Workforce Planning

Headcount planning and forecasting have a broad influence, impacting everything from production and customer service to employee morale and turnover, as well as job market trends and budget planning. Without the right tools, headcount planning and forecasting can be faulty and inefficient, making it difficult to fill workforce and skill gaps.  Workforce planning connects directly to recruiting intelligence and acquisition strategies to build a future-proof workforce. It helps organizations meet short-term and long-term business needs while remaining within specified workforce budgets. To operate efficiently and save resources, every organization requires just enough skilled employees to meet its goals without overhiring. These goals and required skills may often change, so it's essential to accurately anticipate future employee needs and plan to meet them. Headcount forecasting and planning are more than just filling vacancies. We use these strategies to identify current and future skill needs, attract and retain the right talent to meet those needs and plan to reduce attrition across the organization.  Improving the quality of hires is a top priority for recruiters worldwide. In fact, 59% of L&D professionals say they have their focus on reskilling and upskilling moving into 2023. Without this approach to headcount planning and forecasting, the skills gap widens.  To meet your business goals and recruitment needs, combine workforce forecasting strategies with employee L&D. Let’s review the most common workforce planning reports to help you determine the best way to build your headcount planning model.  💡Key Takeaways: Build your headcount planning models on organizational data and involve all department heads, senior management, HR and finance professionals in the process.   The most common reports you will need to generate from your workforce planning and forecasting model will include headcount reports, compensation reports, performance reports, recruiting reports and variance analysis reports.  Effective headcount planning strategies include gathering all applicable data, analyzing current headcount statuses, evaluating your current workforce, developing a headcount plan and executing strategies. Benefits of effective headcount planning include better budget adherence, improved workforce management and streamlined headcount reports. Headcount planning enterprise analytics help your organization create a single source of truth (SSoT), harness the power of data visualization, unlock augmented analytics and predict future outcomes more accurately.  Headcount Planning Models Building headcount planning models require the most accurate organizational data. These models combine and analyze required data points, including: Number of workers needed to cover labor hours to optimize productivity Anticipated new employee growth through the next year Expected churn over the next year Costs per new hire Time investment in hiring Current and predicted skills gaps Skills potential Hiring sources Labor budgets Worksite occupancy You need to involve all department heads, senior management, HR and finance professionals when developing your headcount planning model to ensure an easy transition to the new model. These entities can offer invaluable insights into which data sources are the most reliable and accurate for building these models. When developing your model, begin a new tab on your forecast spreadsheet and label all named positions by division. That way, all payroll and benefits changes in this tab flow through the predictive model.  A workforce planning template will simplify this process. However, you can set these functions on any spreadsheet. Once you have done this, group each department into rows and place inputs on the left side of the tab and outputs on the right (i.e., wages, taxes, other payroll liabilities and FTEs).                                                                                                    Source: YouTube Headcount Model Inputs If you are following our model so far, the left columns should include department, name (from the employee roster), position/title, full-time or part-time, hours, wage, benefits rate, payroll taxes and medical rate. You must also include the start and end dates of employees (we’ll explain shortly).  Some organizations calculate medical expenses according to headcount using forecasting models. We discourage using the percentage of wages to calculate medical expenses. It isn't accurate and will cause faulty numbers.  Whether an employee makes $20K or $200K annually, providers set medical premiums under fully insured plans. To determine the average rate for every employee, divide the total medical expenses by the number of plan participants for a more accurate figure. Required Fields You can customize this model to suit your organizational needs. However, your headcount planning tool must have fields such as full- or part-time, total hours, wage rates, taxes, start and end dates, and medical and benefit rates.  Start and end dates are critical to your headcount planning and forecasting model. If an employee begins on the 15th, the model will calculate earnings for the days remaining in that month. The same is true for ending dates should an employee leave the company before the last day of the month. With these required fields, you can also easily aggregate worth and income inflation surges in their own row for straightforward and accurate reporting. Headcount Model Outputs Once we complete the inputs, the headcount planning model will forecast monthly wages along with the headcount, any FTEs and medical premiums. If you are building your own model, place a total row at the bottom of the model and sum these outputs by department using the Excel function SUMIF.  A template should have summed this up for you. Double-check to ensure this calculation is correct. If the cell reads an error, it means some data is missing in your model.  5 Workforce Planning Reports Your Organization Will Need  Now that we have collected the workforce planning metrics, we can create our reports. Workforce planning reports serve two main purposes: to determine if we have enough human resources to meet productivity needs and to provide insights for informed decisions on labor and costs quickly and accurately. Let’s look at the reports you can create to assess workforce requirements and labor costs. Headcount Report Your company's most essential resource is its employees. That's why acquisition and retention are such high priorities for senior management. A headcount report does more than tell you how many employees you have, their tenure and turnover and retention rate by department. It also shows the average cost per employee, which is around $5,000 before training.  It can help you decide whether to allocate funds to recruitment or skills development based on which will best suit your organization's needs at any given time.   Compensation Report Regardless of your organization's headcount, compensation reports are valuable tools, especially compensation structures that vary by employee. These reports will deliver insights on the salary, paid overtime, commissions, bonuses and benefits of all employees. We create these reports to determine payroll deductions and when and how much PTO each employee has taken.  Performance Report Performance reports deliver valuable insights regarding what value new employees bring to the table. These reports indicate whether they are meeting or exceeding position objectives and expectations.  It allows you to see which team members consistently reach their goals without exceeding their budgets. It also delivers critical insights into each employee's performance.  Additionally, performance reports identify which staff display the greatest potential for advancement and which managers develop their teams' talents best.   Recruiting Report Recruiting reports provide critical data regarding open assignments, recent hires and the number of applications and prospects interviewed for each position.  The report also provides the average time to fill each position and the average cost per hire. It ensures that talent acquisition teams can identify qualified candidates faster and on budget. Variance Analysis Report Creating a headcount planning model will enable your finance team to put together a variance analysis to help senior management and stakeholders determine whether their budgets match their actual expenses. Inevitably, the CEO will ask questions such as: Which teams have the most top performers compared to our predictions?  How much are we spending on talent acquisition next year? How does that compare to last year's budget?  With a variance analysis, you can obtain these answers quickly and accurately.                                                                               Source: efinancemanagement.com 6 Effective Headcount Planning and Forecasting Strategies The key to headcount planning and forecasting is to avoid being reactive and to be proactive. If you desperately need new hires and staff turnover is outrageous, you're going to have a hard time keeping up.  Tight labor markets often spell disaster as skilled talent is scarce and the recruitment door widens, impacted by the rolling recruitment door. Being future focused and playing the long game of talent acquisition and retention will help in this case. Templates are a good starting point. Get the numbers to predict your staffing needs for next year while tracking hiring progress by department, recruiter and hiring stages with a customizable, downloadable, free workforce planning template. Your strategy should have carefully laid steps to get your business from point A to point B. Follow the steps below for your workforce and headcount planning strategy.  1. Gather Applicable Data In this first step, collect and access the short-, mid- and long-term corporate plans for the organization. Examine the strategic goals and budget to establish noteworthy insights on critical headcount metrics. Review the following datasets as you build your headcount planning and forecasting model: Position requirements Income data Worker data including skill sets and diversity stats  Departmental performance ratings   Organizational hierarchy   Frequency of attrition rates   Benefits and retirement eligibility Once your teams have established these benchmarks, track critical metrics over time. Doing this will make your headcount planning and forecasting more accurate. 2. Analyze Current Headcount State  Get a 360-degree picture of the current state of your workforce by running a headcount planning exercise. You will be able to present a clear visual of your employees’ skill gaps, the organization's hiring priorities and the total costs of your workforce to help you predict future headcount challenges and needs.   3. Evaluate the Current Workforce  Build a profile of what your organization's ideal employees look like for each department and in every role. This allows you to drill down and granularly evaluate your current workforce. Use the following items to build an employee profile: Departments with critical roles that remain empty for too long Attrition patterns Competitive salary and benefits What employees to consider as "flight risks" Potential or current workforce skill gaps Promotion opportunities 4. Develop Headcount Plan Identify exact business challenges that can impact the organization’s headcount needs in the coming months or years. Consider the following: Shifting consumer trends and demands New methods for identifying top talent Talent source and availability Regulatory industry changes Planning for scaling and growth   5. Align Execution Strategies Before executing strategies, determine if your budgets align with your workforce requirements. If not, you will need to make adjustments and tailor strategies for special circumstances.  