Workforce Planning Benefits

Transcription

1 Workforce Planning Benefits Seven Ways Workforce Planning Can Help Your Organization While surveys show that upwards of 90-percent of companies aren t getting the results they expected from a talent management system, a great foundation has been set for workforce planning. OrcaEyes holds that most of the shortfall in results lies in the lack of a business case roadmap for the talent planning process and because, while improving, data integrity often still fails to meet expectations. This is where workforce planning can come in to play. The key to successful workforce planning is gaining an understanding of how and where it benefits your organization. Listed below are seven reasons you should implementing a workforce planning initiative today. Benefit #1: Prepare for mass retirements. The reality of the much discussed pending retirements is here, it s happening today, it s impactful and ignoring it won t make it go away. It is affecting our businesses; it is very difficult to detect where it will hit first and you need to know how and where to be prepared. Right now, getting this information can seem impossible, but a workforce planning and analytic tool puts it right at your fingertips. Benefit #2: Align a diverse and geographically dispersed workforce. No matter your industry, there are likely to be people in various locations with similar skill sets managing day-to-day operations. To go along with those people are projects beginning and ending, retail or hospitality locations opening and closing, and/or basic consumer demand surging or plunging in different regions at any given time. It is HR s responsibility to know the goals of the business and to implement workforce programs that enable business leaders to carry out those goals. A good workforce planning system contains a view of how many people you have with the same skills assigned to the same job by location and/or project. The positions in this list are aligned with project teams and business growth or retraction goals and then linked to an additional layer of calculated human capital trends and predictions. This way, when you look at a

2 position list, you get a directional view of how many people you are going to need in each position in the future and whether you are trending toward a surplus or shortage in each location or project. Case Study In a large consulting organization made up of primarily billable service employees, workforce planning and analytics software links people to projects and/or contracts with project start and end dates. When business leaders did not have access to this information in an easily digestible format, the result was lay-offs, severances, rehires, gaps of billable employees and additional recruiting costs. Once business leaders were provided a means to view the availability of non-localized positions in relationship to contracts ending and other contracts beginning globally across all business units, employee severance costs were reduced as were external recruiting costs. The end result was an increase in Billable Services by 1.07%, a reduction in severance costs by 2.9% and a reduction in external recruiting costs by up to 8%. Benefit #3: Influence external labor supply. Industries in certain major metropolitan areas would benefit greatly from some level of collaboration. Companies who compete for highly skilled labor have the opportunity to influence education and vocational institutions to develop the necessary talent. In the Dallas Area, OrcaEyes has partnered with the hospital council, a regional association for hospital systems that operate in the North Texas area. We work with four of the major systems independently and then through this initiative, we aggregate their data into a central system to analyze workforce trends throughout the region. This allows the council and its members to work with colleges, universities and vocational schools to ensure there will be enough of the right workers to meet the growing demand. Education and vocation institutions need sound data to develop programs. It s typically a two-year process to get a new program in place and the school needs to be able to truly define the need. The measurement for success and determining factor in developing future employees lies in hire rates. If the student body gets hired upon graduation, the school adds more seats. If they don t get hired, the class shrinks. In industries where the typical times to readiness for a specific position is five to eight years, it might be beneficial to collaborate with other companies in your region to encourage schools to start prepping students straight out of high school. The workforce planning process helps you forecast future need more effectively so you are armed with the right data. Look at your retirement data; pair it with turnover, burnout rates (turnover or transfer rates) and strategic plans. Does a sufficient talent pool or pipeline exist to meet your goals?

