Many managers still create their work schedules based on a general hourly budget and their gut feeling. The result? At the end of the week, they’re faced with unexpected, higher costs, such as unnecessary overtime or having too many or too few staff on duty.
Would you like to achieve structural savings on labor costs without compromising service quality? Then you should base your budget on facts and specific tasks even before you create the schedule. Intelligent workforce management (WFM) helps you work more efficiently from day one.
The first step is to establish the financial framework. You start by forecasting revenue, which allows you to directly link labor costs to expected revenue.
The advantage: You avoid simply scheduling hours. You establish a connection in advance between the costs and the expected revenue for your location.
While most WFM systems stop at a general budget for the “bakery” or the “cash register,” we take it one step further. Strategic WFM allows you to refine your labor cost budgets down to the most specific level: the task.
This is where a Workload Planner (WLP) comes in. This type of planner breaks down the total hours into a detailed breakdown, so you know exactly how many budgeted hours you need for each department and task, and when.
Here's a concrete example: Let's say you have a 5-hour budget for cleaning the juicer. If your business has a policy that this task is only performed on weekdays, set the budget hours for Saturday and Sunday to 0%. The hours will be distributed among Monday through Friday. This way, you can be sure that the right tasks are scheduled at the right time.
This detailed planning for each task has a direct impact on your labor costs and the way you work:
Precise Planning: Since your budgeted hours are allocated so specifically to each task, you know exactly when you need to schedule more or fewer employees. This reduces the risk of over- or understaffing.
Less waste: You schedule only the hours needed to meet expected demand and complete tasks. You use fewer “buffer hours,” which often result in unnecessary costs.
Higher Productivity: By linking work hours to specific tasks and assigning them at the right time, employees work in a more focused and productive manner.
By applying this strategic approach during the budgeting phase, you lay a solid foundation for lower personnel costs and improved capacity utilization—without compromising the quality of your services. At the same time, this remains a forecast: you are working with expectations, and reality can always differ from them.
Planning is the foundation. After that, you decide who to hire. You can’t just hire the cheapest employees. You also need people with experience. And a good mix of permanent employees and temporary workers is important. If you don’t hire enough temporary workers, you’ll lose them. If you don’t hire enough of your own employees, you’ll lack expertise and quality.
Every business is different. It’s a good idea to actively test different approaches to find out which combination works best for your business. In the next blog post, I’ll show you how to make adjustments throughout the week if circumstances change and your budget no longer adds up.
Would you like to stop gambling and start playing it safe?
Discover in a personalized, no-obligation demo how our WFM solution structurally reduces your labor costs at the task level and optimizes your capacity utilization.
