Workforce Management Makes the Grade

Applying Workforce Management Initiatives to K-12 Schools & School District Labor Requirements

The most efficient schools and school districts have turned to technology to improve the quality and delivery of their programs and services.  Private and public schools, vocational tech schools and schools supporting funded programs have experienced the immense benefits of technology and have realized the need to take full advantage of it throughout all operational and educational processes. By automating workforce management operations, administration can more effectively respond to staffing initiatives, absence management and student and faculty needs while also addressing government regulations and maintaining accurate cost data.  Without a dashboard view of the workforce, visibility into resource availability and the corresponding possibilities are limited. The ability to make effective staffing choices, such as the elimination of unnecessary overtime, when to schedule substitute faculty and what the impact is when staff is assigned to work hours beyond what is considered safe or within contractual guidelines is compromised. In addition, data intensive manual or semi-automated timekeeping and staff scheduling practices are often prone to error and do not provide the flexibility for real-time responsiveness that schools and school districts need in order to meet growing demands. There are alternatives to consider.

Those responsible for the overall operations of K-12 schools and school districts are constantly assessing how resources are utilized. Automated enterprise-class workforce management optimization solutions can help schools reduce payroll preparation time, improve payroll accuracy by 1-6% of gross payroll and improve performance, productivity and ability to operate within a set budget.  

That’s why administration is turning to technology to address some of the most pressing workforce challenges they face today including:

• Managing a diverse and distributed educational community comprised of faculty, students, administrative and maintenance staffs that can be salaried, hourly or contingent
• Workforce mobility within individual schools and school districts 
• Addressing complex pay, work and union rules while complying with regulatory requirements
• Increasing efficiency and modernizing workforce management processes to meet the needs of a diverse end-user community
• Eliminating payroll inaccuracies
• Rapidly responding to city or federal agency initiatives such as vaccination programs
• Simplifying compliance with federal, state, local and school requirements and regulations, including FMLA and FLSA
• Productivity gains through effective and efficient employee scheduling and absence management
• Systems integration to ERP, payroll, HR and other core back-office systems

Schools and school districts are not immune to fluctuations in the economy and their impact on the ability to provide students with a quality education. According to the National School Boards Association, federal funding for elementary and secondary education remained nearly flat from
FY 2005 to FY 2007 due to a shift in budget priorities and gridlock in Congressional appropriations processes. With cuts in federal and state funding, many schools and school districts stepped up efforts to remain financially healthy while remaining fully committed to maintaining their academic standards now and into the future. Many of these efforts rely on technology initiatives that will help provide schools with better decision-making tools to ensure that business objectives are met while educational quality and academic programs are not compromised.

This paper examines workforce optimization solutions and the opportunities and benefits they offer K-12 schools and school districts to increase cost efficiencies and workforce productivity. Whether the needs are for a regional group of schools or for an entire school district, there are measurable benefits that go beyond cost savings in adopting automated solutions.

Place Control Where It Matters Most

Students engaged in work/study programs, faculty who provide support for after school programs or athletic team coaching, full-time, part-time, shared or substitute faculty teaching in different departments or teaching facilities are as much a part of a school’s business community as staff working in administration, foodservice or maintenance. As technology innovations expand the boundaries of education, K-12 schools find themselves graded not only on academic excellence, but on operational performance and standards while continuing to deliver best-in-class, high quality services and outcomes to students, faculty and staff.

Successfully controlling costs and efficiently deploying these diverse workforces depends on administration’s ability to effectively schedule staff, control and track time, attendance, scheduled and unscheduled absences and leaves, eliminate payroll inaccuracies and integrate with existing applications for optimum efficiency. Whether an educational institution is an elementary, middle or high school, or needs to manage a feeder school district model offering a variety of academic and community programs, automated workforce management solutions help improve overall performance and productivity. 

Effective school administrators require the most current, accurate and reliable data to make timely decisions that can impact the quality of education and service for their students and faculty. By employing automated workforce management solutions, schools and school districts are better able to realize the following benefits:

• Maximized Efficiencies

• Standardize and automate manual time and labor tracking processes and absence management resulting in efficiency gains, increased payroll accuracy and cost savings 
• Track tenured teachers on extended family/medical leaves or sabbaticals
• Manage staff in a leave status
• Schedule resources to support academic and community-related program requirements while balancing cost control and efficiency
• Manage fluctuating staff populations associated with schools and school districts, including shared faculty, special education resources and one-to-one student aides
• Support quality initiatives by deploying the right number of people with the right certifications and the right skills at the right time
• Manage the skills needed to support the classroom, the students and the curriculum

2.   Cost Control

• Capture labor costs by program, subject, grade or student
• Determine the right substitute at the best cost when managing unexpected absences 
• Accurately track time and allocation of staff as critical elements in obtaining and maintaining entitlements and discretionary grants  
• Support union contracts through a rules engine to manage the complexities inherent in all workforce rules including pay, work, scheduling, accruals, etc.
• Track  sick, vacation and other absence and leave accruals
• Provide self-service functions to allow faculty and staff to monitor vacation and sick time actuals against entitlements

3. Ability To Deploy Solutions Across A Diverse End-User Community

• Provide a single portal, intuitive user interface for all user interactions with the system, based upon a user’s role and responsibilities
• Employ a rapid deployment model to achieve self-sufficiency with quick time-to-benefit
• Leverage flexible APIs and Web services to optimize all levels of system integration to human resource/payroll systems as well as systems that include workflow elements such as automated call systems and emergency response systems 
• Take advantage of flexible deployment options through traditional software license or on demand service models

World-class Inside and Outside of the Classroom

Schools use an array of electronic resources to deliver the best experience for their students, faculty and staff. As a growing trend in this area, automated time, scheduling and attendance systems are regarded as ’mission critical’ as schools turn to technology best practices for help in effectively managing their resources. Increased and real-time responsiveness, enhanced support for mobile and other “untethered” workers and self-service options for faculty, administration and staff are technology initiatives that contribute to a school district’s operational efficiency, which further helps to control costs. Optimizing workforce performance requires the ability to allocate educators, administrative and maintenance resources to the ever-expanding programs and services that are important parts of a school’s strategic plan for excellence.   

