You’re at an inflection point. You’ve been a high-growth business—but now that growth has plateaued and your momentum has stalled. It’s the first time your teams have teams. They’re forming silos—each has its own processes and every day you hear, “We just don’t have the time.” Now, sales and marketing aren’t aligned, finance is budgeting on its own and HR can’t hire quickly enough. More competitors are entering your market and you need to move faster. But how? To scale the right way, you need to prepare your budget collaboratively, flexibly and quickly to avoid the common budgeting missteps made by small and medium-sized businesses. Today, we’ll cover three budgeting mistakes often made by businesses of these sizes as they attempt to scale. 1. Ignoring Cash Flow Forecasting Challenges When growth opportunities arise, without cash, you can’t capitalize. While organizations set aside contingency funds, they may not allocate enough cash to both emergencies and investment opportunities. That’s when—with limited resources—you may spend more money than you planned. To commit to your budget, you need to forecast cash flow with greater accuracy by modeling different cash flow cycle scenarios and opening up the channels of communication between your teams.   Watch this video to hear Paul Gill, Partner, Valuations and Modeling Financial Advisory Services at BDO, talk about growing assets during times of higher inflation.   To watch the full episode of CFO Confidential: Unpacking Inflation, become a Plan To Grow member and join the community where you’ll learn best practices and elevate your leadership skills. 2. Skipping the Budget vs. Actual Variance Analysis If you’re not performing a variance analysis at least monthly and tracking your plans against actuals, you’re missing trends that indicate opportunities or threats. You may be underestimating your cost base and operating expenses, or just don’t have an accurate forecast of cash inflows and cash outflows. To be able to identify opportunities—such as where you can save on expenses or which sales regions you should focus on more—you need to analyze your budgets vs. actuals monthly at a minimum.   Evan Short, Solutions Consultant at Vena, explains in this video how Vena allows you to create more accurate, driver-based forecasts for operating expenses, track your budgets vs. actuals and analyze what-if scenarios.   To watch the full episode of Vena with Evan: OpEx Planning, become a Plan To Grow member. 3. Neglecting the Rolling Forecast How many scenarios are you prepared for? Many organizations don’t implement agile planning processes, such as the rolling forecast and scenario modeling, and thus are only prepared for one eventuality. If you don’t reforecast regularly when budgeting—some organizations forecast only once every year—you won’t have the flexibility to adjust when market conditions fluctuate. To protect your organization from uncertainty and to be able to seize opportunities, you need to reforecast at every month’s end and regularly conduct what-if scenario analysis. Budgeting and Forecasting Software Scaling requires collaboration, agility, speed and process alignment. For many high-growth small and medium-sized businesses at this inflection point, as their teams grow, their respective teams are at risk of drifting apart, establishing their “own way of doing things” and not sharing information when budgeting and forecasting. With Vena’s Excel-based Budgeting and Forecasting solution, you can prepare your budgets collaboratively, flexibly and quickly. Your budget sets your company’s direction, and with Vena, you can avoid budgeting mistakes often committed by small and medium-sized businesses—helping you to scale the right way.  