Close any skill gaps and offer upskilling and reskilling opportunities to retain high-value team members. Furthermore, close any temporary or seasonal headcount gaps with part-time employees, temps or contracted workers.  6. Evaluate, Revise, Repeat Monitor your organization's workforce and headcount planning and execution over a set period. Evaluate progress against set benchmarks and revise plans as needed for a demanding and ever-changing market.  Evaluating, revising and repeating these steps can simplify headcount allocation, and redeploying forecasting and planning strategies can maintain job quality and suitably fill all positions.   Benefits of Effective Headcount Planning and Forecasting Keeping your organization's productivity in line with business goals requires headcount planning. Here are some immediate benefits of implementing strategies based on the headcount planning models above. Better Budget Adherence Sticking to a budget goes beyond keeping new hires' salaries at a specific level. Headcount reductions, new hires and lost productivity can create additional labor costs and drain your budget.  If you struggle to keep recruiting in line with approved workforce budgets, it’s time to develop a headcount planning strategy that puts finance leaders and recruiters on the same page. Your headcount planning and forecasting model will ensure that you spend only what is necessary for every employee and project.  Improved Workforce Management Space is a common challenge that organizations face when in growth mode. Restrictions on available workspace and equipment make scaling difficult, even in today's flexible work models that incorporate work-from-home schedules.  Headcount planning models can provide you with an at-a-glance view of what personnel work where and during what schedule. This allows you to budget for your organization's real estate needs, equipment requirements and IT infrastructure investments.  The planning models also aid recruitment efforts. For instance, you can negotiate with potential hires who might jump at a 5% pay cut in exchange for a remote or hybrid work schedule. Studies show that companies that offer these scheduling benefits retain their employees for the long term.   Streamlined Headcounts  Many staffing strategies fail when employee types and schedules don't match the expectations of a standard 40-hour week. Proper headcount planning takes a holistic view of an organization's needs, leaving room for staff downtime and diverse schedules and employee classifications.  Some companies discover it is cost effective to hire seasonal workers or contractors during production peaks. Others find it more cost effective to reduce staffing needs and free up workers for more demanding tasks. Some companies are turning to automation for this.  Top Talent Acquisition Organizations risk misaligning their talent acquisition strategies without proper planning and forecasting models. The execution of those strategies without effective headcount planning and forecasting models increases these risks.  This workforce planning makes it easier to recognize and fill available positions with the best hires and prevents the position from becoming vacant before the end of the year. It suits your hiring strategy and helps you build talent pipelines that deliver top candidates virtually on demand.   Making Headcount Planning Agile and Inclusive Companies that have a formal headcount plan generally conduct these reports annually. However, due to COVID-19, we learned how quickly markets can change, so a truly strategic approach must be agile, comprehensive and iterative. In other words, headcount planning should be a living document.  Ideally, senior management should use real-time data to review and adjust their strategic workforce plans regularly. This allows organizations to respond more quickly to internal and external factors that might otherwise be disruptive. Headcount planning teams should regularly seek insights from department and business unit managers, as well as HR, to uncover short- and long-term skills needs.  Headcount Planning and Enterprise Analytics Headcount planning is essential for financial planning and analysis. It includes setting hiring goals, upskilling and reskilling employees, reducing churn and offering insights on recruitment practices.  Automation improves headcount planning accuracy and provides you with better employee analytics insights. It takes productivity and performance to the next level. Let's examine how. Create a Single Source of Truth Begin by connecting your organization's finance and HR data. Create a single source of truth (SSoT) for all datasets by integrating your FP&A tools with a central cloud-based database. Your database will house both live and imported data connections, giving your teams a holistic and harmonized view of your data sources.  With this seamless connection between finance, HR and your headcount planning model, you can consolidate your entire enterprise data. This promotes data governance compliance and establishes an SSoT enterprise wide.    Harness Powerful Data Visualizations Open the pre-built HR headcount dashboard and begin analyzing your datasets using advanced analytics and visualization tools. By looking at various reports, you can evaluate the following: Expected headcount and costs Year-to-date time-offs  Training spendings Diversity details Trends in hiring and attrition  You may soon see a high-level overview of your employee count. You can learn more from your headcount dashboard by adding country, location and department filters to your model. You can take your analysis even one step further by analyzing specific data such as experience and other qualifying factors to understand your headcount landscape better. As you may have noticed, most staff training courses focus on managers and accounts, neglecting new hires who may then perform poorly due to insufficient training. You can then use these insights to develop fresh training programs for these employees. These insights will also indicate which employees could use reskilling or upskilling. Unlock Augmented Analytics For more insight into your workforce planning, harness the power of AI and machine learning (ML) in your headcount planning model. Insights from AI and ML can help you understand the key drivers of a given data point more quickly without manually analyzing your datasets. For example, AI and ML can use data from your headcount planning model to assess appropriate labor costs. If your model indicates that administrative support and executive level are the biggest contributors to labor costs—and they are—you can reduce headcount costs.  To reduce labor costs, consider increasing the number of account managers for lower-level management duties. AI and ML can automatically run these scenarios for you.  Evaluating your data will also help you understand attrition rates and their impact on performance and costs. Ask yourself questions such as the following: What is each quarter’s target attrition? What is each age group’s target attrition? What are the total salary and bonuses per age group? Using your model, search for insights that provide answers regarding charts or numeric values. Add them to your current dashboard to get the data you need for making data-based decisions on the fly. Predict Future Outcomes Picture having your headcount plans and performance in one location that enables continuous, event-based churn and budget forecasting rather than quarterly or annual planning cycles.  Predicting staff turnover with features that lead to meaningful conversations with management is the number one driver of turnover. It drives more discussions between employees and managers across the organization to guide leaders to make better personnel-related decisions.  With the tools to better anticipate unpredictable losses, you can improve headcount forecasting, giving you the tools to research crucial influencing factors to take immediate and proactive action. How To Use Workforce Planning Tools To Grow At Vena, we leverage Excel and combine it with advanced modeling capabilities to streamline your headcount planning processes. Through data integration and our Executive, HR and Workforce Management templates, we help you automate your manual processes. Here's how Vena Workforce Planning Solutions will help streamline your organization's growth:  Integrate Data From Your HRIS Vena allows you to integrate employee data with your HRIS into your processes and templates. Using our headcount planning models, you can deliver more accurate FTE tracking and improve labor cost predictions and manage your employee data easier than ever.  Plan for any scenario and gain confidence in your numbers by connecting your cloud applications with your source systems, including: Workday Ceridian Peoplesoft Paycomm Paylocity Bamboo Report and View All Your Key Metrics Visual dashboards enable you to view labor costs enterprise wide, discover underlying employee data, forecast revenue per team member and report on all employee expenditures. You get all of this from pre-built templates that you can customize to meet the needs of your organization.                                                                              Source: Vena Automate Tasks and Protect Your Data Data governance continually evolves—with unique challenges, new methods and technological advancements that change how we view and manage data. Headcount planning models can help protect your data while also automating tasks to streamline workflows.  Our workflows enable your organization to distribute templates to every entity and control the submission and review processes. Vena's best-in-class data security restricts access to sensitive employee information—such as payroll data—to help you remain compliant with all data governance regulations.   Plan for Any Scenario With Dynamic Modeling Capabilities To boost efficiency, we integrated our Workforce Planning platform with the most dynamic modeling capabilities available and used dynamic modeling to map out changes to your organization's payroll, taxes and benefits packages. With Vena Workforce Planning Software, you can evaluate the role of reorganizations and notice how changes within salaries or driver rates impact your bottom line.  Improve Headcount Planning Processes With Vena Discover a more intuitive way to manage your workforce with headcount planning and forecasting solutions from Vena. Vena's V365C Excel Add-in makes it easier than ever to manage labor costs while streamlining planning in areas such as ad hoc, variance analysis and reporting. Our collaborative Workforce Planning Software can help your organization predict recruitment needs while ensuring quality of hire and improving retention. It enables you to manage employee transfers, report labor expenses and cost allocations while improving workflows with more detailed employee-level planning.  You can build a talent acquisition pipeline and remain proactive against churn with better tracking of upcoming hires, transfers and terminations across your entire enterprise. Vena’s Excel interface delivers advanced data integrations, modeling capabilities and easy-to-use dashboards to help with your headcount planning and forecasting processes.  Learn more about workforce management and effective headcount planning and forecasting with the following articles: The Ultimate Guide to Workforce Planning 5 Workforce Planning Reports You Can Run Using Vena HR Data Visualization: 10 Insights Impacting Your Bottom Line Excel at Workforce Management Excel at workforce management today. Download our free workforce planning template to help you manage your labor expenses in one place.

