Workforce management for small and medium sized businesses requires a huge amount of resources, both in terms of time and money. Manage well, and your business runs like a well-oiled machine with employees’ times optimized, never over- and under-staffed, with few complications in terms of scheduling and time keeping. Manage poorly and your business can hemorrhage money while customer service fails.
While industry experience and great leadership qualities are irreplaceable, there are tools that exist to help managers optimize their workforce and manage better and more easily. Ximble, created by tech industry veteran Peter Swaniker, aims to automate the most mundane and tedious aspects of workforce management so managers can spend less time filling out excel sheets and more time motivating their team.
Here are 5 key Ximble features that can help any business run better.
1. It takes the headache out of shift scheduling
Ximble’s software allows managers to create and maintain employee schedules swiftly and easily. Connected via mobile and web platforms, employees can indicate their availability while managers can set hours and budgets.
The scheduling tool will work with the information and create possible schedules to ensure you are well staffed and within budget. You can even manage multiple locations and optimize labor costs with different staffing configurations.
Because the automated platform does most of the heavy lifting, you won’t have to waste time drawing up physical calendars or contacting employees individually to find out their availability.
2. It minimizes the cost of missed shifts or “buddy clocking”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported in 2015 that losses linked to absenteeism cost employers $225.8 billion a year. As a business owner or manager, you probably don’t need the CDC to tell you what a huge headache it is to fill in for an employee who misses a shift or can’t come in at the last minute. Luckily, Ximble makes time tracking easy.
Employees can check in to shifts via their own smart devices, by picture, text, QR and pin codes. Using pictures to check in also allows managers to eliminate the occurrence of what’s known as “buddy clocking”, whereby one employee checks in for another who is late or absent.
Geo-fencing and GPS tagging helps ensure they check in only when they are actually at work. Plus, Ximble sends automatic shift reminders to your employee’s smartphone helps ensure missed shifts and late shifts are minimized.
3. It gives you a ton of information at the touch of a button
Ximble offers rich reporting features that help you identify worker habits and helps you optimize your workforce. The company is even working on incorporating artificial intelligence to consider business trends, local factors like seasonality and foot traffic, and other variables that may affect your business so you can better tailor your shift schedule to reflect actual business needs. Plus, the company releases reports like its 2017 Key Insights on Employee Attendance and Tardiness so users can understand overall trends and findings in the workforce management industry.
4. It makes benefits tracking a breeze
The company is set to release a Paid Time Off module to help track PTO accrual manually. With a fully configurable accrual system, the Ximble module is an extremely powerful under the hood feature that is compatible with most business, industries, and PTO policies.
For managers constantly struggling with complicated PTO policies while working to maintain compliance with local, state, and federal PTO requirements, this new feature can mean saving hours of work every week. It allows employees and supervisors alike to monitor hours accrued through Ximble’s web and mobile app based platform and employees can even request paid time-off directly from the Ximble platform, making the process easier on everyone.
5. It’s easily integrated with the rest of your business solutions
Ximble already offers a pretty great set of features to help make managing your business easier. But it would still be a headache if you had to migrate the information from Ximble into your other business management solutions, like payroll or HR. Luckily, the Ximble team took that into consideration and offers built-in integration with most of the top payroll and HR software. That way, information like hours, shifts, PTO, and budgets are automatically shared between the different software you use, helping you truly optimize and automate the running of your business.
Takeaway
Managing better means constantly finding ways to improve the way your business runs. With Ximble, all the most tedious, yet still vital tasks can be optimized and completed quickly and easily, helping business run smoother and helping managers make more time to truly work on leadership and business development. It’s managing better, and managing more easily as well.