Public Safety 2025: Becoming an Employer of Choice by Reimagining Workforce Management and Scheduling in Continuously Volatile Times

This IDC analyst paper from UKG can help you better support your public safety employees — Public Safety 2025: Becoming an Employer of Choice by Reimagining Workforce Management and Scheduling in Continuously Volatile Times.

Public safety employees are experiencing extreme volatility brought on by the pandemic, civil unrest, natural and man-made crises, and other areas of instability. These industry-specific issues can slow down productivity and take a toll on the mental health and satisfaction of the public safety workforce. Issues include:

• Occupational stressors — creating burnout and psychological strain from high risk, demanding situations
• Complex compliance environment — labor rules and union-compliant work schedules can create challenges in staff scheduling and reporting requirements
• Manual processes — the amount of time spent on manual workforce management and paper-driven scheduling processes is unmanageable
• Constant budget pressures — municipal funding has declined, creating a reality that agencies must do much more with less

Workforce Management and automated scheduling strategies can help public safety agencies fully integrate human capital, payroll, and scheduling systems to help create solutions that:

• Capture granular, real-time personnel availability, and skills data to ensure resources are available when needed. This can help combat staff shortages, sick leave, fatigue, rising overtime costs, fair shift bidding, labor and union requirements, special training, and certification
• Centralize data about crisis intervention teams. If workforce data is siloed across multiple agencies, it can be impossible to gain a comprehensive view of available resources to respond to crises with the specific skills and certifications needed.
• Involve broad stakeholder groups. Provide collaboration between private groups, public sector groups, and citizens and families in the community to provide caring, humane responses to today’s challenges.
• Automate tracking, billing, and invoicing. Track labor response time and costs between the groups for rapid cost recovery and to also associate the costs to Crisis Intervention Teams (CIT) programs, FEMA, and grant dollars.

To learn more, download the analyst paper.