If you’ve been reading the news lately, you’ve probably heard a lot about “quiet quitting.”. If you have a team to manage, it may have even got you worried. And for finance leaders—looking to lead their organizations through the current market strife—it might be something making you feel anxious After all, the media has run rampant with news of quiet quitting. While the so-called phenomenon has been making headlines, though, what do finance leaders really need to know about it?  Should you be concerned? And if so, how do you begin to combat this new trend? Let’s dive in and see. 💡Key Takeaways:  A new trend that’s making headlines, quiet quitting refers to employees who put in the minimum amount of effort in their jobs, without putting in any extra work or time. While critics debate whether quiet quitting is actually a new thing, a lack of employee engagement is always a challenge for finance leaders and one they should be ready to work on. By considering what your employees need to be happy and respecting the boundaries they put in place, you can help build engagement within your finance team. What Is Quiet Quitting? Gallup defines quiet quitters as those who do the minimum amount of work and are “psychologically detached from their job.” Quiet quitters aren’t actually quitting—they’re still doing their jobs, just not taking on any additional duties or putting in extra time. For some managers, this has posed a problem. They want employees that go the extra mile, so what do they do when their employees don’t? Do they try to replace these quiet quitters with new recruits who will bring more enthusiasm to the role? Given the recent Great Resignation, though, the right skill sets may not be available.  Other leaders, on the other hand, are asking another question instead. What can they do to help combat quiet quitting and re-engage these workers to help them rebuild enthusiasm for their roles?  Then there’s the question of whether “quiet quitting” is even actually a thing.  How Serious Is Quiet Quitting? According to a 2022 Gallup survey, quiet quitters make up at least 50% of the U.S. workforce. For them, it was a process of elimination: the same survey found that 32% of workers were actively engaged in their jobs and that 18% were disengaged. It’s the remaining 50% that make up the quiet quitters. But critics have unpacked those numbers a little differently—questioning whether quiet quitting is a new trend or simply a normal dip in overall productivity and engagement that’s been given a new name. “Statistically speaking, quiet quitting is not actually a thing. Or, at least, it is not a new thing,” The Atlantic wrote in September 2022. In fact, while employee engagement has declined slightly in 2022, over the long term, it’s still up from similar Gallup survey results done between 2000 and 2014.  And while productivity, overall, has declined compared to the early days of the pandemic, that may be due to another phenomenon completely. The Great Resignation saw many employees leaving their jobs to start new ones. And as any leader knows, there’s always a learning curve when someone takes on a new position—meaning productivity naturally falters. There’s another possible reason for the so-called quiet quitting trend, though. Worker burnout, and employees who are putting up stronger boundaries between life and work as a result, might be at least one of the causes. So, with that in mind, what can finance leaders do in response? What Do Finance Leaders Need To Know?  Whether it’s the product of employee burnout, a lack of engagement or the learning curve that comes with a new role, finance leaders can address the quiet quitting trend in their own business simply by being more aware of their team members’ needs. By knowing what your employees require to be happy and stay productive in their jobs, you’re one step closer to engaging them more completely.  Here are a few things to consider along the way: Employees setting work boundaries is a good thing. In today’s remote and hybrid work environment, finding life-work balance is more difficult than ever—so for their own mental health, employees need to set firm boundaries. As a leader, you shouldn’t just respect that—you should help them do it. And that means not expecting them to work evenings and weekends, as a rule, so that burnout becomes less of an issue. Paying your employees what they’re worth is a great place to start. Unsatisfactory compensation or better pay elsewhere is still one of the top reasons employees leave their jobs. And if anyone understands the power of money, it’s finance leaders. So if you want an employee to go the extra mile—or hope to keep them from leaving your team and moving elsewhere—pay them fairly. It probably won’t make up for a toxic work culture or unhealthy work-life boundaries, but when all other things are equal it can be a good incentive to keep your team members from thinking about jumping ship. Recognition, growth opportunities and flexibility are things employees prioritize—meaning you should too. Keeping your employees happy is critical if you want them to stay enthusiastic in their jobs. And that means giving them what they need to succeed. A recent Deloitte survey showed that three of the top things finance folks are looking for in their work life are recognition for a job well done, clear opportunities for career growth and flexibility to work remotely or hybrid. If you don’t consider those things and make them important as well, then don’t be surprised if your team members disengage. After all, why should they be enthusiastic about working for a business that makes no effort to consider their needs? Finally, the ability to do “meaningful work” was another thing the Deloitte survey found employees are seeking. As a finance leader, you know what you do is meaningful to the organization as a whole—so why not let your employees be part of that and connect them to the bigger contributions you bring? Keeping Your Team Engaged  Whether quiet quitting is actually a new trend or, as The Atlantic article put it, “about as novel as cubicles, lunch breaks, and bleary-eyed colleagues stopping by your workstation to mutter, “Mondays, amirite?,” employee engagement is something every finance leader should be contemplating. After all, keeping your employees engaged in their jobs will help you do better as a team—collaborating more effectively, communicating more and producing better results.  All of which isn’t just a plus for you and your team. It’s also going to have larger benefits for your business as a whole. Workforce Planning Tools and Capabilities To Help You Grow Learn how Vena can help empower your workforce planning needs.    

Many companies tried out remote work for the first time in 2020, the switch catching some employers off guard. A few years later, it seems that the long-term effects have positively affected many employers’ bottom line. With a mix of hybrid and remote work, flexible work options can save money while improving employee productivity and retention. Employers can maximize remote work savings by reducing office space, improving employee engagement and reducing employee turnover.  Providing employees with flexible work options, such as telework and hybrid work, can save you operating costs while also increasing your business’s attractiveness to employees.  💡 Key Takeaways: Hybrid and telework models have become the norm—and many employees now expect to be able to work from home for at least part of the work week. Offering remote work flexibility can increase employee productivity and happiness while saving money.  Employers who convert to a hybrid work environment should anticipate cost savings in areas including office space and utility costs, cleaning services and taxes. You can also maximize hybrid work savings by reducing absenteeism, accessing a wider talent pool and facilitating virtual team building for employees.  Capitalizing on Remote Work Savings One study found that since 2020, 60% of high-revenue companies have switched to hybrid work. While the pandemic may have facilitated an already emerging trend, many employees today expect their employer to offer hybrid work or telework options.  Source: Holloway  Hybrid work benefits not only employees, but also employers. Businesses can benefit from remote work cost savings such as: 1. Reducing Office Space If you offer telework, there’s likely no need for a large office space.  In a hybrid work environment, employees can choose which days to work in person, or you may assign teams certain days to come to the office. This removes the need for a large office space.  Instead, consider moving to a smaller office or renting a flexible space. In either case, reducing your operational costs is more cost-efficient than maintaining a large office that is otherwise empty on certain days.  A smaller office will help: Lower utility bills Reduce cleaning service fees  Minimize expenditures on communal snacks and coffee Reduce the cost of office supplies Some of these costs may feel inconsequential, but cutting these expenses can reduce your operational budget and save your workplace solutions (or equivalent) team time and effort. 2. Improved Employee Retention and Turnover It’s no secret that happier employees are more likely to remain in their current position.  As remote work continues to become more normalized, employees have come to expect flexible work options. In an employee’s hiring market, employees are more willing to jump ship and seek employment elsewhere when their current employer mandates unfavorable return-to-work requirements. Offering permanent telework or hybrid work options encourages your current employees to remain with the company. With a reduced employee turnover rate, you maintain consistent productivity and eliminate the need to train new staff.  This saves money in two ways.  Firstly, you don’t have to search for potential new employees, dedicate resources to training them, and lose a current staff member’s productivity levels should the new employee need to shadow them.  Secondly, no break in productivity otherwise occurs when one employee exits and another enters.  3. Minimized Employee Absenteeism Absent employees can disrupt the normal workflow of your business. This can result in delayed work product, disappointed clients and other issues. One study found that flexible work options may decrease employee absenteeism. This is because remote work: Reduces the spread of sickness Minimizes occupational hazards Makes it easier to return to work after an illness Enables parents to care for their children more easily Eliminates the inconvenience of a long commute   Even where remote work isn’t available every day, teleworking at least a few days per week may increase employee productivity and reduce absenteeism. 4. Better Employee Productivity and Engagement Happy employees are productive employees, and employees with a say in their workplace tend to be happy. Another 2022 study found that companies that allow their employees to work 80% remotely were more motivated and 15% more productive.  Source: Dollarsprout  This same study suggests that retaining productive employees can save up to $11,000 per year over hiring and re-training new employees. 5. Access to a Wider Talent Pool When you need new employees, finding talent that fits your requirements can be difficult.  Sometimes, it may not be possible to find a local candidate. When an employee leaves unexpectedly, this can also disrupt the workflow. Allowing remote work means your new hire could reside practically anywhere.  For example, certain skilled workers may even live in another country. In that case, you could save money on labor costs due to a differing standard of living, contracting laws and labor laws.  6. Continuity in Operations The onset of the pandemic disrupted daily life. Many businesses simply closed and were unable to adjust. A study by Yelp found that 98,000 businesses closed in 2020 alone.  For those businesses that have endured, functioning virtually provides several benefits: Flexibility during times of crisis  Reduced operational costs  Innovative new technologies Final Thoughts: Is Hybrid Work the Best Option for Your Company? Flexible workplace options like remote and hybrid work can be beneficial, but may not be best for every employee. You may want to consider: Not everyone thrives in a remote environment Telework may not be suitable depending on your data privacy needs Whether employee collaboration may be affected    Another factor you may consider is the impact of remote work on employee morale. One study found that remote workers may be more likely to leave their current jobs for a company that provides mental health benefits.  For example, coping with the stress and adjustment of switching from an in-person environment to a long-term remote system.  By helping your employees adjust to—and maintain—work-life balance with remote work, you’re preventing the cost associated with high turnover while also improving employee morale.  FREE Workforce Planning Template for Excel View all your labor expenses in one place, leverage our interactive dashboard and get a detailed breakdown of expenses by type and by month with this free best-practice Excel template.