The nachos and chili are prepared, your favorite beer is chilled and ready to go. But before your watch party can begin you’ve got a choice to make. Who are you rooting for at this year’s Super Bowl? Now think twice before you decide. Because it turns out all of your financial investments for the year ahead could depend on the winner. Or at least that’s what the Super Bowl Indicator would have you believe.  First introduced in 1978 by New York Times sportswriter Leonard Koppett, the Super Bowl Indicator uses the Super Bowl results as a stock market predictor. A win by a team from the American Football Conference (AFC), it suggests, will result in a bear market—or stock market decline—in the year ahead. By contrast, a win by a team from the National Football Conference (NFC) will mean a bull market, or stock market rise.  By that measure, a 2022 win by the Los Angeles Rams should earn the stock market a stellar year. A victory by the Cincinnati Bengals, on the other hand, will see it falter. So go Rams, go, right? Or not. Find out how former Super Bowl champions the Kansas City Chiefs use Vena to speed up their financial plays. Look Ahead for a Winning Future While the Super Bowl Indicator had a 100% success rate when Koppett first introduced it in the 1970s, as of 2021 that accuracy had declined to 74%. And it hasn’t been faring well in recent years. In fact, it’s been wrong for the past five years straight. That’s because—not surprisingly—there’s nothing scientific about the Super Bowl Indicator. Finance teams everywhere understand that “correlation does not imply causation” and that there are more useful tools than touchdowns and field goals to plan out your next play. So why not just root for the team you’re most excited for on game day and use the other tools and processes available to plan ahead. Here are three methods that don’t rely on a single sporting event to help you stay ready for the future: 1. Forecast Frequently or Risk a Fumble For most finance teams, forecasting is a natural part of the budgeting cycle. By applying available historical data and updating key performance metrics, forecasting helps you predict future business results.  And chances are you’ve already got a regular forecasting routine in place—in fact, if you’re a publicly traded company, you’re required to disclose high-level forecasts to your investors. But the frequency of your forecasting is also key. Many organizations rely on quarterly or monthly forecasts to fuel their decision making—but ongoing rolling forecasts will better show you exactly what play’s the right one at any given time.  Rolling forecasts can help you create a more reliable game plan by revealing ongoing business trends, focusing your attention where it’s needed and enabling you to divert resources as required. And with the level of uncertainty and constant changes we’ve seen over the past two years, they’ve become more of a priority for many finance teams. In The State of Strategic Finance, our 2021 benchmark report, 24% of respondents said they’d introduced rolling forecasting over the year past—a number that’s hopefully only continuing to grow. 2. Plan Out Your Next Play With Scenario Modeling Our 2021 benchmark report showed us something else as well: only 40% of organizations were employing scenario modeling before making forecasting adjustments in 2021—meaning 60% weren’t. Yet scenario modeling and what-if analysis are other powerful tools that will help you prepare for all possible versions of the future.  Thankfully, 40.5% of the respondents we surveyed understood that, saying that they were looking to prioritize scenario modeling and what-if analysis in 2021. That’s a win in the making, since the most strategic finance teams embrace scenario modeling as part of their daily, monthly or annual routine.  By linking business drivers to key performance indicators (KPIs), monitoring those KPIs and  factoring in external modeling inputs, scenario modeling allows you to put a winning strategy in place, while also preparing for a loss—looking at high, medium and low scenarios and mapping out your future plays. Scenario modeling also helps you know exactly what levers you can pull at any given moment to adjust your next move. It lets you assess the impact of changes you’re planning or market shifts underway, using all of the financial and non-financial data at your disposal to do so—from sales volume and headcount data to pipeline and historical data. All of which better lets you keep your eyes on the prize. Get the score on how the Arizona Cardinals—the National Football League’s oldest franchise—uses Vena as a single source of truth. 3. Put AI and Predictive Analytics Into the Game Finance has been slow to embrace artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)—so much so that our benchmark report showed that only 7% of finance teams were using it in 2021, the exact same percentage we saw in 2020. But AI and ML—along with predictive analytics—offer a way to tackle more complex problems and stay ready for whatever is ahead.  As finance takes on a more strategic role—and integrates more and more data into decision making—AI and ML can play an important role, helping you dive deeper, to identify trends, data anomalies and correlations that will help you better prepare for anything ahead. AI can also help you get extra yards out of your scenario planning by evaluating millions of data points to accurately determine best and worst-case scenarios without fear of human error. Alongside AI and machine learning, predictive analytics and predictive budgeting can further help you make predictions for the long- and short-term future. By leveraging modeling and statistical algorithms—and drawing on broad and deep sets of historical data—it can help you determine potential risks and future outcomes, reduce inefficiencies and make better choices for your team and organization as a whole. Now Put Your Game Plan Into Action None of these methods start with a kickoff—but they can gain more traction with a complete planning platform that lets financial and operational planners draw from financial and non-financial data sources and quickly get to the insights you need. With that in place, you can quarterback your team to victory, staying agile for the future no matter what it holds. Which means this Super Bowl Sunday, forget about what the winning team might say about future financial trends—and just let yourself enjoy the game. Want to learn more? Join Kansas City Chiefs’ Michael Ragsdale, Director of Strategy and Analytics, in Vena’s Reporting and Analytics Livestream on March 22, 2022. Sign up today.