Students currently in the K-12 curriculum are growing up in a world where real-time response through technology is the norm. Not only do they take it for granted, they have come to expect that schools deliver the same real-time response that they are accustomed to in their personal lives. Tests, grades, homework assignments, class notes and presentations are readily available online for students in many school systems. These advances have enabled parents to more easily monitor the progress of their child’s performance and help students take a more active role in their own success. These students expect to have their questions answered, their information needs met and their requests fulfilled with just a few clicks of the mouse. 

The Challenges of Increased Mobility

The  trends leading to an increase in the number of faculty, staff and administrators spending more time outside the classroom than in it are expected to continue. Supporting”untethered” workers goes beyond delivering Internet or email access to those not physically located in one place. It involves communications that allow staff to ‘check in’ through remote means by consistently and securely providing select, critical applications in a predictable manner. The goal of these efforts is to bring essential enterprise business applications to this mobile component of a school or school district’s ranks wherever they are rather than forcing them to return to the enterprise applications on a computer located in an office or classroom.

Matching People with Business Demands

Without an automated system in place, the tasks of staffing, managing absence-driven replacements and responding to the wide variety of academic and extracurricular programs are laborious and can be quite inefficient. Visibility into resource availability is limited. The result? Schools may not know if they’re paying for unnecessary overtime or might be scheduling employees to work hours beyond what is considered safe or within contractual guidelines.

With an automated workforce management system, school administrators benefit from the ability to track key performance indicators (KPIs) that provide real-time visibility into the status of cost metrics, allowing for the most productive and cost effective staffing. Schools can optimize schedules based on demand, and as a result, realize an increase in productivity, while enhancing operations and ensuring the right resources with the right skills are available when and where they are needed.

A dashboard view of the workforce and insight into the skill sets of the available staff ensures better alignment with contract, certification and skills requirements to meet the continually evolving needs of the K-12 curriculum and the business of running a school or school district.  Automated scheduling optimization also eliminates errors that inherently result from time-consuming manual processes. Business rules drive policies surrounding accruals, paid time off, time accrued towards participation in retirement programs and leave management.  Proper tracking and validation of these rules can result in greater accuracy of benefit accruals and lower payroll and labor costs.

Choosing to Automate

Once a school or school district has made the decision to automate, they need to focus on the business goals and metrics that influence overall operations. Be certain that the solution proactively provides alerts and best practice workflows to optimize key scheduling tasks. The solution also needs to enable department heads and administrators to track performance against specific objectives/metrics. In this way, they could quickly and easily take appropriate corrective actions in accordance with school policies. Look to the solution to provide all end-users with the flexibility to replicate, improve on and automate complex scheduling processes to remain efficient.

Understand that workforce management systems should be viewed as having the potential to be touched by virtually everyone directly connected with your school – such as recording time or checking vacation balances over the Internet using ‘self-service.’  A best-in-class solution is intuitive and easy-to-use with little or no training. Ease-of-use and familiarity with the system encourages more rapid and widespread adoption and offers immediate productivity gains, delivering a better return on the technology investment.

Technology Needs to be Versatile and Flexible 

Schools and school districts often require more decision making than many world-class businesses as they address the broad needs of an extremely diverse educational environment. The following are important technology aspects to consider when selecting a workforce management solution:

• Scalability – be sure that the system can easily scale to meet the changing needs of the organization today and in the future 
• Integration – look for a solution that easily and seamlessly integrates with other related business critical applications to achieve improved efficiencies
• Flexibility – determine whether an in-house license fee model or a Software-as-a-Service  (SaaS) On Demand delivery model is best to meet IT requirements
• Personalization – systems should offer flexible configuration options to personalize the solution to business needs without the high cost and maintenance issues inherent in customization
• Data Acquisition – look for a solution that offers open and flexible data acquisition methods and platforms, including Web Clocks, PDAs, BlackBerry® smartphone and other mobile devices, kiosks, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), offline, etc.
• Maximize user productivity – the best solution  should deliver an ease-of-use that virtually eliminates the need for end user training
• Increase user satisfaction – by standardizing the ‘look and feel’ for user interactions across all applications and maximizing adoption rates
• Implementation – be sure the vendor understands the needs of K-12 schools and can tailor the implementation strategy to the school’s unique requirements, addressing business objectives and organizational capabilities

Robust workforce management solutions that provide best-in-class time and attendance, employee scheduling and optimization components that are 100% Web-based, fully integrated and scalable, help schools make the grade to operate more efficiently.

About CyberShift, Inc.

CyberShift, Inc. is a leading provider of workforce and expense management software and services focused on helping organizations of all sizes improve performance and productivity of their workforce.  Through its integrated Workforce Management 3GÔ, which includes time and attendance, advanced scheduling and reporting and analytics, schools and school district administration  can more effectively plan, manage and deploy their workforces, reduce costs and improve processes across business operations.  CyberShift Expense™ automates the processing and facilitates the management of employee expenses such as travel and entertainment and helps improve compliance, enforce expense policies and procedures and increase visibility into operations.  Offered in both traditional license fee and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery models, CyberShift’s innovative solutions have been awarded US and Canadian patents.  CyberShift is the first enterprise-class workforce and expense management solution provider to enable support for the BlackBerry® platform.