What Will The Future Of Work Look Like?

Remote work, work-life balance, employee loyalty, qualifications, and employee experience and empowerment are topics becoming increasingly more important in the new normal. Only if companies recognize and implement these trends will they stay relevant and competitive in the future. 24/7 availability of corporate software in the cloud has an important role to play. A workforce management solution has to be available to anyone, anywhere, anytime, regardless of user type, location, or time zone.

Seamless integration

In the past ten years, we at Atoss have invested 170,000 developer work days in our flagship product for time recording, tracking, and personnel planning. Our clear goal was to sustainably increase the business value and user friendliness of our workforce management solution.

To integrate staff even better into processes, we have reached a milestone with Staff Center. Atoss Staff Center combines self-services with a revolutionary new way of user interaction – completely barrier-free, no training necessary. New functionalities allow employees to painlessly change shifts, indicate their ideal working hours, request vacation days, and record their working hours on a stationary device or on their smartphone, creating an ideal digital employee experience.

Furthermore, all this information and use cases are also available and editable in SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central without having to log in again. This guarantees seamless integration for users and decreases the number of data duplicates and corresponding mistakes.

Of course, one can’t talk about smart business software without also mentioning the potential of artificial intelligence (AI). One example in the context of user experience is natural language processing, allowing for an even more seamless interaction between users and the workforce management system. Eliminating the need to fill out a form or to write countless e-mails, the employee can simply tell the system, “I would like to take Wednesday through Friday off next week.”

Through regular training with different languages, idioms, and wordings, the system learns and automatically improves at understanding the employees’ intent. In other words, the workforce management system is self-learning.

The future of work

Artificial intelligence can also personalize users’ interaction with the system. After regular training, the system recognizes which interaction the user in question uses often and proactively suggests certain actions or options. For example, imagine a retail employee who just got into work in the morning. The app greets them with “Would you like to clock in?”, saving time and improving said employee’s experience with the system. Ideas for use cases like this one often come from users themselves, since they are the ones most familiar with pain points and possible solutions.

Another example in the context of business value is using artificial intelligence to evaluate personnel resources. AI can spot anomalies in historical data, like revenue or the number of customers usually frequenting the store at any given time. Consequently, it can be used to significantly increase the quality and accuracy of headcount planning.

As probably all HR professionals are aware, near-perfect headcount planning is the most important thing when it comes to optimizing the quality and costs of shifts and work schedules. Intelligent optimization algorithms can support human resources teams by automatically creating an ideal work schedule, feeding on business and employee data. Artificial intelligence is able to optimally combine required staffing needs with configured criteria like qualification, employee availability, or time balance.

The aforementioned examples are only a small glimpse of what we are already making possible today. We at Atoss are dedicated to shaping the workforce management of the future.