If your not for profit is struggling to finance the resources needed for your services—especially during times of uncertainty—you’re not alone. In a sector that heavily leans on government funding and private donors, many not for profits have had to pause their “non-core” programs, if not their core services, too.  With fewer resources, not for profits are suffering from staffing constraints—trying to maintain salary expenses at the benchmark of 65–70% of revenue—and they don’t have the people to provide these services. With fewer grants available as we approach year three of the COVID-19 era, to increase the success probability of your grant proposals, you need to prepare stronger, evidence-based submissions. In this blog, we’ll cover three questions every one of your grant proposals should answer, and how—with Vena’s Pre-Configured Solution for Not for Profits—you can strengthen your proposals with quantitative evidence. 1. How Much Grant Management Experience Do You Have? Grantors want to see how long you’ve been doing this. They’ll weigh your grant management experience in their evaluation of your proposal, so you’ll need to demonstrate your experience. Whether fair or not, it’s easier to trust—and award a large grant to—an organization that’s done it before. Take a look at the video to see how you can use Vena’s Grant Income template to report your historical, existing and planned grants. This template lets you create reports filtered by an individual grant or grant category—restricted, unrestricted or undefined—or all grants.   To watch the full episode of The Exchange: Not for Profit Meetup, become a Plan To Grow member and join the community. 2. What Is Your Grant Allocation for This Fund? Grantors need to see how you’ll allocate the grant for which you’re applying. How you’ll spend this grant is, probably, the most important question in their assessment you must answer, so you need to demonstrate that your allocation is cost effective. Grantors want to know their funding will be spent effectively and responsibly. See how you can leverage Vena’s Grant Allocations template to show how you’ll spend this grant by watching this video. This template lets you report your planned allocation by expense, by project and/or by month. 3. What Are Your Historical Grant Outcomes? Grantors want to know your prior grants have made an impact. They’ll consider the outcomes of your previously awarded funding when they review your proposal, so it’s critical to your success that you highlight that impact. After all, grantors want to feel confident that their grants will make a difference. Watch the video to see how you can leverage Vena’s Grant Utilization template to report your overall allocation and post-allocation spending. This template lets you create reports filtered by entity, department, restriction—and perhaps most importantly—by project to highlight the impact that each grant has made toward achieving your mission. Your Grant Proposals To generate more grant funding, your submissions need stronger, quantitative evidence of your grant management experience, your grant allocation and your historical grant outcomes. With Vena’s specially priced Pre-Configured Solution for Not for Profits, you can answer these three questions with evidence—empowering you to write stronger, winning grant proposals.

Your two most important assets are your people and your data. As your employees run detailed reports that contain confidential HR information, and these move along the workflow across the business—from person to person, between departments, internal and external—it’s hard to be certain that your employee data is protected. Sure, you want to maintain a transparent process, but you also know you need to protect your greatest assets. Are you confident that no one other than those authorized to view a specific report has seen that data? As compensation details, other payroll expenses and more sensitive employee-related data are passed along—often back and forth—do you know exactly who has access to what data? With governmental personal information protection laws (GDPR, PIPEDA, CCPA, etc.) and the increasing importance to safeguard your information against hackers, you need to ensure your employee data is private and secure. It’s especially important if you’re a high-visibility company that's subject to a greater risk of a data breach. In the spirit of “Safer Internet Day”—a global celebration on February 8 that joins stakeholders to make the internet safer for everyone—we’re focusing on better (and safer) employee data protection protocols for organizations and their people. Today, we’ll cover three signs that could indicate that your company needs better employee data protection when running reports. 1. Version Control Frustrations One team is spending time—a lot of extra time—manually consolidating data before you can run your reports. Because everyone worked off slightly different numbers that came from disparate data sources, a few employees now have to scour through every edit between v1 and v6 to assemble those edits, scan the changes and find the employees who entered that data to ask about their entries. That’s more auditing time—and people power—scanning through and passing around sensitive employee information during account reconciliations and financial consolidation.  