3 Benefit #4: Unify the Human Resources function. Building a healthy, sustainable organization by way of the workforce requires involvement by more than the Workforce Planning Analyst. There must be involvement from the whole group. Why? Well, once you determine where your Gaps are going to be, how will you fill them? When there are real talent shortages, where will talent come from? Gaps are formed by retirement, turnover and lack of available talent, with each of these challenges requires unique solutions. Basically, there is more to filling a gap than implementing a Recruiting solution Workforce Planning is the continuous process of monitoring workforce initiatives and drivers that affect the business ability to meeting its goals now and in the future. or pipeline (although Recruiting is a key component.) Solid workforce planning requires ongoing education, recognition of top performers or potential leaders who can train in other areas of the business, goal setting, and mentoring, coaching and financial rewards. Companies who can bring their entire organization to the table to address workforce challenges can build comprehensive solutions to address the needs of the business. A complete workforce planning team, from an operational perspective, should include a workforce planning leader (someone who can read and translate the data), and representation from recruiting, talent management, learning and development, compensation, finance and strategy. Benefit #5: Steer Talent Management Initiatives For most organizations, the Talent Management strategy is the overarching workforce strategy. For others, a disconnect remains between recruiting, performance and succession planning, learning and development, among other disciplines. With that being said, here are some ways we see organizations using workforce planning and analytics to optimize the Talent Management process. 1. Workforce planning is the mechanism for determining who is going to leave the organization and when. Planners know who will retire, who is at risk of leaving and which new jobs are opening up at the beginning of the fiscal or planning year. Fundamentally, they KNOW who they will need and when. Then they create pipelines for those positions to avoid a negative situation. 2. Organizations that practice effective workforce planning can better retain their top performers. They know where the opportunities for career growth are found. They put top performers on career tracks with known future job openings. 3. Companies effective at workforce planning use analytics to track employee movement through the organization. They know where people came from and how they got to

4 where they are. They know if tenure in one position correlates to success in another; and they benchmark teams against each other using critical workforce drivers. 4. Organizations that are effective at breeding top talent reward managers who coach, mentor and develop career plans to develop their own employees, and they themselves become better leaders along the way. HR can identify these leaders with the ability to track employee movement. 5. Workforce planners define which specific changes in their talent management strategy will have the most impact on the organization. They pick goals with a solid correlation to better business performance. They use these correlations to build and promote the business case to senior management helping them understand how the initiatives will impact business performance to secure funding for strategic initiatives. They compare their organization to others in their industry. Through this they become best-in-class employers. Benefit #6: Stop wasting time with Spreadsheets. This one is simple. First, figure out the salaries of the people building metric or analytic dashboards in Excel. Calculate their hourly rate and multiply it by the number of hours they spend a month doing the work. When you add it up and look at it holistically, you ll see there is a better way. Second: How granular and accurate are your results with Excel? Human interaction leads to human mistakes something as small as a decimal can wreak havoc on your entire presentation. Third, in your spreadsheet reside data and calculations. There are growth plans, turnover, movement, pending retirements, demographics and maybe current workforce gaps; but where are the people? If you figure out you are likely to lose someone, how difficult is it to go back and figure out who those people are? And finally, if you are spending hours, days and weeks to get to the workforce trends, when do you have time to correlate those to business goals and objectives. Take the metrics to actionable levels by including measurements your business leaders are tracking and compare them to trends in the workforce. Can excel do this? Yes. Is it easy? No. Does it make financial sense to do it in Excel? No. There are too many tools that can do this for you.

5 Benefit #7: Get the right people, in the Right Place, at the Right Time and At the Right Price. You knew we couldn t just leave this ubiquitous cliché out of the Top Ten List, right?! Workforce planning is all about taking a proactive approach to ensuring you have the right people in the right place at the right time. While many talent management vendors tout this result through the use of their systems, the truth is, you only get ahead of the process when you have a complete understanding of where the business is going, what workforce is required to meet the business strategy set forth, and the ability to combine future needs with data on underlying factors affecting your workforce today. Whether you choose a professional or managed service, software implementation or both, if you are going to align the workforce with the business, you must have a roadmap in place It boils down to this: In order to be affective and prepare for the future, you must have an understanding of the internal dynamics affecting the business and then pair these with the business strategy. It requires a conversation with business leaders, even if it s uncomfortable. Workforce Planning IS this process. OrcaEyes is the unrivaled leader in workforce planning and analytics. Our solutions work for thousands of employees spanning multiple continents. For more on this topic, visit our blog at orcaeyes.com/blog or to find out how our company can help you meet your goals, visit us online at orcaeyes.com or call