The time is nigh. Or at least a possible recession may or may not be around the corner. With inflation and interest rates trending upwards, many economists are predicting a 2022 recession. That, understandably, has businesses of all sizes concerned. And while there’s no reason to panic yet, smart organizations know to be proactive. If that’s you, you’re likely already starting to try to figure out how to weather the possible storm ahead.  That starts with reevaluating your strategic workforce planning best practices and goals. After all, in a worst-case scenario, recessions can come with layoffs and other workforce adjustments. But when they’re not planned correctly (or avoided completely), layoffs can affect your ability to meet your business goals, bring down employee morale and threaten your company culture and productivity as a whole.   So how do you use workforce planning to recession-proof your business while still keeping your team working at its maximum capacity? We have five strategic workforce planning best practices to help: 1. Start by Assessing Your Existing Team If you do find yourself needing to make adjustments to your workforce in the near future, you want to be prepared. And that starts by getting a clear idea of the strengths and weaknesses of the workforce you already have in place. One of the strategic workforce planning best practices we recommend, then, is evaluating your current team. That means looking at all of the relevant data you have with a critical eye, to determine how everyone is contributing to your strategic goals, whether the right leadership is in place to guide them through turbulent times and what mix of skills you need to get you through to the other side of a recession. Where can you make changes to build new efficiencies or optimize what’s already in place? And would automation or new technology help?  This kind of workforce analysis will help you determine which layoffs and workforce adjustments will have the least impact on your business objectives—and where those layoffs can be avoided altogether.  But there’s more you might want to consider during this stage as well. 2. Create a Diverse and Resilient Workforce A recession doesn’t mean it’s time to throw out your commitment to the greater good. Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are still important issues for many of your customers, partners and staff. And if you want to be a good corporate citizen, they should be for you as well. In fact, since recession-era unemployment rates are often higher for people of color (and even more so for women of color), now is the perfect time to prove your commitment to those ideals. Source: Forbes via Bureau of Labor Statistics But even more than that, a diverse workforce is often a more resilient workforce. According to Gartner, companies that demonstrate strong DEI practices during a crisis are often viewed more favorably—but those whose actions don’t align with the values they’ve expressed will be looked at less positively by the customers and stakeholders that help keep your business thriving. So when you analyze your workforce with the goal of recession-proofing your business, don’t forget your DEI goals. Instead, build a plan that keeps diversity and inclusion front and center. In this video, Vena Chief Customer Officer Debbie Lillitos discusses how workforce data and analytics can help fuel D&I—and why it's important to not take that data out of context. FREE Workforce Planning Template for Excel View all your labor expenses in one place, leverage our interactive dashboard and get a detailed breakdown of expenses by type and by month with this free best-practice Excel template. 3. Open up the Lines of Communication Our next tip? Don’t plan for a recession in isolation—get everyone involved. In other words, don’t surprise your teams with layoffs or other major changes that will affect how they do their jobs. It may be a tough conversation to have, but if you want to keep employee morale from sinking and keep productivity up, you need to prepare your employees and make them feel like they’re part of the discussion. If you don’t, you risk leaving your employees out on a limb and feeling like you don’t care about their well-being. So be transparent. Share the reality of your business’s financial situation and ask your employees for their ideas on how to reduce costs and increase efficiencies. In doing so, you make them part of the process, while also benefiting from a range of perspectives coming from throughout the organization.  The result? Maybe ideas will emerge that will make layoffs unnecessary. A reduction in hours, perhaps, or voluntary pay cuts. Or something else altogether—something you hadn’t even considered. Which brings us to number four… 4. Don’t Make Layoffs Your First Course of Action If you want to empower your business through the recession and be ready to hit the ground running when the economy turns around again, you need the right people on your team. You want those people to be experienced in your unique way of doing things, and happy and productive so that they’re giving you their best work.  For those reasons and more, layoffs shouldn’t be the first course of action in your recession plan. So why not look for other cost savings you can draw on first as you build out a plan to recession-proof your business? By reducing expenses, eliminating redundancies and reimagining business practices that aren’t adding to your revenue, you might be able to find the savings you need without laying off any staff at all. That way, as the economy turns around and your business does as well, you’ll have the team you need to keep up. 5. Don’t Forget the People Behind the Numbers And that brings us to number five—the last of our strategic workforce best practices. After crunching the numbers and considering alternatives, you may decide you can’t altogether avoid making cuts to your workforce. It’s unfortunate, but it happens. However, that doesn’t mean you need to make it worse for the people on the other side. To the people you’ve decided to lay off, that decision will be life-changing. So treat those people like, well, people—not just numbers on a spreadsheet. By being empathetic to their situation and addressing each layoff like the life-impacting event it is, you’ll show how much you really care. And don’t stop caring when the layoffs are over, either. Chances are the team that remains will be left doing more work than they were before, all while worrying about the future status of their own jobs. Programs that support mental and emotional health, non-monetary perks to reward work well done and continual communication can all be ways of making your team feel valued and safe. Any Other Strategic Workforce Planning Best Practices You Need To Know? Of course, this is all just a start. Preparing for a recession means creating a workplace planning environment that strives for continual improvement. That means looking for ways to constantly add efficiencies, stay agile and optimize the way you do business.  And if you want to truly be proactive, all of that should be in place before the economy takes a downturn. So if you haven’t already, start creating that culture of improvement now. That way, if the possibility of a recession turns into the reality of one, you’ll already have a plan in place that leaves as few casualties as possible in its wake. Strategic Workforce Planning Best Practices Learn more best practices in attracting, recruiting and retaining professionals who will help build a differentiating modern workplace culture to thrive in the face of ongoing change.

