Turn On Workforce Management

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Identify the prerequisites required to enable Workforce Management.
  
• Navigate to Salesforce Go to locate and enable Workforce Management.
  
• Recognize key areas covered in the guided setup checklist so you know what to expect.
  
• Explain the architectural relationship between Service Resources, Skills, and Job Profiles.
  

Ready to Flip the Switch?

Historically, setting up an enterprise workforce tool meant locking your admin team in a basement for a few weeks with a pot of coffee and a stack of implementation manuals. Not anymore.

Because Workforce Management is a native capability within Agentforce Contact Center, provisioning it is straightforward. Salesforce provides a guided setup framework that holds your hand through the entire process.

This unit covers a general setup path: heading to Salesforce Go, turning on Workforce Management, and getting oriented to what the guided setup checklist covers. Workforce Management has a lot of parts, and we won't walk through every configuration option. When you're ready to set up your org for real, review the Salesforce Help articles at the end of this unit.

Before you start clicking buttons, make sure your org has the proper foundation in place.

Prerequisites

Before you configure Workforce Management, you must have the correct technical and licensing prerequisites.

Workforce Management relies on modern UI frameworks and is only supported in Lightning Experience.

• Supported Editions: You must have Enterprise, Performance, or Unlimited edition.
  
• Licensing: Workforce Management is a premium add-on; it’s not bundled with a standard Service license. You can acquire it in two ways: as a standalone add-on (for orgs that just want Workforce Management without upgrading their entire routing package), or bundled within the Agentforce Contact Center license, which gives you the full suite of contact center capabilities.
  
• Enhanced Omni-Channel: While not a strict installation blocker, Workforce Management is built on top of your routing data. Omni-Channel must be enabled and functioning in your org to use intelligent forecasting.
  

Head to Salesforce Go

If you type Workforce Management into the Quick Find box in Setup, you’ll see a link for it. But clicking the link intentionally redirects you to Salesforce Go.

Think of Salesforce Go as your helping-hand for setup. Instead of forcing you to click between several Setup nodes to configure a feature, Salesforce Go centralizes everything into one clean screen.

1. To start, select Setup () and select Salesforce Go.
   
2. In Search features…, enter Workforce Management and select Workforce Management.
   

On the feature introduction page, click the Get Started button, and toggle on Turn on Workforce Management.

When you turn on the toggle, the Workforce Management feature preference is enabled in your org. Additionally, Historical Adherence is automatically turned on. This immediately gives your supervisors the baseline tracking they need to see if reps are sticking to their published schedules.

Guided Setup Checklist

Once the toggle is on, the guided setup checklist appears.

This checklist provides you a structured sequence so you don't have to guess the correct configuration order. Each step displays a progress indicator and turns green when complete and red when incomplete (with helpful error text that explains what you missed).

Rule one of Workforce Management setup: Work through the checklist from top to bottom. The sequence is intentional and architecturally dependent. For example, if you try to assign a worker to a territory before you have actually created that territory, the system will politely stop you. Don’t skip ahead!

Let's break down what you’ll do in some of the key sections.

1: Install Apps

Install the Workforce Engagement Analytics app, which provides the dashboards your planners and supervisors use. You must install this app first or the rest of your setup won't have a visualization layer.

Workforce Management generates a huge amount of data: forecast curves, adherence percentages, and capacity gaps. But raw data is useless if you can't visualize it. This analytics app is built on the CRM Analytics platform.

2: Design Your Workforce Structure

Next, build your foundational data architecture. This is where you map your business operations to Salesforce records.

• Skills and Job Profiles: Define the specific skills required to do the work, for example, Tier 1 Support, Fluent French, and group them into Job Profiles.
  
• Routing Queues: Map these skills and profiles directly to your existing Omni-Channel work queues.
  
• Service Territories and Operating Hours: Define the physical or virtual locations where your work happens, for example, Dublin Call Center, and set their base operating hours.
  
• Holidays: Optionally, create and map holiday schedules so the engine knows not to schedule 50 people on New Year's Day when the office is closed.
  

3: Create Workloads

Tell the AI forecasting engine exactly which historical rep and AI agent work records it should analyze to predict future demand. You define the time aggregation intervals, channel groupings, and skill mappings. Once your workloads are active, the engine begins crunching your historical data, and you’re officially ready to generate your very first intelligent forecast.

4: Build Your Shifts

With your resources in place, you need to define the parameters for how they work. You aren't scheduling specific people yet; you’re building reusable schedules.

• Shift Templates: These define your standard working hours. Instead of creating a shift from scratch every time, you build a Standard 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM template.
  
• Shift Patterns: These structure your recurring schedule sequences. For example, if your team works a 4x10 schedule (four 10-hour days followed by three days off), you build that pattern here.
  

Map your templates into your patterns to build cohesive, repeatable shift rotations that the optimization engine can use to auto-generate the calendar.

5: Add Your Workforce and Manage User Access

Assign the necessary Workforce Management permission sets to your users. Every user using Workforce Management needs a license and a permission set, but they don't need the same access.

6: Set Up a Custom Lightning App

Finally, create or update a custom Lightning Console app so your team can see and use their new Workforce Management tools. This step happens in Lightning App Builder rather than Salesforce Go.

Choose which Workforce Management features to surface, such as forecasting, scheduling, or service resource tools, based on what each persona on your team needs each day.

The Workforce Management features you choose appear to users in your configured app.

To configure an app, check out the Salesforce Help article, Create and Edit a Custom Lightning Console App.

Up Next

Congratulations! You have completed the tour. You now understand the strategic business case for Workforce Management, how its native scheduling engines interact under the hood, and how to navigate Salesforce Go.

Ready to set up Workforce Management in your org? Salesforce Go gets you started, but it's just the entry point. For the complete setup and configuration options, check out the Salesforce Help article, Set Up Workforce Management.

If optimizing your workforce has you fired up about improving service rep performance, keep the momentum going by checking out Quality Management which picks up right where this one leaves off.

Resources

• Trailhead: Quality Management
• Salesforce Help: Enable Workforce Management and Feature Preferences
• Salesforce Help: Get Help for Lightning App Builder