Managing a workforce means assigning tasks and filling shifts. Optimizing it goes further—balancing every labor hour for maximum impact while boosting employee engagement. At its core, optimization means matching business needs with employee skills and preferences, creating a win-win that maximizes labor efficiency and engagement. True optimization leverages data and automation to improve productivity, reduce costs, and enhance agility.
In today’s volatile labor landscape, legacy workforce management methods, such as manual spreadsheets, rigid schedules, and one-size-fits-all policies, simply can’t keep up. Businesses need actionable, real-time strategies that adapt to shifting demand, employee needs, and operational complexity. Here are proven workforce optimization strategies that work.
Data-Driven Workforce Optimization Strategies
The most effective workforce optimization strategies use data to drive every decision, from how many workers are needed to who gets scheduled at what time. Below are four tactics that deliver measurable improvements across labor efficiency, engagement, and cost control.
Use Labor Forecasting Tools to Align Staffing with Demand
Labor forecasting tools leverage historical trends, real-time data, internal factors like sales and promotions, and external signals such as weather, holidays, and local events to accurately predict future staffing needs. By analyzing thousands of data points—from past performance to ongoing operations and upcoming events—this data-driven precision ensures that employee schedules align closely with actual demand, allowing for more efficient staffing and improved operational performance.
Companies using advanced forecasting techniques usually see a noticeable reduction in labor costs and higher customer satisfaction scores (internal source).
Automate and Personalize Scheduling
Static scheduling models are inefficient in dynamic environments. AI-powered scheduling engines can automatically generate shift plans based on forecasted demand, employee skills, and availability in minutes instead of hours.
Personalized schedules that consider individual preferences improve shift performance, help maintain compliance, and reduce absenteeism. Research from Gartner shows that businesses adopting automated scheduling experience 25% less unplanned absenteeism (source). Automation also eliminates bias and reduces the burden on frontline managers.
Give Employees More Control Over Their Schedules
Flexible scheduling isn’t just a perk; it’s a major driver of employee retention. According to Legion’s 2025 State of the North American Hourly Workforce report, 61% of hourly workers say the ability to choose when they work is among the most important factors when looking for hourly work.
Self-service scheduling tools—such as shift swaps, on-demand shift claims, and flexible work preferences—directly address these priorities. They give employees greater control over their schedules, reduce friction with managers, and strengthen long-term engagement.
When employees have more control, they’re more likely to stay and more likely to perform. Empowered teams are better aligned with business goals, and frontline managers can spend less time fixing coverage gaps and more time developing their teams.
Track and Adjust in Real Time
The best plans are still subject to change. Real-time labor visibility allows businesses to adjust on the fly—reallocating labor, adjusting shifts, and responding to unexpected callouts or demand spikes.
Live insights into performance, coverage, and compliance give managers the information they need to make smarter weekly decisions. This reduces unproductive hours and helps maintain alignment with budget and business goals.
How Legion Brings These Strategies to Life
Legion’s workforce optimization platform operationalizes all of these strategies in one integrated system:
- Labor Forecasting: Legion uses historical trends, external signals, and AI to deliver a highly accurate, unique model and forecast for every driver. It forecasts demand in 15-minute, 30-minute, or daily increments while customized advanced machine learning algorithms continually improve and learn from the data.
- Labor Optimization: AI-powered staffing guidance considers all labor-related elements (models, location-specific attributes), optimizing labor demand rather than just the schedule. Legion automatically generates granular, down-to-the-minute task-based labor modeling across all channels while balancing preferences, availability, skills, productivity, budgets, compliance, and other factors. The result is schedules that meet business needs and employee preferences 96% of the time.
- Automated Scheduling: Legion instantly creates optimized schedules based on productivity, labor rules, budget constraints, compliance rules, and employee skills and preferences.
- Productivity-Based Scheduling: Legion seamlessly incorporates employee productivity into schedule optimization without compromising other critical business needs (e.g., budgets, compliance, or employee preferences). It uses calculated employee productivity scores to optimize schedules with top performers working at critical times, ensuring managers have the staffing and performance to meet sales and output targets.
- Employee Self-Service: Through a 4.9-star-rated mobile app with over 60,000 reviews, employees can set availability, swap shifts, access pay on demand, communicate with managers and peers, and claim open shifts with a single tap.
- Real-World Results: Legion customers have reported up to 13x ROI, a 25% reduction in labor overages, and up to 5 hours saved weekly per manager.
Optimization Is the New Standard
Workforce optimization is quickly becoming a competitive requirement for an hourly workforce. Efficiency, productivity, and employee satisfaction are no longer tradeoffs; they are critical goals that must be achieved simultaneously.
That’s why businesses need tools that go beyond reporting data and actually act on it. Legion enables organizations to optimize labor in real time, at scale, across every location and role.
Ready to turn strategy into action? Request a demo and see what optimization really looks like.
