WFM Glossary
Axsium’s Workforce Management Glossary is a compilation of common industry terms. Use it to sharpen your understanding of the solutions, tools, and technologies used in workforce management.
Absence Management
What is Absence Management? Absence management is the process of tracking and managing employee...
Accruals
Accruals refer to the number of vacation days, sick days, or other employee entitlements that have...
Attestation
Attestation refers to the process of an employee confirming the accuracy of their clock-ins and...
Availability
Availability refers to the dates and times during which an employee is available to work....
Balanced Scorecard
A balanced scorecard is a framework for identifying the KPIs of a workforce management project...
Business Case Development
Business case development is the process of creating a document that helps justify a WFM...
Calculated Driver
A calculated driver is a labor driver that uses numerical constants or mathematical formulas in...
Change Management (Enablement)
Change management (sometimes known as enablement) is the practice of managing organizational...
Clocking
Clocking is the process of capturing employee time-in and time-out. This can be done with either a...
The Digital Workplace
The digital workplace is the concept that businesses should be enabling and engaging their...
Employee Attendance Tracker
Attendance tracking software tracks whether an employee was on time, late, or absent from a shift....
Employee Engagement
Employee engagement is the degree to which employees feel enthusiastic about their work, are...
Employee Surveys
An employee survey is a common method of taking the pulse on employee engagement, morale,...
End-User Adoption
End-user adoption is the degree to which employees actually use the prescribed WFM tools and...
Engineered Labor Standards
Engineered labor standards is a term often used interchangeably with labor standard.
Field Enablement
Field enablement is the practice of providing employees custom change management and training...
Forecasting
Forecasting is the process of predicting short- and long-term customer demand and the...
Foundations
Foundations are the building blocks to construct labor standards in Axsium’s Opus work measurement...
Implementation & Integration
Implementation and integration are the core processes of setting up a WFM system to ensure that...
Labor Demand Curve
The labor demand curve is the intraday distribution of forecasted workload (e.g. labor demand)...
Labor Driver
A labor driver is a numerical measurement, count, percentage, factor, or volume amount that...
Labor Law Compliance
Labor law compliance is the process of ensuring that your organization follows all labor laws in...
Labor Modeling Tool (aka Labor Standards Software or Labor Management System)
A labor modeling tool is a tool or set of tools dedicated to building, validating, and maintaining...
Labor Model (aka Labour Model or Staffing Model)
A labor model is the combination and interaction of your labor standards, workload drivers, store...
Labor Rules
Labor rules are important constraints that must be factored in during the scheduling process for...
Labor Standards
A labor standard is the measurement of how long it takes for a worker to complete a specific task...
Managed Services
The managed services department of a company is a single point of contact for the professional...
Mobile WFM
Mobile WFM is the practice of giving employees the ability to access WFM systems from anywhere...
Personal Fatigue and Delay (PF&D/PFD)
Personal fatigue and delay is an adjustment that workforce management specialists make to labor...
Plan Do Check Act (PDCA) Cycle
The Plan Do Check Act Cycle is a process improvement methodology. Plan: Create the method of...
Policy Management
Policy management is the process of creating, communicating, managing, and maintaining labor...
Policy/Practices Standardization
Policy standardization is the process of simplifying the numerous different approaches to...
Predetermined Motion Time System (PMTS)
A Predetermined Motion Time System (PMTS) is a work measurement technique that analyzes the basic...
Process Improvement
Process improvement is the streamlining of business processes to drive productivity and...
Project Readiness
Project readiness is a service that helps WFM clients understand the implications of their...
Requirements Gathering
Requirements gathering is a process of determining and defining a company’s current and future...
Rewards and Recognition
Rewarding and recognizing is the common business practice of acknowledging staff who have...
Schedule Optimization
Based on the forecast, the Schedule Optimization algorithm is the process of determining which...
Scheduling
Scheduling is the process of taking a labor forecast and assigning employees to work during...
Shift Management
Shift management is an employee-facing WFM module that gives employees the ability to see their...
Shift Swapping
Can you cover my shift? Anyone that has worked a shift in retail or in a restaurant knows all...
Skills
Skills refer to whether a worker can perform a certain role in a store (e.g., cashiering,...
Solution Sustainment
Solution sustainment (or Managed Services) is the ongoing support, maintenance and update of WFM...
Standard Operating Procedures
Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are instructions that help employees perform routine tasks....
Static Driver
A static driver is a labor driver that doesn’t vary much over time but may vary significantly by...
Strategic Roadmap
A strategic roadmap is a document that outlines daily, monthly, and annual tasks so clients can...
Task Management
Task management, in contrast to the scheduling module (which determines the employees to be...
Time & Motion Studies
A Time & Motion Study is a technique for producing labor standards and identifying...
Timekeeping
In the workplace, timekeeping refers to the monitoring of employee clock–ins and clock-outs....
Transactional Data
Transactional data represents all the detailed information generated as a result of employee...
Upgrades
An upgrade is the process of applying a new code, database scripts, or other vendor provided...
Vendor Selection
Vendor selection is the process of evaluating WFM vendors against a defined set of decision-making...
Volume Driver
A volume driver is a type of labor driver that can vary significantly over short periods of time...
Work Measurement
Work measurement is a study that uses continuous observation of a task to understand the...
Work Sampling
Work sampling is a method of collecting data on employee activity to help retailers understand how...
WFM Strategy
A WFM strategy is an organization’s high-level, tactical plan for building an effective workforce...
Workforce Management (WFM)
Workforce management uses specialized software that ensures the right people are in the right...
Workforce Planning
A strategic workforce planning process helps companies achieve their business objectives by having...
Workload (aka Labor Demand)
Workload is the calculated number of labor hours (as defined in the labor model) that will be...