WFM in a Post Pandemic World

As we near the 2nd Anniversary of this Covid Pandemic, let’s take a look at what has changed in the world of WFM and how Organizations are coping with these ‘Constant Changes’

Within the corporate space, Year 1 was a year of uncertainty. With organizations trying to figure out and trigger BCP models that have been collecting dust on the shelves to Employees trying desperately to retain their jobs and make ends meet. In the midst of all this, almost every technology player worth their Salt revamped their products and offerings to enable organizations to sustain and stay afloat.

?From Shifting Services offerings to the Cloud to new and modified solutions tailored to enable the employee to Work from Home or from Anywhere for that matter.

?Some teams and organizations were already set up to make the switch whereas a vast majority spent a significant amount of time finding their feet. That said. let’s take a look within the WFM industry specifically. I will share my take after a brief look at some industry realities within these spaces:

?Let's start with the basics:

Forecasting:

A vast majority of the Forecasting models in use by most organizations and WFM tools weren’t able to cope with the new business landscape, given that they relied heavily on substantial amounts of historical data to function. With erratic spikes in otherwise stable Demand and Arrival Patterns, none of the historical data we relied on and spent years collecting were made redundant in a flash.

To make matters worse, for a large part of the first year, none of these ‘New’ trends seemed to have any desire to stabilize. With both customers and businesses trying to find their rhythm, WFM teams were faced with Constantly evolving Historical Patterns that would not align to any historical models.

No one has been able to predict the nature of this Pandemic (though many have and continue to try) but for WFM and Forecasting teams alike, we can now say with a certain amount of confidence that another wave of change is in the offing. We just don’t know how soon before we see it.

I am referring to a time in the near (or not so distant future) when we start to see the pandemic and all its glorious restrictions taper off; where people and business start going back to work (to a certain extent) which will inevitably lead to yet another iteration of Demand and Arrival patterns being generated and possibly obliterating some more historical data we have been trying to gather.

My Take: Shelve the longer terms statistical models for a while and make the jump to (if you haven’t already) tactical forecasting approaches like Linear or Moving Averages till we achieve a degree of stability.

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Scheduling:

Many work cultures around the globe (especially towards the west) were already garnered to a high degree of employee flexibility within the scheduling space, whereas the further east you go, the degree of flexibility reduced significantly.

Most top tiered WFM solutions enable WFM teams with the tools and capability to extend scheduling flexibility to employees however the challenge has been with the organizational culture. Although it sounds simple enough, the cultural shift in moving from working ‘5 Days a Week’ to working ‘ 40/45 Hours a Week’ is not an easy one.

With almost all employees working from home (for the most part in this pandemic), it has not been as easy for everyone to strike a balance between work and home life. This has resulted in the need for WFM professionals to take a hard look at their SOPs and rework them to introduce a significant ’Human Element’ to the planning and Scheduling practices.

I applaud the WFM teams that have been able to offer their workforce the ability to plan around their household chores and their kids PTMs to be able to continue to fulfil their work obligations albeit in bits and pieces and make up their 40 / 45 hours for the week in non-traditional scheduling models, all the while balancing the Business need to meeting Service Level obligations.

My Take: If you haven’t already, please consider an immediate shift in scheduling practices to make the employee flexibility a standard offering. Even in a post pandemic world, a large number of organizations have already accepted that working from Home / Remotely will continue to remain a feature for a varied number of their workforce as a strategy. Furthermore, a significant amount of the workforce are likely to make a demand for this style of working now that they have experienced the success in the approach. Most WFM tools offer out of the box features to help you cope with such demands with Flexible Scheduling Models, Shift Bidding, Partial Shift Swaps and Even Flextime based scheduling features on offer. Enable them and use this to market your organization as people friendly as you continue to attract and retain the best talent on offer.

?Real Time Analytics:

In continuing with the theme of Working from Home, we have also witnessed employees Working from Anywhere. Ranging from Hotels and Motels offering a change in scenery to traditional Coffee shops as locations. All WFM teams rely on the ability to track their employees in conjunction with the flexibility being offered via the hybrid scheduling models in play.

For traditional Voice based programs, most ACD’s have been doing a stellar job in generating data and providing real time views and results to WFM and MIS teams. But today, most organizations have evolved from ‘Call Centers’ to ‘Customer Engagement Centers’ and Voice based processes have evolved to Multi Channel, Multimedia processes. Many organizations have stared at the challenge in tracking non voice Employee Performance and Adherence for a while now. Many technology companies have evolved to provide this capability enabling you to continue to seamlessly track employee productivity and Adherence even when not connected to an ACD. Some of these solutions even go beyond Employee Productivity and extend to aiding Employee Compliance (for sensitive data and lines of businesses) and even Employee Guidance to aid the Remote Worker.

My Take: With remote work highly likely to remain a reality even after this pandemic is long gone, invest in the technology. Identify a Technology Solution that integrates seamlessly with your WFM environment and more importantly eliminates manual data collection entirely. This would enable you to focus more on the Analytics behind the data rather than the data gathering itself.

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In Summary:

A lot has been demanded from WFM teams the world over, not just in the Business-as-Usual scenarios but more so since the time this Pandemic has struck. With varied levels of success being enjoyed by some teams and organizations, there is an imminent need to evaluate (or re-evaluate) your position on the technology that aids the WFM teams to deliver (and continue to evolve) in such times of uncertainty. For what its worth, invest in an organization with a culture of investing not just in the future (Research and Development commitments) but also provides an equal investment opportunity in People Development as well.

I cringe whenever I hear the phrase thrown around ‘WFM is a Thankless Job’.

I think it’s been a long time coming and WFM teams deserve credit where credit is due.

This pandemic has not been easy for anyone. Let’s not overlook any WFM Professional and the agility with which they have kept pace in these uncertain times.

Spread the word, Tag a #WFMPROFESSIONAL in your network today to show some love.

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