A Future-Ready Workforce Calls for Companywide Planning

As economic uncertainty and market disruption continue, C-level executives recognize they must not only digitally transform their planning, analytics, and execution, but do so quickly. To succeed, they’ll need more than the right technology. They’ll need a workforce fit for the future. 

This need will be even more critical as the world emerges from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a survey of nearly 500 global companies by AMS, a London-based talent acquisition and management firm, 38% of companies worldwide put talent acquisition on hold during the pandemic. At the same time, the pandemic has highlighted the critical importance of workforce planning, as 30% of companies deem such planning a priority versus just 12% who said so prior to the pandemic. 

To create a post-COVID-19, future-ready workforce, agile organizations must rethink their talent strategies to minimize skills gaps, maximize hiring investments, and better align talent with corporate objectives. The first step in this process is to unite various business units—including those traditionally considered odd bedfellows such as human resources (HR) and finance.

Rise Above Silos for Companywide Planning

In too many organizations, workforce planning is siloed between finance, which takes a cost-based view of head count, and HR, which worries about finding the right candidates and making sure they stay. Without communication, HR risks creating a hiring plan that isn’t aligned with the company’s budget—which could impact the ability to hire the right people at the right time. And when finance isn’t involved in workforce planning, it risks losing track of the company’s single largest expense and is left unable to develop plans, budgets, and forecasts that mirror reality.

But when the two unite, workforce planning immediately becomes more strategic. Companywide planning, in which planning data doesn’t solely reside in finance or HR, makes it possible to look beyond immediate objectives to gain a panoramic view of the business and the workforce that drives it. HR is no longer solely responsible for forecasting head count and developing succession plans, while finance is no longer alone in keeping the hiring process on budget. Together, the two functions can ensure the workforce plan aligns with larger corporate goals.

Through collaboration, HR and business leaders can shake off old-fashioned, head-count-focused workforce planning and examine their talent needs through a broader, companywide perspective. This new, strategic approach involves examining how and where employees are deployed, how closely capacity meets demand, how well skills and capabilities are aligned to current needs, and how prepared various business units are to recruit, on-ramp, and develop workers as the business grows.

Gain Access to the Right Data in Real Time

Even as more and more companies realize the necessity of higher-level, integrated workforce planning, most are still saddled with outdated ways of collecting data and creating reports.

According to a 2020 survey of 9,000 business and HR leaders, more than half (53%) of respondents report that management interest in workforce information has increased in the past 18 months. Yet many are hampered by limitations in their technology, with 52% saying they lack the right systems to produce the information and insights necessary to understand their workforce needs and trends.

A modern, companywide approach to workforce planning requires a cloud-based platform that creates a single source of truth. Unlike the siloed, static Excel sheets of the past, modern workforce planning platforms offer data in real time to HR, finance, and department managers alike, so that everyone can move forward together.

Align Talent With Corporate Objectives

It’s common sense: Planning should always support an organization’s business objectives. But in companies that plan at the department or group level using spreadsheets or outdated planning platforms, rogue plans are almost inevitable—and they increase the risk of misallocated resources. 

A companywide planning environment ensures better cross-linking, so workforce plans map to plans for financial planning and analysis (FP&A) and strategy. Moreover, a self-service, cloud-based solution gives cross-functional leadership the ability to strategize from a common foundation. Business unit leaders can jump into the data and ensure hiring strategies are aligned with their business plans; finance and HR teams can easily model hiring and retention; and strategy leaders can analyze the workforce impact—and costs and benefits—of potential acquisitions or divestitures.

Improve Agility by Taking a Strategic Approach

Companywide workforce planning illuminates blind spots common to head-count-based planning and delivers the agility necessary to respond rapidly to a constantly changing environment. By bringing together HR and finance to make more strategic use of a company’s most important asset—its people—workforce planning ensures both business units are working toward the ultimate goal of achieving better performance and profitability.

With a modern workforce planning environment, you can:

• More easily align the composition of your workforce with your strategic objectives—a major competitive advantage that enables clarity, speed, innovation, and discipline.

• Funnel conversations around strategy and cost into the system to improve both the cost-effectiveness of your talent and the dynamism of your workforce planning.

• Enable HR, finance, and operations teams to plan collaboratively for new hires, promotions, and merit increases using a single system and the same real-time data. This allows everyone to work more effectively and iterate faster to arrive at the right decisions.

• Use robust real-time data to anticipate and plan for the impact of generational and skills-based changes within your workforce.

• Eliminate unnecessary manual leaps between applications by integrating tasks and creating direct links between planned action and executed action.