If your best method is reviewing ‘Last Accessed’ or ‘Last Edited’ details when auditing, it’s difficult to retain confidence in knowing who worked off which version, what changes were made or with whom that data was shared. You need an audit trail—a drill down into the history of a spreadsheet for every cell and data point—and templates that you can leverage across multiple profit centers, rather than one template for every department. Without audit trails and data integration, you risk violating key foundational security controls.   Watch the video to hear J.T. Cecchini, General Manager at LevelUp Financial Partners, talk about using Vena for data restrictions and the risk of emailing company salary information.   To watch the full episode of The Financial Reporting Meetup, featuring J.T., become a Plan To Grow member and join the community. 2. User Access Level Uncertainty You’ve been given a report and have questions about something you’ve discovered. The person you asked doesn’t have an answer and is taking a while to get the information you need. If they’re unsure of who to ask, it’s likely your employees don’t know who has access to what information and who’s completed what tasks—whether inside or outside your organization. This is an indication your company isn’t following the following foundational internal control guidelines: Principle of Least Privilege: Employees should only have access to what they need to complete their tasks. Segregation of Duties: The assignment of tasks—within a process that involves shared responsibilities and multiple people and departments—to minimize fraud or error. If your employees don’t know who to consult when they notice inaccurate data—for instance, payroll staff seeing questionable variable compensation numbers and asking the wrong managers for confirmation—who will they ask? By sending information to the incorrect people for verification, it significantly increases the risk of your sensitive HR details reaching unauthorized users. 3. Offline Employee Database in Excel Your data is stored offline and your employees send reports back and forth through email. Without a central, cloud-based environment, you’re more susceptible to data breaches— especially if you have staff members who don’t always follow safe internet best practices.  And if you’re using Excel spreadsheets to hide and filter data manually, without the ability to track changes, you don’t know who’s viewing, editing or sharing this data. While there are offline options to secure Excel data, hackers can use Excel’s security features against it. This is where high-level encryption measures become necessary to thwart nefarious actors. Employee Data Security Vena’s Excel-based Complete Planning Platform has a role-based access control feature that lets you restrict or grant data permission to employees. The control system has an audit trail that drills down into the history of a spreadsheet—for every cell and data point—so you have complete visibility into, and control over, who has viewed what data and from where those numbers came (stamped with date, time and user). This adheres to information protection laws. The strict control system enforces the segregation of duties and follows the principle of least privilege, keeping unauthorized users from viewing, editing and sharing data. The platform has a built-in version control system that ensures everyone is working off the same data in the Vena Cloud—a secure, enterprise-class environment that’s encrypted with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256-bit encryption and private keys managed by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Key Management System. As your employees run reports and confidential HR information moves along every stakeholder, with Vena, you can feel confident your employee data is fully protected. Celebrate Safer Internet Day by trying the Complete Planning Platform. You’ll discover how to better protect your two most important assets: your people and your data.

For more than 15 years, Microsoft MVP Megan Strant has been enhancing the end-user experience across organizations. She’s worked across a number of Microsoft partners, building and managing their change management practices and learning strategies. The experience of your people on their journey, and at times, relying on their uptake of technology or shift in behavior, is a major part of the success of any change across your organization. To drive that success and to improve your people's experience along their journey, you need to make it personal by answering their, “What’s in It for Me (WIIFM)?” In my session, Evolving Relationships With Change Management Methods, at Excelerate =SUM(it) 2022, when we polled the audience on which change management challenge they expected to be the most difficult, the top answer at 48% was “identifying each team’s WIIFM.” WIIFM is different across the business—for business owners, for