HR data visualization, on a real-time dashboard, can generate insights into how your people affect your bottom line. Whether or not the Great Resignation will accelerate or subside in 2022, it’s still essential to track and monitor your most valuable asset—your workforce—to support data-driven decision making in HR. We’re uncovering 10 HR insights you can instantly generate by visualizing your people data—including a few employee well-being insights in the spirit of International Day of Happiness (March 20) that impact your bottom line—in Power BI, the only AI-powered, end-to-end reporting and analytics solution in the marketplace. By slicing and dicing data you’ve collected along your organization’s employee journey, you can monitor employee health and performance, track how these insights affect your bottom line and ensure you have the talent for your company’s objectives of today and tomorrow. What can HR data visualization do for your bottom line? Let’s explore 10 insights by following the employee journey, from candidate sourcing to employee separation. 1. Candidate Sourcing The first question: If you know a hiring manager’s ideal start date for a role, do you know how soon you need to begin sourcing candidates for that position? (We’ll circle back to this.) If you’re sourcing talent through referrals, internal transfers, your talent acquisition team and external agencies, you can determine which sources are most effective and which are least effective. If you track the source of hire, performance ratings and employee tenure, you can determine which recruiters source the best employees and which external hiring agency sources the employees who leave your organization the fastest. Making a low-quality hire is more expensive than hiring no one, so identify which sources produce the best hires and higher retention likelihood. 2. Talent Acquisition How are you turning candidates into employees? As your talent acquisition team moves candidates along your hiring funnel, you can monitor the pass-through rates and the average number of days of each hiring stage—from preliminary phone screenings to onsite or remote interviews, to the assessments and finally the offer period. When thinking about candidates who don’t become employees, you can analyze those reasons through your candidate data. Monitoring your candidate rejection rate may help you find causes behind potential candidates not completing applications, say if there was a recent change in your online process. Tracking candidate experience scores could indicate the likelihood that a candidate who isn’t hired will re-apply to your company in the future. And for candidates who receive an offer from your company but decline, that’s another data point you can follow to see how many declined and why. Every second one of your teams awaits incoming talent—especially so for a backfill—means lost productivity, so analyze your hiring performance to discover any outliers, trends or biases keeping the best people from joining your company. 3. Training, Learning and Development They’ve signed the contract—what comes next? As you onboard new hires through training and regularly deploy learning and development programs to all staff, you can measure the effectiveness of your programs for people onboarding, enablement and leadership development. By analyzing hours spent, program costs, budget and performance target scores, you can optimize training expenses by comparing employee performance improvement against the time and money spent on each program. You can also look for any correlations between onboarding experience and employee retention or employee performance. If you collect information from new employees on differences between job description expectations and job responsibilities, training sufficiency or their relationship with their manager, you may find patterns that inform you in optimizing training expenses to improve employee performance and retention. 4. Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging What people data do you collect? To slice and dice information collected along your organization’s employee journey, you need to know through which demographic parameters you want to analyze your people data. Here are some parameters: Age group Gender Geographical region Function Department Tenure Contract type Education level Ethnicity Sexual orientation Religion Disability Family Status Remember that some parameters can only be disclosed voluntarily by employees and candidates. But with more demographic parameters to analyze your people data through, you can generate deeper HR insights around how to bridge variances of employee experience on belonging and inclusion. Focusing on these areas can improve employee performance and retention.   Check out this video of Power BI Embedded, the only AI-powered, end-to-end reporting and analytics solution in the marketplace—now directly embedded into Vena’s Complete Planning platform. You’ll learn about scenario analysis, decomposition trees, predictive analysis and more. 5. Headcount Who are your people and how many do you employ? With the volatility of salary expenses, having an overview of your workforce to quickly view actuals, budgeted and forecasted headcount, attrition and retention—all filtered by month and year—helps you plan better. Whether you’re planning for growth or downsizing, having instant access to a real-time overview of your people will help you create more accurate HR budgets and forecasts when workforce planning. 6. Total Rewards Now that we’re on to salaries—what else does your workforce want? That’s why collecting deeper demographic data can better align your salary expenses, benefits and total rewards with the desires of your employees (and candidates). Remember to ask your people through surveys and to never make assumptions about what they desire in compensation. Do they need parental leave? Which observance days are important to them? What health benefits do they need? Are they interested in stock ownership? You also need to compare your compensation package offering against your industry benchmarks to remain competitive. With more data around total rewards sentiment available, you can better manage incentives to learn which types of compensation will best improve employee performance and retention. Metro Supply Chain Group and Vena A global leader in third-party logistics visualized how their operational metrics impacted their costs, revenue and EBITDA margins. 7. Employee Performance How do they perform? You can track productivity by department, role, individual employee or leader. By assessing performance reviews and scores, you may uncover opportunities to raise productivity. Perhaps one department of your company needs more leadership training. Maybe the employees of one particular role at your organization don’t have the resources they need to perform well at their job. Is there one demographic that receives a significantly lower rate of promotion when compared to all employees? When you collect data behind individual performance, you can generate peer-to-peer performance learnings to help identify lower performers who need additional support and top performers to promote. And when monitoring promotions, you can see status elevations by job change, transfer or lateral movement. By discovering areas of performance improvement and promoting the right employees, you can raise organizational productivity—and ensure the most deserving employees receive a raise themselves. 8. Employee Engagement Do you regularly ask your people about their experience at your organization? Conduct a survey on their employee experience regularly and monitor the results from poll to poll to help determine if your organization’s initiatives to increase engagement resonate. If you analyzed one department’s feedback on their confidence in their managers and whether or not those employees would recommend working at your company to a friend, perhaps there’s a correlation with that department’s performance. If that department scored the highest amongst all your teams, that department's job openings could receive higher candidate referrals. Don’t forget to consider your company’s Glassdoor ratings as an external source, too, when collecting employee engagement data. Employee engagement affects performance and retention, so measure the efficacy of your engagement improvement efforts and their respective costs. 9. Employee Retention What level of tenure tends to exit your organization at a higher rate? Do you meet your retention target rates? By tracking your retention rates against your targets and industry benchmarks, you can learn which of your teams retain their employees longer, which need improvement and your average employee tenure—by role, function, team or department. You can also uncover which employee demographics exit fastest and which times of the year your company sees the highest seasonality of employee attrition. Hiring can be expensive and timely, so monitor your retention rates to avoid exceeding your hiring budget. 10. Employee Separation Why are your employees moving on? As your people depart, you can analyze their sentiment (compensation, growth or relationship with manager) as well as how your organization would categorize the separation (involuntary, voluntary non-regrettable or regrettable). As positions open, track—by role—your average time to hire and average time to fill. Those insights answer that first question we posited in the employee journey: If a hiring manager provides an ideal start date, do you know how soon to begin sourcing candidates for that position? With that insight, you can plan ahead to minimize the number of days a hiring manager lacks the talent they need for their team. This ensures your organization has the workforce for your company’s objectives of today and tomorrow. Now, could you plan even better, by predicting when an employee will depart and begin sourcing candidates even before they resign? Well, if you’re tracking and monitoring employee tenure by role, it’s possible. HR Data Visualization with Power BI Embedded With Power BI Embedded—the market’s only end-to-end reporting and analytics solution—now directly embedded into Vena’s Complete Planning platform, you can integrate AI-informed data strategies into company-wide business intelligence, enabling instant insights at scale for you to work smarter and faster—without requiring additional Power BI licenses. Using out-of-the-box interactive dashboards, you can turn data on your most valuable asset—your people—into real-time, actionable insights for every one of your users in their data-driven decision making. As you drill into your collected HR data, you should be able to visualize and review your unbiased data against baselines, generate insights and make proactive decisions about your people to impact your bottom line. Uncover Actionable HR Insights Visualize your people data, generate instant insights and ensure you have the workforce for your objectives of today and tomorrow.

What’s your talent strategy going into 2022? The world of work has been experiencing seismic change. A shift from in-office to remote work environments and an incredibly unusual job market driven by a high demand for workers, emboldened job seekers and the Great Resignation have likely forced you (and your competitors) to re-evaluate your talent strategy. What hasn’t changed? Your people. As the old adage goes, “Your people are your best asset.” That’s why, to find and retain the right talent in 2022, your business should invest in professional development. In this blog, we’ll cover three reasons why increasing your business's professional development budget will help you create a winning talent strategy in 2022. 1. Investing in Professional Development Will Help You Win the War for Talent A recent Deloitte report revealed that “talent/labor” and “retention” were the top internal risks worrying CFOs for 2022. While it’s true that candidates want higher salaries and more employers are offering increased wages to drive recruitment and retention, candidates and employees also want compensation packages that help them maintain their employability and protect them in an ever-changing job market. A December 2020 report by Citrix revealed that 82% of employees believe they need to reskill or upskill at least once annually to maintain a competitive advantage in a global job market. Out of the HR directors surveyed, 62% agreed. If candidates and employees want to maintain their employability in a dynamic job market, to win the war for talent, your talent strategy should include increasing your professional development budget. That way, you will capitalize on a key decision-making factor that candidates (and current employees) assess when considering job opportunities. Hear what 1Password CFO Jeannie De Guzman has to say about the extra steps 1Password is taking to address the Great Resignation.    To watch the full episode of CFO Confidential: The Great Resignation on demand, become a Plan To Grow member. 2. You Will Attract Generation Z Employees LinkedIn’s 2021 Workplace Learning Report, a survey of 5,154 professionals, discovered that 76% of Gen Zers believe learning is key to a successful career. The report also found that 67% of the workforce’s newest additions spent more time on learning in 2020 than the prior year and that 69% of Gen Z learners created more time for themselves to learn. If Gen Z candidates have an appetite for learning—one large enough for them to make the time to do so—your talent strategy should increase its professional development budget to align with their desires to learn and to maintain a work-life balance. An increased learning budget will help you attract the Gen Z candidates—in, and soon to be entering the workforce—to your company. 