to a 2015 WorkJam study of 500 U.S. service company managers, "68% of employers say the most difficult part of scheduling is assigning shifts that accommodate both their staff's availability and business needs” (Source Page 3). This statement highlights the importance of determining the right questions to ask prospective vendors. In this post we are providing a brief summary of important questions to ask prospective vendors, in order to simplify your purchasing process.

Implementing effective workforce management strategies to ensure optimal levels of productivity can be successfully accomplished with a proactive scheduling solution. Utilizing an automated scheduling system can ensure that the right people are always working at the right time with the right skill sets thus eliminating the need for excessive and costly overtime. Learn how a scheduling solution can streamline your business processes saving your business time and money in the process.

Reduction in operating and labor costs can be effectively accomplished today with the implementation of a workforce management solution. Manage costs effectively with accurate calculations of employee work hours according to your business, union and HR rules that literally take one-third of the time it tacks to complete manually. Create electronic timesheets that can be easily sent to payroll reducing if not eliminating countless payroll processing errors inherent in manual run systems. Manage and reduce overtime costs with automatically generated employee lists that are based on skill sets to ensure that the right people are covering the right positions at the right time.