managers and for individual contributors. Each stakeholder level will have a different experience along your change program. But overall, to drive change, you need buy-in from every person from every level. You’re asking more from your people, for them to perform extra work and in ways that often add stress. It’s crucial for you (the change agent) to connect with your people. By answering each team’s WIIFM, you can build the connection between: You and your people Your people and your upcoming change program your people and the ongoing change In this blog post, discover how to overcome change management challenges and learn the three key elements in answering each team’s WIIFM: 1. What Are the Core Reasons Behind My Change Program? Start with the “why.” As world-renowned author Simon Sinek has been saying for years—the “why” is crucial in business. While his work focuses on a business’s purpose and inspiring people, the “why” in change management also flows through everything in work. Think: What’s the point? Like how your business’s vision, strategic objectives and goals should flow through each department and connect to each employee’s role, your change program should too. Whether you’re going through a major transformation, driving culture change or implementing new software, you need to build a connection between your people and your change program. Think about your program as part of a greater purpose—not just an initiative. This will help you devise the language for communicating (I’ll get to this soon) the work ahead and its benefits. 2. What Are My Stakeholders’ Values and Motivators? Involve your people in your planning. Discuss the upcoming changes. If you’re running a change program, major activities—such as impact reviews and strategy assessments—should already be underway. In other words, talk to your people and pay attention to their pain points, blockers and de-motivators. Your goal isn’t to please your people. Try to find a middle ground rather than forcing change. They won’t care or invest their time and energy if they don’t see the benefit for themselves and the business. Think: What are they hoping to get out of this change? Your people will tell you. Listen to their perspectives and understand their needs. Ask each stakeholder what they want from the situation. In my session, we also polled the audience on pain points they experience when going through change management. Their top answer at 37% was “motivating team members.” While motivation drives success and you need your people on board and motivated to achieve positive results, it can be tricky. Whether you’re leading a specific project or have broader organizational goals, appeal to what drives them and keep it simple and achievable. Some possible motivators include: Providing free food Recognizing employees Sharing success stories Implementing gamification Fostering a culture of inclusion Every stakeholder has different perspectives, needs, values and motivators. Ask each stakeholder what they want from the situation. 3. How Can I Communicate My Core Reasons, While Aligning With My Stakeholders’ Values and Motivators? Craft your communication carefully. It’s not merely a task you tick off or updates you send. Communication is your opportunity to connect. It can require persuasion or even creativity to express the core reasons and benefits in a way that aligns with your stakeholders’ values and motivators. Communication that isn’t carefully and thoughtfully crafted is stating only the facts, such as an  implementation date, IT update or program update. Your people will ignore or delete these. Some possible methods of communication include: Emailing (this still has a place for communication as many people rely on it heavily) Sending announcements through business social platforms or intranet Engaging with people through their regular channels such as a weekly department update or monthly breakfast Driving awareness about upcoming changes through internal news or announcements Creating targeted posts in digital workspaces such as Microsoft Teams Providing short reminders or dates on a rotating desktop background Running lunchtime “Ask Me Anything” sessions to inform and have a place for discussion Put effort into what you communicate and ensure the communication is relatable. To be a strong, successful communicator who drives employees to embrace change, you need to be clear and convincing. Like values and motivators, your stakeholders have different preferred methods of communication. Think about your employees’ needs, rather than what you need from them. You’re not only informing them—you’re persuading them too. Persuasion is easier if you can determine their preferred methods of communication. WIIFM Change Management Whether you’re implementing the next change program across your business or helping your people through the ongoing state of constant change in our world, you need to identify your core reasons, understand their values and motivators and determine their preferred methods of communication. Answer the WIIFM questions to make it personal—and build stronger connections with your people.