3. You Will Develop a Competitive Workforce A recent Gartner survey of more than 500 HR leaders found that their top priority for 2022 was building critical skills and competencies within their workforce. Many large enterprises, such as PwC, Amazon and Accenture, are investing more than half a billion dollars in employee upskilling to keep their respective workforces competitive. When your company’s goals inevitably change, your workforce needs to be ready to adapt. An increased professional development budget can support your employees with reskilling and upskilling to adjust to your company’s shifting priorities. Ongoing learning can help your employees stay up to date by acquiring the latest skills and knowledge in their field, changing how they work and think, as well as receiving training in new or emerging technology. Your talent strategy should increase its professional development budget to keep your workforce competitive so that once your company’s priorities shift, your workforce is prepared and has the skills to adapt quickly. Ultimate Guide to Workforce Planning Read about aligning HR strategy with business goals, HR budgeting, HR metrics and more. Your Talent Strategy in 2022 Re-evaluate your company’s talent strategy regularly. As work environments and the job market continue to evolve, you will need to have the ability to dynamically align and adjust your workforce planning, from current and future payroll to fringe benefits and more. While investing in professional development will be a key component of a winning talent strategy in 2022, so too will your ability to drive agile, employee-level planning.   Click here to find out how the not-for-profit organization, Citizen's Advice, transformed its approach to workforce planning by improving collaboration between budget holders and the finance team. Workforce Planning Software Vena’s Workforce Planning solution helps you forecast and report on your labor expenses with greater accuracy. With integrated data transferred from your HRIS to pre-built Excel templates—you can plan compensation better, build a talent acquisition pipeline and develop a winning talent strategy. Simplify Labor Planning Get end-to-end management for your labor expense planning, reporting and analytics

It’s easy to focus so much time and energy on increasing employee headcount that you overlook another critical growth factor: revenue per employee—also known as net income per employee. Fast employee growth sounds like a good thing for your company—and it can be—but that’s not always the case. In fact, if your revenue per employee isn’t strong, it could result in serious setbacks and concerns down the road. There was a day and age when employee count was a badge of honor. The companies with the most employees were generally considered to be the most successful. But all of this is changing. Today, the employee count is nothing more than a vanity metric. Instead, many of the most successful companies are striving for lower headcounts and higher revenue per employee. Want to learn more about workforce planning? Check out our Ultimate Guide to Workforce Planning. Now that we have the basics out of the way, let’s turn our attention to why it’s important to focus on higher net income per employee. 1. Fewer Employees = Faster Decisions You know what we’re talking about here. The more employees a company has, the more difficult it is to make fast decisions. Conversely, smaller companies and smaller teams are much more agile. They can make quick decisions and adjust on the fly, which can save both time and money. This doesn’t mean that large companies can’t double as agile organizations. However, it’s much more difficult to do so as the employee count grows. 2. Cost Savings It makes sense to believe that more employees will result in more revenue. After all, this allows your company to get more work done. Or does it? There are many ways smaller companies are able to save money by cutting costs: Salary and benefits: The more employees you have, the more money you pay out in salary and benefits. And as you know, these costs have a tendency to rise year over year. Training: The numbers vary based on the source, but most agree that the average cost of training a new employee is in the $2K range. That doesn’t consider the fact that some employees won’t make it out of training and others may require additional training. Office space: Even with remote work on the rise, this is still an important consideration. As your company grows, you may find that your space is no longer big enough. And for remote workers, the cost of equipping their home office can quickly add up. Office equipment and supplies: From computers and printers to paper and envelopes, large teams quickly burn through equipment and supplies.  3. Flexibility As a company grows, flexibility generally dwindles. In some cases, it disappears altogether. This is the opposite of an agile organization (see above). A smaller team has the flexibility to get more done, which can result in a higher earnings per employee. It also leads to less friction across departments, thus reducing challenges and stress. Think about it this way. In a large company with thousands of employees, a new hire will have to go through many steps to implement a new procedure or strategy. With a lower headcount, there’s more flexibility to make instantaneous changes with the idea of tweaking and refining on the path forward. 4. High-Level Contributions From All Employees You’ve seen it before and you’ll see it again. The bigger the company, the greater chance there is of hiring and retaining “dead weight.” In other words, some employees neglect to carry their own weight. And worse yet, this often happens because they continually slide under the radar. There’s no accountability. With a lower headcount, every employee has the opportunity to make high-level contributions. When that happens, you’ll find that your smaller team is capable of outperforming much bigger competitors. 5. More Efficient Collaboration Did you know that roughly 75% of employers rate collaboration and teamwork as very important? While that may be true, it doesn’t mean that business leaders always hire with this in mind. A common example is those that overlook the importance of a higher than average revenue per employee. It’s natural for larger teams to struggle more with collaboration than smaller ones. This is particularly true in today’s day and age of remote work. When you focus on higher revenue per employee, your company will naturally remain “lean and mean.” This will work in your favor in regards to communication and collaboration, whether in the office or working remotely. Learn more about Vena’s integrated revenue planning software. Important Questions To Answer By now, you realize how you can benefit from focusing on higher revenue per employee. However, you may still have some questions. Here are a few of the most important to address: What is your current employee headcount? Are you in a position to reduce the size of your workforce? What is your current net income per employee? What’s the best way to calculate net income per employee and revenue per employee? What steps can you take to improve your revenue per employee How does your revenue per employee stack up against other companies in your space? What is your revenue per employee ratio? Is there room for improvement? Remember, it’s not enough to assume that your revenue per employee is strong. You need to know your current numbers while tracking changes as your revenue and headcount fluctuate. Final Thoughts When you focus on higher revenue per employee, it’ll have a positive impact on many areas of your business. If earnings per employee is important to you and your company—and it should be—now’s the time to take control. With the help of Vena’s collaborative and intuitive workforce planning software, you have the power to grow your business without bloating your employee headcount. 

If you’ve spent any amount of time browsing the internet or watching the news, the phrase “Great Resignation” isn’t foreign to you. It’s been thrown about wildly since the early days of the pandemic and it continues to pick up steam as the months go by. The Great Resignation is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the trend of employees quitting their jobs and focusing more time on their personal life. In other words, employees are shifting from a “live to work” to a “work to live” mindset. This doesn’t necessarily mean that people don’t want to work. It means that they’re seeking an improved work-life balance. According to a recent CNBC article, 3.9 million people quit their jobs in June 2021. And that doesn’t take into consideration the millions of people who quit in the months leading up to June. What’s the Reason for “The Great Resignation” Trend? As noted above, many people are quitting their jobs in search of something that makes them happier. They don’t want to spend eight or more hours every day at a job they don’t enjoy.  Other reasons for the growth of this trend include: Early retirement after cashing in on the stock market and/or rising real estate values Starting a small business Seeking permanent remote work Regardless of the reason why so many people are putting in their two-weeks notice, it’s had a profound effect on employers of all sizes in all industries. And with that, workforce planning is also changing. Here’s how. 1. Headcount Planning Is a Must You know how many people you have in your company right now, but do you expect that number to be the same tomorrow? Next week? Next month? The more employees you have, the greater chance there is of turnover. As employees quit, your headcount will dip. And as you hire replacements, your headcount will once again grow. At least in the meantime, you should expect an ebb and flow. With the right approach to headcount planning, you can: Stay proactive against churn Track and manage new hires and terminations  Track the impact of new hires and terminations on company finances If you’re not careful, the Great Resignation could sneak up on your business—and not in a good way. You could find yourself short-staffed and falling behind. Check out our “Ultimate Guide to Workforce Planning” to help you and your business navigate The Great Resignation. 2. Remote Employment Is on the Rise As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, a large number of workers throughout the United States (and the rest of the world) were forced into remote work. Some liked it, some loved it and some wanted to return to the office after one day. There will always be people who dread working from home, but there are many more who have fallen in love with remote work.  According to a report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “the percent of employed persons working at home on days they worked nearly doubled” to 42% during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. If you’re receptive to remote work, there’s a greater chance of keeping the majority of your workforce happy. Conversely, if you want your employees to return to the office as soon as possible, it’s likely to scare some of them into quitting. They want the freedom of working from home. The growth in remote employment is changing workforce planning in many ways: Varying state and local tax laws Employer authorization to do business in different areas The implementation of remote work policies The need for new technology and equipment Timekeeping policies Payroll alone has the potential to cause trouble as you now have to calculate taxes such as FICA, FUTA and SUTA by the location of the employee.  3. Forecasting Can Save Your Company Forecasting has always been a big part of success in the business world. If you’re focused solely on the present, you’re more prone to getting knocked off your throne in the future.  Business forecasting could make or break your company as the Great Resignation wears on.  With Extended Planning, you can “integrate your financial, operational and other business data to uncover your hidden insights and dependencies between departments.” When you do that, forecasting becomes less time-consuming, less stressful and more accurate.  Regardless of the business forecasting model you employ, start by answering questions such as: Do you have access to historical data in an easy-to-consume format? Has your company been affected by the Great Resignation and/or recent economic downturn? How so? What’s the outlook for your industry? How far out do you want to forecast? What are your plans for using the forecast?  It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Forecasting today could save your company in the short or long term. This is even more so the case with the work landscape changing by the day. Final Thoughts Even if you feel confident in your workforce planning strategy, there’s no way of knowing what the future holds. Who could have predicted the Great Resignation bearing down on us in 2021? Vena’s collaborative and intuitive workforce planning software can help you tackle the here and now while also preparing for the future. It helps with everything from payroll and benefits planning to employee transfers and headcount planning.  Don’t let a trend like the Great Resignation bury your business. Adjust accordingly so it can continue to thrive.

