Common Challenges In Workforce Management & How WFM Software Solves Them

 

You’re running a business or managing teams, and you’ve probably faced the constant juggling act of shifts, absences, overtime, and compliance.

It’s stressful, time-consuming, and often error-prone. Yet modern organisations can’t afford to let workforce mismanagement drag them down.

In this post, you’ll discover the most common challenges in workforce management and exactly how Workforce Management (WFM) software can help you overcome them.

What Is Workforce Management (WFM)?

Workforce Management (WFM) refers to the set of strategies, processes, and tools that let you plan, schedule, monitor, and optimise your workforce.

You use it to ensure the right people are in the right place, at the right time, doing the right tasks.

Core functions typically include:

• Scheduling staff

• Forecasting demand (customer traffic, workload)

• Tracking time and attendance

• Monitoring performance

• Managing labour costs

• Ensuring compliance with laws and internal policies

If you do all of this manually with spreadsheets, emails, and phone calls, you’ll feel overwhelmed quickly. WFM aims to bring consistency and automation into the mix.

Why Effective Workforce Management Matters

When your workforce is managed well, you see tangible benefits:

• Higher productivity: because you avoid overstaffing or understaffing.

• Better morale and retention: employees feel treated fairly, with schedules that respect their preferences.

• Reduced costs: less overtime, fewer errors.

• Compliance peace of mind: you meet labour laws and reduce risk.

• Data-driven decisions: with analytics, you can adjust strategy rather than guess.

Altogether, effective workforce management helps you run smoothly, more efficiently, and with less daily stress.

The Most Common Challenges in Workforce Management

Here are the key challenges that many organisations face. You might recognise some from your own experience.

1. Inefficient Scheduling and Forecasting

One of the top issues is aligning staff levels with actual demand.

If you over-staff, you waste payroll. Understaffed, and service suffers. Doing this manually is tricky – you rely on guesswork, outdated data, and intuition.

Because you can’t perfectly predict peaks (such as a local event or weather shift), your scheduling ends up being reactive.

Last-minute changes, shift gaps, or excess staff become the norm.

2. Time and Attendance Tracking Problems

Even when schedules appear favourable on paper, attendance issues often derail plans.

Common problems include:

• People forget to clock in or out.

• “Buddy punching” (one person clocking in for another).

• Remote or hybrid workers are inaccurately logging their hours.

• Manual timesheet entry with typos or delays.

These all contribute to incorrect payroll, disputes, and lost productivity.

3. Compliance and Labour Law Challenges

Each region has its own laws regarding overtime, mandatory breaks, holiday pay, shift differentials, union agreements, and other related matters.

Staying on top of all this is tricky, especially if your workforce spans multiple regions.

You risk penalties, legal exposure, or unhappy employees if something slips. Additionally, maintaining an audit trail or records is often a manual and fragmented process.

4. High Turnover and Low Employee Engagement

If schedules feel unfair or inflexible, employees lose trust.

If they don’t have input into their shifts or can’t see how performance is measured, engagement suffers.

Over time, you may lose talent, forcing you into hiring cycles that drain resources.

Burnout is real when staff feel overworked, under-appreciated, or stuck with unpredictable hours. Engagement and retention problems often stem from scheduling and visibility issues.

5. Inadequate Data and Reporting

Without real-time insights, you’re always chasing.

You produce reports once a week (or month) and, by then, the insights are stale. Managers often lack dashboards that show attendance, overtime, unfilled shifts, and cost overages, among other key metrics.

Because data is scattered (in spreadsheets, separate systems, and manual logs), you can’t tie cause and effect easily.

You end up making decisions based on gut rather than evidence.

6. Poor Integration with Other Systems

Your HR, payroll, ERP, and even CRM systems may all be in silos.

If your WFM isn’t integrated, you’ll suffer:

• Duplicate data entry

• Inconsistent employee records

• Delays in updating changes (e.g. new hire, termination)

• Lack of unified reporting

It’s a headache to reconcile data across multiple systems every pay period.

Conclusion

Managing a workforce has never been more complex.

Between juggling schedules, ensuring compliance, tracking attendance, and keeping employees engaged, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. But the truth is, you don’t need to manage all this manually anymore.

With the right WFM, you can bring structure, clarity, and confidence to the way your organisation operates.

Sentrient makes this transformation simple. Designed to help businesses of all sizes, Sentrient’s workforce management solution gives you everything you need to manage your people efficiently.

If you’re ready to take the guesswork out of workforce management, Sentrient can help you do just that.

Book a demo with Sentrient today and see how simple and effective workforce management can be.

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