Labor Optimization Made Simple with UKG Strategic Workforce Planning

Labor markets in advanced economies are among the tightest they’ve been in nearly two decades, which is why it’s more important than ever for businesses to engage in labor optimization. This strategic approach to staffing aims to improve employee efficiency and productivity while reducing operational costs and achieving better business outcomes.

Workforce planning, a main component of labor optimization, is a complex and crucial undertaking that can help businesses adapt to change, stay competitive, and achieve long-term success. Its objective is to ensure your organization has the right people with the right skills in the right places at the right time, so you can maximize output and minimize waste—keeping your people happy and protecting your bottom line.

Workforce planning, scheduling, and forecasting are part of a complicated process because it requires many factors to be considered. These include the amount of work that needs to be done and the skills required to accomplish that work, the ideal number of people that should be hired and the budget available to hire them, and the availability of potential employees and their scheduling preferences. On top of these considerations, organizations must also adhere to all applicable laws, regulations, and industry standards related to employment. It’s a lot to juggle.

Accurately plan for future business and staffing needs 

For an organization to be most effective, it must avoid understaffing, which can lead to employee burnout, and overstaffing, which can lead to budget burnout, and find the Goldilocks “just right” scenario. But for this to happen, organizations need a way to predict, analyze, and address the gaps between their frontline workforce today and their human capital needs of tomorrow. And they need to be able to plan appropriately for both peak seasons and slow seasons. 

While many organizations still use manual workforce planning, this process presents myriad challenges. It’s time-consuming and error-prone, and lacks real-time visibility, all of which make it difficult to optimize employee schedules and resource allocation. An automated strategic workforce solution like UKG Strategic Workforce Planning, which is part of the UKG Pro® Workforce Management suite, allows you to bypass the manual, labor-intensive process of budgeting and forecasting, and use workforce supply-and-demand data to predict and plan effectively.

With Strategic Workforce Planner, the long-term budgeting process becomes streamlined, allowing quick, data-driven decisions and easy scenario modeling. This integrated toolset amplifies the budgeting process, facilitating collaboration across finance, operations, HR, and other business partners. It's not just about cutting costs—it's about strategic planning, wise workforce investment, and driving both short-term success and long-term growth while remaining flexible to market changes. A real-world example was the collaboration between UKG and Connors Group to support Gap Inc. in right-sizing their labor to save in certain areas while reinvesting in others to serve customers better and strengthen overall workforce performance.

Be ready for whatever comes your way

According to the IDC Retail and Financial Insights white paper, End-to-End Labor Optimization, retail organizations struggle with labor planning and collaboration between departments because planning is traditionally done in silos. In fact, 21% of organizations report that they never collaborate on workforce planning, and only 12% report that they consistently collaborate across departments on workforce planning.

UKG Strategic Workforce Planning facilitates cross-functional collaboration. It bridges the gap between departments and budgets, breaks down silos, and helps organizations build a powerful defense for any operational reality that might come their way. It also brings together the expertise of three important roles—HR, Finance, and Operations. Finance lets the team know what headcount the budget will allow, HR understands how best to hire the right people at specific times of the year, and Operations implements a plan that seeks to balance employee productivity, operational efficiency, and job satisfaction to meet current business goals.

UKG Strategic Workforce Planning is designed to help organizations:

• Get an accurate calculation of long-term workload and team capacity over weeks, months, and even years
• Gain insights and track progress in real time through robust labor analytics and reporting
• Anticipate and plan for future needs through intelligent “what if” scenario planning
• Identify optimal staffing levels, skills mix, and hiring opportunities
• Build accurate labor budgets
• Create a seed forecast with machine learning that distributes to all locations

By improving work-life balance for employees who are no longer pushed to burnout or asked to work shifts that don’t easily fit into their lifestyle, UKG Strategic Workforce Planning also encourages increased employee engagement. This can lead to higher job satisfaction and improved retention, all of which are good for an organization’s bottom line.

Case in point: Costa Coffee 

Costa Coffee is the largest coffeehouse chain in the U.K., with 16,000 baristas across 1,500+ locations in the U.K. and additional outlets overseas. The company uses a healthy mix of full-time, part-time, and seasonal employees, and became a UKG Strategic Workforce Planning customer near the end of 2021 in order to optimize its labor allocations. In particular, Costa wanted to be able to make more strategic decisions around seasonal recruitment during the holiday season but in 2021 didn’t have any real-time or centrally located data it could pull from to help accomplish that.

Year over year, the Christmas holidays are a peak season for the company—and then January tends to be a very slow month. With the help of UKG Strategic Workforce Planning’s Capacity Planning module, Costa Coffee was able to more precisely forecast its holiday staffing needs for 2022, which led to an almost 50% increase in staffing efficiency during the Christmas season and a 65% increase in efficiency over the following months compared to 2021.

“We didn’t see as many overspends over the holidays, which is great from a business and profitability perspective,” says Katie Little, Labor Operations Manager at Costa Coffee. "UKG Strategic Workforce Planning helps us make sure we’ve got the right balance of full-time, part-time, and seasonal contract employees. And the Long-Term Planning module gives us the ability to look forward and plan effectively around recruitment so we get ahead of the game. We’re able to go out early and make sure we’re attracting the right people.”

UKG Strategic Workforce Planning has empowered Costa’s frontline managers with optimized recruitment plans that are designed to align staff levels with business demand and help managers stay on top of staffing needs. Managers can better serve their full-time and part-time employees—offering them more hours and greater scheduling flexibility—and can hire fewer seasonal employees. This cuts down on recruitment costs and also provides a better work-life balance for employees. Research shows that investing time and budget back into the employee experience can lead to a 50% reduction in turnover and a 34% reduction in absenteeism.

Costa Coffee is now beginning to leverage the solution’s Labor Model tool to take a closer look at the kinds of tasks it’s asking its store teams to perform, so it can begin to identify opportunities for task simplification and greater efficiency. “I think before UKG Strategic Workforce Planning, we were a little bit blind as to what was going on and now, we have much better visibility,” says Katie.

Watch a webinar replay with Katie Little to get more insights and information about Costa Coffee’s experience working with UKG and the benefits it has reaped using UKG Strategic Workforce Planning.

Take your organization to the next level

With UKG Strategic Workforce Planning, you gain a long-term view into your future staffing and business needs, so you can prepare for any scenario and take a more strategic approach to your people strategy. And when your business objectives and workforce planning strategies align, the result is streamlined operations, controlled labor costs, and happier employees. Learn how your organization can benefit from UKG Strategic Workforce Planning and explore the end-to-end labor optimization infographic to see how strategic workforce planning can enhance employee satisfaction and improve business outcomes.