People—from your in-house employees to the contractors you bring in to get a job done—drive your business. They keep your company moving towards its goals, ensure your customers stay satisfied and make certain your product and services are delivered on time and on budget.  They’re at the heart of every business. Which is why making sure you have the right people, with all of the right skills, is a critical part of any HR team’s role. Workforce planning empowers you to do that, helping you plan your team now and for the future. With an effective workforce planning process, you’ll be able to stay on top of your day-to-day People needs while keeping an eye ahead—on potential market and industry changes and the skills or headcount you’ll need to meet your business goals.  But workforce planning can also be a major investment of time and budget—which means getting it right the first time is key. That success is built on a commitment to accuracy and an attention to detail. And for that, you need to consider every element closely,  starting with the following: 1 What is workforce planning? 2 Operational vs. strategic workforce planning 3 Contingent workforce planning 4 The workforce planning process 5 Aligning HR strategy with your business goals 6 The role of a skill gaps analysis 7 HR budgeting: how to plan your HR costs 8 Workforce planning metrics 9 5 workforce planning reports 10 4 workforce planning best practices What Is Workforce Planning? Workforce planning is the process of analyzing your workforce and forecasting and planning for your business’s current and future needs. It helps your organization stay on track with its goals by ensuring you have the right people in place to accomplish those objectives—and that the people you do employ are equipped with the skills your business needs. With that in mind, workforce planning typically considers: How your workforce is positioned to meet current and future business objectives   The skills your team needs for the future and where it may be lacking   The best talent acquisition and talent management programs to fill those gaps    Any outsourcing requirements you might have and the best ways to fill them   The costs of maintaining and developing the workforce you need By drawing on all of the tactics available and analyzing the data along the way, workforce planning keeps you on the path your organization has set and allows you to forecast the future. All so that you can put a plan and budget in place that allows you to stay on top—and ahead—of your business’s needs.  Operational vs. Strategic Workforce Planning There are actually two levels of workforce planning—one that looks ahead and one that makes sure you stay on track in the moment. Consider both in turn: Operational Workforce Planning Operational workforce planning is all about the short term. It helps you keep up with your day-to-day workforce needs, putting employees on task, making any necessary tweaks along the way and addressing seasonal and project-based headcount requirements as they come up. Usually a function of HR or of the managers within each relevant team, operational workforce planning should be part of their daily workload, with processes in place to keep everything running smoothly. But it’s only one part of your workforce planning efforts. Strategic Workforce Planning Strategic workforce planning looks ahead—usually up to five years into the future. As such, it concentrates on your larger goals and how they align with your business strategy—as well as any long-term obstacles that may get in the way. It’s this kind of planning that will help you determine where the skills gaps in your company exist and allow you to identify how you might fill them. It’ll also help you put plans in place to attract the best employees and contractors and build the skills you already have in-house. While your strategic workforce planning is usually led by HR, involvement from your executive team, board of directors, finance and operations teams and department heads will help keep everything on track.  Contingent Workforce Planning But your workforce planning doesn’t stop with your in-house team. While data varies, more conservative numbers show that at least 1 in 5 U.S. jobs is fulfilled by a contract worker. Using freelancers and contract workers can save money in the long run, but keeping on top of those workers requires its own processes, administrative tasks and hiring procedures.  And with contingent workers often needing to be scaled rapidly (think of those being brought on for seasonal work or a big project) and spread across several departments, they come with challenges of their own. Yet Deloitte found that only 29% of organizations track these workers’ compliance with work contracts and only 32% track their quality of work.  But there are planning and operational best practices that enable you to optimize your contingent workforce: Start them out with a trial period or small project to see how they fit with your organizational culture.   Give them identifiable goals, processes of communication and training that let them stay aligned with your business and empower them to continually succeed at their jobs.   Offer programs that help them build their skills and potentially earn more, while giving you the chance to bring additional skills to your business.    Continually forecast ahead to determine future contingent labor needs in order to identify where you may need to add new contractors to meet your goals.   Focus on your workers’ experience with your organization. Making them feel like part of the team can add to their productivity and general effectiveness.  While contingent workers may not be full-time employees, they can provide significant value to your workforce and fill in gaps in the skill sets you have available. As such, managing and developing this workforce should be a key part of your planning process. The Workforce Planning Process So where do you start your planning—and how do you successfully align it to your goals? These six steps will help guide you through the workforce planning process and help you get the most from your efforts: Step 1: Strategic Direction Determine your business goals and the top-down strategy your executive team has set—then consider how you can align your workforce to those goals. As you do, look at all of the tactics at your disposal: talent acquisition and headcount planning, training and development programs, outsourcing and so on can all help you fill your workforce needs.  Step 2: Supply Analysis Analyze your workforce and where it might change. That is, where you might see turnover and movement without any interventions or major business shifts. What does your workforce look like as a whole—how many employees are there, what skills are they bringing to the table and what do the overall demographics look like? Are there workers headed to retirement? Employees you expect to see turnover for other reasons? Finally, what skills are your organization relying on and how will that predicted turnover affect how you do business? Step 3: Demand Analysis But interventions are necessary if you want to grow—so you need to consider those as well. What business strategies, product releases, industry changes, geographic expansions, etc. do you need to prepare for? Where may your current team fall short in supporting those goals? And what’s the best way to make sure you’re ready for what’s around the corner?  Step 4: Gap Analysis This is where you analyze any skills gaps that exist. Can your current team keep up with the future your company has planned? Will additional training be enough to fill those gaps? Or will you need to recruit new talent? What about your HR and labor budgets—will you have the resources to keep up, or do you need to focus your efforts on the roles with the greatest future impact? Step 5: Solution Analysis and Implementation Next, it’s time to take the actions you need to meet your workforce goals and fill the gaps you’ve identified. That might mean introducing a recruiting strategy to add the skills you’re missing, building your in-house team or outsourcing new contractors or contingent staff. It might also mean restructuring or redesigning the jobs you have or adding training and development programs that help you fill in some of those missing skills in your current team. Step 6: Monitoring Your Progress Of course, you don’t stop planning even after you start to implement your workforce changes. Rather, continue to monitor and measure the results of your changes and their impact on the organization itself. Are you on the right path towards your future goals or do you still see gaps that need to be filled? A Workforce Planning Example For an example of how to get the most out of your workforce planning efforts, consider Saddle Creek Logistics, one of the largest third-party logistics firms in the U.S. Headquartered in Florida, Saddle Creek has 5,000 employees across 50+ locations throughout the United States. Saddle Creek integrated their workforce planning, revenue planning, OpEx and CapEx into a single database, allowing them to work from a single source of truth. The result was an end-to-end budgeting process and smarter, data-driven decision making. Templates helped drive the process, freeing executives’ time for more granular analysis. “Tasks just flow from one person to the next without any manual intervention,” says Paige Williamson, Saddle Creek’s Associate Director of Fixed Assets and Systems.  Learn how Vena helps the Kansas City Chiefs meet its workforce planning needs. Aligning HR Strategy With Your Business Goals Aligning HR with your corporate strategy is a crucial part of the workforce planning process. From your learning and development programs to your talent acquisition strategy, you’ll see better results if you keep in mind your business goals. But alignment happens on more than one level so consider the following: Vertical alignment happens between the various levels of your business. If the executive team has built out a set of business goals, for instance, it’s up to your HR team to align their goals and actions to them, to maximize all of your people and resources and ensure everyone is working towards the same set of outcomes. Horizontal alignment happens between departments and teams—and it’s just as important. After all, it’s not unusual for departments to use competing strategies to meet the same goals—wasting both time and resources. By aligning with other departments, HR can better determine which actions and projects to prioritize and where resources should be allocated.  Four best practices can help you better align along both levels: 1. Don’t Be a Silo Collaborating and partnering with your executive team and other departments and understanding the market and industry at large, will get you to your goals faster and ensure you have the right support along the way. 2. Know Your Culture and Budget To ensure you’re hiring people likely to thrive in your business environment, your workforce planning tactics should be built with your organizational culture in mind, while the right HR budget can mean the difference between success and failure. 3. Put Your Data To Work Through accessible HR dashboards and integrated company-wide data, you can begin to visualize your most critical metrics—analyzing where you’re falling short of your goals and where you’re thriving.  4. Align Your HR Activities and Team By identifying the targeted actions you need to achieve your goals—and assigning the right people to make them happen—you can get on a clearly defined path toward making your business strategy a reality.  When HR is aligned with your business goals, you make better decisions around talent acquisition, retention strategies and training needs—fueled by a better understanding of any gaps that exist.  Find out more about how to align HR strategy with your business goals. The Role of a Skills Gap Analysis The skills we rely on to keep up with our business demands are always changing. Understanding the skills you no longer require—and anticipating those you’ll need in the future—is part of ensuring you have the right team for your business. And that’s where a skills gap analysis comes in. Your HR and workforce planning teams will use a skills gap analysis to identify—and eventually fill—the skills shortages that exist in your company, in order to meet current and evolving needs and pave the way for future plans. Such an analysis will help you determine where those changes may be necessary within your organization, to let you better keep up with emerging technology and industry changes and keep pace with your future business demands. Specifically, it can help your organization: Recognize where important skills are missing  Identify individual growth opportunities in your employees Better target your recruitment efforts Plan ahead for your workforce and growth goals For a successful skills gap analysis, either consider each employee individually and the skills they bring to the table or focus on the overall gaps in your departments or business as a whole, to figure out which skills you need to add. From there, follow a series of steps: 1. Determine Your Business Goals  Consider where your organization is going in the near and long terms and which strategies you’re going to use to get there—as well as the skills you need for that to happen.  