Workforce

The workforce or labour force is the labour pool either in employment or unemployed. It is generally used to describe those working for a single company or industry, but can also apply to a geographic region like a city, state, or country. Within a company, its value can be labelled as its “Workforce in Place”. The workforce of a country includes both the employed and the unemployed (labour force). The labour force participation rate, LFPR (or economic activity rate, EAR), is the ratio between the labour force and the overall size of their cohort (national population of the same age range). The term generally excludes the employers or management, and can imply those involved in manual labour. It may also mean all those who are available for work.

Formal and Informal

Formal labour is any sort of employment that is structured and paid in a formal way. Unlike the informal sector of the economy, formal labour within a country contributes to that country’s gross national product. Informal labour is labour that falls short of being a formal arrangement in law or in practice. It can be paid or unpaid and it is always unstructured and unregulated. Formal employment is more reliable than informal employment. Generally, the former yields higher income and greater benefits and securities for both men and women.

Informal Labour

The contribution of informal labourers is immense. Informal labour is expanding globally, most significantly in developing countries. According to a study done by Jacques Charmes, in the year 2000 informal labour made up 57% of non-agricultural employment, 40% of urban employment, and 83% of the new jobs in Latin America. That same year, informal labour made up 78% of non-agricultural employment, 61% of urban employment, and 93% of the new jobs in Africa.[8] Particularly after an economic crisis, labourers tend to shift from the formal sector to the informal sector. This trend was seen after the Asian economic crisis which began in 1997.

Informal Labour and Gender

Gender is frequently associated with informal labour. Women are employed more often informally than they are formally, and informal labour is an overall larger source of employment for females than it is for males. Women frequent the informal sector of the economy through occupations like home-based workers and street vendors. The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World shows that in the 1990s, 81% of women in Benin were street vendors, 55% in Guatemala, 44% in Mexico, 33% in Kenya, and 14% in India. Overall, 60% of women workers in the developing world are employed in the informal sector.

The specific percentages are 84% and 58% for women in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America respectively. The percentages for men in both of these areas of the world are lower, amounting to 63% and 48% respectively. In Asia, 65% of women workers and 65% of men workers are employed in the informal sector. Globally, a large percentage of women that are formally employed also work in the informal sector behind the scenes. These women make up the hidden work force.

Workforce management (WFM) is an institutional process that maximizes performance levels and competency for an organization. The process includes all the activities needed to maintain a productive workforce, such as field service management, human resource management, performance and training management, data collection, recruiting, budgeting, forecasting, scheduling and analytics.

Workforce management provides a common set performance-based tools and software to support corporate management, front-line supervisors, store managers and workers across manufacturing, distribution, transportation, and retail operations. It is sometimes referred to as HRM systems, or Workforce asset management, or part of ERP systems.

As workforce management has developed from a traditional approach of staff scheduling to improve time management, it has become more integrated and demand-oriented to optimize the scheduling of staff. Besides the two core aspects of demand-orientation and optimization, workforce management may also incorporate:

• Forecasting of workload and required staff
• Involvement of employees into the scheduling process
• Management of working times and accounts
• Analysis and monitoring of the entire process.

The starting point is a clear definition of the work required through engineered standards and optimal methods for performing each task as efficiently and safely as possible. Based on this foundation and demand-based forecasts, workers are scheduled, tasks are assigned, performance is measured, feedback is provided and incentives are computed and paid. In addition, online training is provided along with supervisor-based coaching to bring all workers up to required levels of proficiency. Workforce management is a complete approach designed to make workforce as productive as possible, reduce labour costs, and improve customer service.

Field Service Management

Workforce management also uses the process of field service management in order to have oversight of company’s resources not used on company property. Examples include:

• Demand Management: To help forecast work orders to plan the number and expertise of staff that will be needed.
• Workforce Scheduler: Using predefined rules to automatically optimise the schedule and use of resources (people, parts, vehicles).
• Workforce Dispatcher: Automatically assigning work orders within predefined zones to particular technicians
• Mobile Solutions: Allowing dispatchers and technicians to communicate in real time.