The use of workforce management software has become a powerful trend in management. With so many people on the go and so many laws to balance, attempting to balance everyone's time off and building schedules that will really work is a full-time job in and of itself. Fortunately, when you find a set of software that has certain functions, you can get a lot more done with just the right number of people and less time spent. This is doubly important with an increasing number of workers on the road.
Mobile Clocking
It is official: most of the world now gets online using their phones instead of using computers. With this being the case, the most important mobile feature your workforce management software needs to have is the ability for your workers to clock in and clock out from anywhere. Having to return to a central location to clock in and out may seem simpler, but for workers who are more than an hour away it can quickly become impractical. Mobile clocking, particularly from privately owned devices, allows workers to continue operating wherever they need to be until their day is set to end.
Automatic Time Zone Conversion
There are 24 standard time zones in the world, and most of those time zones are not the one in which you are operating. While a local workforce does not need to pay attention to this fact, a mobile workforce does. In some cases, going an hour or two away can change which time zone your worker is operating within. If they are on a conference or a sales call in a distant city, they may be several time zones away. This can be difficult to track.
Fortunately, workforce management software makes the process easier. If a worker is operating several time zones away, the system can record when they clocked in, how many hours they were on the clock, and then when they clocked out without missing a beat. For a human being, making these kinds of conversions can be a challenge, but software does not have such limitations. Software can even determine a cut-off time if someone is across the international date line.
Laws in Different Areas
When employees are on the road, sometimes there are going to be legal conflicts that arise from their hours. While being in the same country should not impose too many legal differences, some municipalities become particular about the hours worked per week. For a person, it can be highly challenging to determine what the laws require in both your home area and the far-off work area where your employee is operating. Fortunately, software can be programmed easily to work with multiple sets of laws. Instead of having to pour over how long someone is allowed to work in one area versus another, you are then free to think about larger issues and put out local fires.
Forecasting and Travel Expensing
It can be difficult to predict road expenses, though they tend to swell in proportion to how far a worker ends up traveling. Software has the ability to forecast the distance and duration of a trip, as well as the probable expenses such as lodging, food and fuel. With software to aide you in making decisions about when and where to send your employees, you can make informed decisions and determine which trips will be the most profitable in advance. In some cases, you may even decide to hold off on a particular trip because it will not yield a reasonable ROI. Learning this in advance causes your software to pay for itself.