2. Look Into the Future  Take a look at where your industry and the workforce itself are going, modeling for future scenarios—then determine what skills you’ll need to maintain a competitive edge.  3. Dig Into the Data Create a single source of data—drawing from employee KPIs, surveys, skill assessments, 360-degree performance reviews and other sources—to create a full inventory of skills.  4. Fill the Gaps  Add the missing skills you need through learning and development programs, job redesigns, outsourcing and recruitment. Don’t stop there, though. Ideally, your skills gap analysis should be an ongoing part of your annual HR budgeting process and the forecasting you do throughout the year.  Find out more about how to make a skills gap analysis work for you. HR Budgeting: How To Plan Your HR Costs  Without the resources to fuel your workforce planning efforts, you won’t get far—and you might find you have to prioritize your efforts according to the resources you do have available to you. Which is why filling your skills gap, achieving your HR goals and meeting all of your workforce planning needs starts with your HR budget.  Your budget should take into consideration three main components: 1. Compensation and Benefits  This will likely represent the largest allocation of resources by far. And since salaries and benefits both hugely influence your ability to maintain and attract talent, keeping on top of industry and job-level expectations will also be critical. 2. Learning and Development  The best learning and development programs not only ensure your team members continue to grow and stay challenged in their roles, but also help you avoid potential turnover and keep up with future skills gaps.  3. Recruitment Your HR budget will have to incorporate not only the costs associated with advertising any new jobs, but allocate for relocation costs and background checks, while also incorporating any interview periods or onboarding training.  Either a zero-based budgeting approach or an incremental budgeting approach will allow you to keep your budget in balance, while regular check-ins and adjustments will ensure you’re staying on track throughout the year.  Get the most out of your HR budget with these five best practices.  Workforce Planning Metrics As with most business planning processes, workforce planning success means measuring your ongoing progress. Measurement will fuel every aspect of the process, allowing you to better determine where your skills gaps exist, the headcount planning you need to do to fill them and any other programs you decide to focus on.  To stay on top of your workforce needs, then, these are some of the metrics you might want to consider: Productivity Are your teams able to get their work done? And if there are productivity problems, what might be the cause? Are teams struggling because they don’t have the skills they need to accomplish the tasks at hand? Is there too much on their plate to finish or do you have employees who aren’t carrying their load? Turnover and Attrition What does employee turnover and attrition look like at your organization? Why are employees leaving and who, exactly, is jumping ship? Attrition happens naturally in any company, but knowing what it looks like at your organization—and at what point turnover can lead to potential problems in reaching your goals—can assist you in your planning efforts. You’ll be able to identify what you need to do to retain your highest performers and most critical employees, plan recruitment and offboarding programs and determine where contingent workers might help create a better transition along the way. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion  How diverse is your workforce? Diversity across race, gender and age—spread across all levels of your organization—brings a range of perspectives to your business. It can also lead to improved innovation and better financial performance. But to create a healthy workforce, it’s important that all of your employees feel like they belong, which means working DEI into your workforce planning efforts, from recruitment to training. Salary  How are salaries distributed throughout your organization? Do you have senior-level members everywhere you need them, to lead your individual teams towards their goals, and are you paying them enough to stay in those roles? Are you fairly compensating the skill sets and teams you expect to rely on to meet your future business objectives and offering competitive salaries in those areas you’re looking to recruit new talent? Engagement How engaged your employees are (or aren’t) with their work can help predict future turnover, as well as overall productivity and absenteeism. All of which can let you better understand where you may need to invest in your current team—through learning and development, upskilling, reskilling or other programs.  Performance Are your employees meeting their objectives—and are they doing so on schedule and error-free? How do their managers and colleagues rate them in their performance reviews? Do they show potential for advancement? Performance metrics like these let you identify the top performers in your business and those with potential for leadership roles. Revenue Understanding your company’s revenue as divided by your total number of employees can help you calculate how much each employee, on average, is contributing to your company. It will also let you better understand the cost of turnover so that you know how much to invest in keeping your employees happy and engaged. Cost How much is your organization spending on your workforce? An understanding of where your money is going—considering everything from compensation and benefits to recruitment and training costs—can help inform your HR strategy and budget.  5 Workforce Planning Reports After you’ve assembled your workplace planning metrics, it’s time to create your reports. Your CEO’s asking you questions, such as: “Do we have the talent required to achieve our short-term business goals? In which departments do we have a talent deficiency? What’s the ongoing cost of our current workforce?” What’s your process for delivering these answers quickly and accurately? Here are five common workforce planning reports you can use to get your CEO the information they need: Headcount Report Your CEO knows your organization’s most important resource is its people. They also want to know if the company is acquiring—and more importantly, retaining—them. On average, it costs $4,129 to hire an employee. That’s before training. A headcount report is an HR report that provides clarity on your headcount, employee tenure, which departments experience the greatest turnover and which have stronger retention. Compensation Report No matter your headcount, the compensation report is valuable—especially when your organization’s compensation structure varies by employee. It shows salary, benefits, overtime paid, bonuses and commissions, payroll deductions and when and how much paid time off is taken. Performance Report What value has that new employee (who cost approximately $4,129 to hire) added? A performance report reveals which employees are meeting objectives, which teams are reaching their goals without exceeding their budgets and each employee’s performance grade. The performance report also identifies which employees display the greatest potential for advancement as well as which managers are best developing their team’s talent. Recruiting Report Successful recruiting may be the difference between success and failure—especially during a candidate’s market. A recruiting report highlights positions open and recently filled, number of applications and interviewees per position, average time-to-hire and average cost-to-hire. The recruiting report helps the talent acquisition team remain on budget and identify qualified candidates faster. Variance Analysis Report Your CEO will inevitably approach you with more questions, such as: “How much are we spending on employee benefits next year? Who are our top performers? Which teams have the weakest retention?”   Now that you have five common human resources and workforce planning reports, you can get those answers—quickly and accurately. 4 Workforce Planning Best Practices Successful workforce planning will keep your business running smoothly, with the right people on hand to pave the way. To get the most out of your workforce planning efforts, consider four best practices for keeping your process on track: 1. Ensure You Have the Support You Need Your workforce planning process isn’t going to get anywhere without the right people supporting and championing its ongoing success. While HR traditionally steers the ship—hopefully with one specified leader at the helm—finance and operations will play important roles in making sure the resources are available to support your goals. Executive support is also critical to seeing those goals build momentum throughout the company and integrating them into the overall business strategy. Getting key stakeholders from every department on board will help ensure company-wide support. 2. Choose the Right Technology The right technology is also critical and can keep the entire workforce planning process moving smoothly. Automating the more repetitive, manual functions will let you focus on analysis and planning, while dashboards and reporting will enable you to visualize the ongoing results. Meanwhile, a single source of truth—with data integrated from throughout the company—will make it possible to track the entire process. 3. Keep an Eye on the Data Data should help drive every stage of your workforce planning process—enabling you to make decisions on which gaps to prioritize and how to fill them and allowing you to evaluate your success in building towards your business goals. Your integrated in-house data can help you keep track of key metrics such as workforce costs, revenue per employee, employee performance and rate of turnover, while market and industry data will ensure you’re on top of salary expectations, benefit expectations and upcoming market changes. 4. Never Stop Looking Ahead Workforce planning doesn’t have a finish line. Your workforce is always changing, as is the market and your business strategy. That means your workforce planning should be continuous as well. Even as you work towards your goals, you should be measuring the effectiveness of your actions and making any necessary tweaks along the way—and looking at the market to see if anything outside of your organization is changing that might affect the strategy you have underway.  While there’s a lot to consider, successful workforce planning can mean the difference between having the team you need to fulfill your business goals and falling short on the skills you require. Done right, it can play an integral role in your business success. Get the most out of your workforce planning with Vena. Recap The Ultimate Guide to Workforce Planning Workforce planning is the process of analyzing your workforce and forecasting and planning for your business’s current and future needs. It helps you stay on track of your business goals by ensuring you have the right skills in place. There are two levels of workforce planning. Operational workforce planning helps you keep up with your day-to-day workforce needs, while strategic workforce planning concentrates on your larger future goals and how they align with your business strategy.  Aligning HR with your corporate strategy is a crucial part of the workforce planning process—both vertical alignment (between various levels of your organization) and horizontal alignment (between departments and teams).  A skills gap analysis helps you identify—and eventually fill—the skills shortages that exist in your company, both now and based on future goals.  Your HR budget helps ensure you have the resources available to meet your goals, while the right metrics will help measure your ongoing efforts.