As the year 2017 comes to a close, people everywhere are taking a moment to reflect on the wins, losses, and lessons learned in the past 365 days. Together we experienced a total solar eclipse, mourned a tragedy in Las Vegas, celebrated a royal engagement, fought for human rights and equality, and joined together to heal after multiple natural disasters. We laughed as we watched children remind us of the struggle of being a parent while working from home. We cried as we watched 90,000 people sing the words to Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.” It was a year full of intense highs and lows.
In the world of workforce management, 2017 was a year of big changes. Perhaps the most significant was the release of Kronos Workforce Dimensions. Dimensions is designed to improve the efficiency of major workflows by allowing users to accomplish frequently performed tasks in one click. The home page allows employees ad managers to view critical information at a glance through a flexible and intuitive interface. Hourly workers are provided with mobile access to the same exact features as their desktop project timecard. Workforce Dimensions partners with may other user interfaces and applications, including Microsoft Outlook, where users can inform both the system and their team when they’re absent.
Through data views and reports, Workforce Dimensions Timekeeping simplifies access to the information needed to solve business issues by allowing all time and attendance data to be visualized, sorted, filtered, and exported according to user preference. Workforce Dimensions Timekeeping is built on an advanced cloud architecture specifically designed for speed and efficiency of scale. It works seamlessly across all digital touch points — all while reducing the burden on internal IT resources.
The timely release of Workforce Dimensions aligns directly with some of the top predictions of workforce trends in the new year. Here are the top three trends we believe you should watch for this year as you consider your 2018 workforce management strategy.
Though there has been a strong focus on the importance of employee engagement in the last year, HR departments are still struggling to communicate the importance of treating employee engagement as a financial strategy. Focus should shift to creating a corporate culture that supports connecting engagement with business challenges while using operational data to show how engagement affects the bottom-line. In alignment with these goals, organizations should begin to work towards attracting and retaining better talent by offering unique growth incentives (e.g. pay, benefits, flexibility, learning and development, work environment). These strategies lead into our next trend…
There is an undeniable and ever-growing skills gap in our current workforce. In order to start closing that gap, many employers will invest more money into training and development programs in the new year in order to fill their skills gaps and reach their full potential. A study by IBM revealed that 84% of employees at best performing organizations are receiving the training they need compared to only 16% at the worst performing ones. Adequate training can help organizations save an average of $70,000 annually and create a 10% increase in productivity. Generation Z will only increase the need for education initiatives as they face an even greater skills gap - 65% of the jobs they will need to fill don't even exist yet.
In the last 20 years, the amount of remote workers has multiplied 4x with 37% of the workforce operating out of the home. Current advances in video conferencing and communication/collaboration tools are supporting the drastic increase. As the workforce becomes increasingly mobile, workforce management technologies will have to evolve to meet their needs. From a corporate perspective, this trend not only increases the number of candidates in the hiring pool, it also presents the opportunity to increase employee engagement and satisfaction by offering a healthy work-life balance.
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