Floating cars. Colonies in space. Robot servants at our beck and call. Let’s be real: That’s not exactly the reality waiting for us in 2030. We can’t expect the world to morph into a scene from The Jetsons in just eight years. But we can expect the world of finance to change. It already has. Over the past few years, finance has become more agile and proactive as the market around us has presented one challenge after another. Technological advancements have made collaboration easier. Automation has become the norm. And decision making has emerged as more forward thinking, with finance taking a leadership role in helping businesses grow and thrive.  So what comes next? At our recent Excelerate =SUM(it) event, Vena Chief Technology Officer Hugh Cumming presented The Future of Planning Technology. During the session, he gave us a sneak peek of what to expect as we go through a digital transformation in finance in the years to come. So here are his—and Vena’s—predictions for the future of finance in 2030. Prediction 1: Speed Will Be a Competitive Advantage “In the new world, it is not the big fish which eats the small fish, it’s the fast fish which eats the slow fish,” Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, once said. And in the world of finance, that’s truer today than ever, Hugh told audiences at Excelerate =SUM(it). That’s only going to continue to be more the case in the future. So for companies of all sizes, agility is key—and the financial organizations that have that agility will thrive in 2030. It will help organizations act quickly, stay ready for market changes ahead and make real-time decisions that will continue to drive them forward.  “Speed and agility, not size, [are] the things that define an agile organization,” Hugh said. “It defines the businesses that are going to win. And at the center of this is the ability to use data to make better and faster decisions, deliver insights to the organization and be at the center of strategy.” Which brings us to prediction two. Prediction 2: Accessible, Real-Time Data Will Drive Business Decisions Ideally, this isn’t something you’ll wait until 2030 to achieve. But the reality is that sourcing data from across the organization and making it accessible and operational in real time is still a challenge for many organizations. Nevertheless, data plays a key role in creating that agility we talked about in the first prediction. And as the digital transformation in finance evolves, the organizations that master their data by 2030 will be able to make faster, more meaningful decisions whenever needed. “Bringing this data together in meaningful ways means leading the way to creating an agile business—or, quite simply, a business that can swim faster,” Hugh said. More than that, though, in 2030, organizations will be able to use data in both retrospective and prospective ways—looking back, but more importantly looking forward. “We see that as what is the essence of this strategic transformation we see in finance,” Hugh added. Prediction 3: End-to-End Technology Will Connect Finance with the Entire Business When it comes to implementing new technology, it’s “the last mile” that’s often the biggest challenge for organizations. That is, introducing the connections and integrations that will let your new technology work together with the ones your business already has. It’s these connections that allow finance to integrate with the rest of the business and easily access the data you need, moving it in and out of the platform you’re using. Solving that last-mile problem will help businesses create a more end-to-end technology infrastructure that supports your entire financial organization—and connects it to the business as a whole. And by 2030, Hugh predicts, the solutions with those integrations and connectivity options available will rise to the top and allow finance to scale quickly and easily without struggle. That will make it easier for end users to integrate the technology they need to solve real, day-to-day business problems. Which fits into Hugh’s second prediction: Rather than seeing technology investments being driven from the top, he says, it’ll be those users who take the lead in finding functional, integratable solutions that fit their business requirements and connect the organization as a whole. Prediction 4: Even With New Tech Investments, There Will Still Be a Place for the Tried and True Technology and innovation will continue to play a growing role in the evolution of finance. That much is clear. But that doesn’t mean you need to replace what’s already working. Not if you want your team to stay happy and productive through those technology shifts. And for most finance teams, that means continuing to use Microsoft Excel. It’s still the go-to solution for finance professionals. Even companies that try to replace it will often find individual team members falling back into their Excel comfort zone. As a finance organization, pushing back against that can be like fighting an uphill battle.  So why bother?  Building your technology stack around Excel will enhance acceptance and continued use, allowing you to naturally build on the technology your team feels most comfortable using. With this in mind, expect Excel to become the de facto finance desktop through 2030 and beyond—even as the technology around it continues to grow. Prediction 5: The Workflows of Finance Will Be Reinvented Forget about clunky spreadsheets shared over email. They certainly won’t have a place as the digital transformation in finance evolves. We can’t even wait until 2030 to say goodbye to those.  What will have a place is efficient, agile workflows that use technology to provide smooth-as-butter, real-time collaboration alternatives. That means better communication, less work for your team members and a better way of doing business.  “[It’s about] being able to collaborate on data in real time, in systems that allow multiple types of users to collaborate, to create a workflow that allows for different users to come in and join a data-centric workflow at different points on the journey,” Hugh said. Again, that type of real-time collaboration will make your business more agile—a faster fish in a sea of slow swimmers. Final Thoughts: When It Comes to Digital Transformation in Finance, Agility Is Key If we know anything about the future of finance, it’s that without that kind of agility, you risk falling behind—or getting caught scrambling the next time the market experiences a new challenge or change. And the less proactive you are, the more behind you fall—and the more you risk losing out to your competition. By 2030, then, it will be the most agile organizations that will emerge at the top. The rest will go the way of floating cars, never gaining flight.

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. 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.

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. 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.