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.

Data-driven finance is becoming an essential function of CFOs and other business leaders who must leverage the power of technology to enhance company insights and strategy. However, knowing how to use and customize your FP&A solutions and other analytic tools will depend on your company's goals. As a result, figuring out where to start can be the biggest challenge for many. Thankfully we have several pioneers across multiple disciplines from whom we can draw inspiration. Read on to learn how seven business professionals are leading the charge on data-driven finance to help power organizational growth. Key Takeaways: CFOs and finance professionals increasingly see the value in using operational and other business data to provide the necessary context to financial data. Part of data-driven finance is focusing on the metrics that provide the greatest business insights and result in the greatest amount of financial growth. Using FP&A software that leverages automation, data integration and other technology, data-driven finance allows business professionals to proactively make decisions using current data instead of reacting based on data from months (or even years) prior. 1. John McLean: Current Health As the CFO of Current Health, John McLean understands that other metrics available in today's business environment greatly influence a company's financial state. Current Health is a healthcare company with the goal of delivering patient care to people when they are away from the doctor's office. John pays special attention to data on customer satisfaction with respect to their wearable devices because he knows the cost of acquiring business. This means he monitors customer use and adherence to their products. He believes that a strong focus on customer experience and satisfaction takes precedence over sales and growth numbers. 2. David Horan: NextGear Capital In the automotive industry, raw data can be overwhelming to consume and use for decision-making because of the many points of the business—including vehicle purchase, maintenance, repairs, warranty programs and more. David Horan is the VP of Finance for NextGear Capital and focuses on strategic planning. He uses an internal-risk scoring algorithm and data visualization dashboards to streamline data for addressing core needs such as determining price points, accurately predicting business risks and finding opportunities in the wholesale automotive marketplace. 3. Kevin Ingram: FM Global Kevin Ingram is the CFO of FM Global, a commercial property insurance company. Like most companies, profit is a top priority and indicator of success. However, Kevin realizes that the measure of profit requires a nuanced data approach. The company relies on the combined ratio metric to account for overall profitability by factoring insured loss costs and expenses with the company's earned premium. They review this metric monthly and on three to five-year time horizons. Source: PwC 4. John Collins: LivePerson After an extensive career as a data scientist, in 2020, John Collins became the Finance Chief of LivePerson, a brand-to-consumer messaging company. The company supports businesses by helping them measure the impact of their brand and manage customer signals as they happen. In the short term, John's focus has been on addressing data connection issues that can offload, extract, transform and load (ETL) tasks for his finance team—most of which automate the reconciliation of accounts for things such as cash flow reporting. His long-term mission for the company's system layer, however, is to expand the reach of its data. His hope is for people, regardless of skill sets, to be able to explore financial or other data of interest in a conversational way. In other words, they don't need to be data scientists to obtain and understand key business information. 5. Ilan Cohen: The Digital CFO As a self-described digital CFO, Ilan Cohen has led several different data projects in various applications. For example, he leveraged the access to data from open banking to develop a product that would help lending companies predict a loan applicant's likelihood of funding based on creditworthiness. This data-based approach resulted in a 300% increase in funded loans. Additionally, Ilan used other data frameworks to help a company intervene in customer relationships to improve retention rates, noting the value of keeping existing customers over finding new ones. Source: EBizCharge 6. Edwin Ang: Foodpanda Senior Financial Controller Edwin Ang for Foodpanda, a food delivery company, has seen its dashboard—which provides several data points for addressing profit and loss—as one of the company's greatest internal achievements. The dashboard's real-time data provides insight into the effectiveness of user incentives, pricing, new customer reach and other metrics. The immediacy of the data allows the company to proactively make decisions instead of waiting for the month to close and relying on old data. 7. Ben Goodband: London Stock Exchange Group Interim CFO for Data and Analytics Ben Goodband at the London Stock Exchange Group uses cloud-based software and machine learning predictive analytics to increase the accuracy of forecasts on sales data. Ben noted the adoption transition for this new technology system was challenging because of old processes but said the key was collaboration among team members in traditionally siloed aspects of the company—such as finance and data science. What’s more, Ben believes the CFO is a necessary bridge between these groups, thanks to their ability to frame and contextualize questions around company strategy.

There’s nothing positive to say about a recession, right?  We certainly wouldn’t be the ones to say there is. But with a possible recession coming around the corner, it’s not all doom and gloom either. Many businesses that started during a recession have thrived (Airbnb and Uber, to name a couple). And with the right strategy, your business can do more than just weather the storm too. You can come out ahead.  But in some cases, your first instincts on how to do that may not be the right ones.  Case in point: when the market declines, many businesses decide that cutting back on marketing is one of the best cost-saving measures at their disposal. But since marketing contributes heavily to your business growth, the wrong cuts can leave your business hurting—unable to bounce back quickly once the recession ends.  So how can you deploy your marketing budget strategically to get the most return from your recession spending? The History of Recession-Era Marketing The first thing you need to know: continuing to invest in marketing and promotion during a recession can have positive effects on your business. And you don’t have to take our word for it—just take a look back at history. During the Depression of 1920 to 1921, researchers Roland Vaile and Reavis Cox found that companies that increased their ad budgets drove more sales than their competitors—both during the crisis and after. And during the 1981 to 1982 recession, the McGraw-Hill Research Laboratory of Advertising Performance found that B2B businesses that kept investing in marketing had “significantly higher sales growth” both during the recession and for three years after. Source: Marketing Tactics And in a lot of ways, that makes sense. After all, spending doesn’t stop entirely during a recession—and your potential customers need a way to know you’re still thriving if they do have dollars to spend. And when a recession is over, the market often responds with a period of growth. To bounce back quickly and to take advantage, you want to be ready when it comes. If you’ve clearcutted your marketing budget, you won’t be. So what should you be doing (and not be doing) as a recession looms? How can you make the necessary cuts while ensuring you have the marketing resources to maintain a growth position? 5 Do’s and Don’ts to Drive Your Marketing Budget Funds are tight during a recession, so deploy your marketing budget strategically. And that means understanding your audience, the market and your place in it. Here are a few do’s and don’ts to get you started: 1. Do Understand Your Competition By “understanding your competition” we mean not just knowing who they are—but analyzing how they’re responding to the recession themselves. Are they slowing down on advertising, slashing their marketing budget or cutting key talent? Have the slashes they’ve made inadvertently reduced their share of voice (SOV), made them less agile or reduced customer awareness of their products or services? Those are all things you can use to your advantage as you make your own plans. Maybe it means hiring top talent that they’ve cut from their marketing team. Or it's upping your own advertising efforts to fill that gap in customer awareness to keep your product or service top of mind. Whatever the case, you’ll put yourself in a stronger position both during and after the recession—all while your competitors are floundering to win back lost ground. 2. Do Recognize Your Customers’ Needs Customers aren’t going to act in one homogenous way during a recession. And depending on the product or service you offer and the audience to whom you market, your customers might not respond in the same way as the customers of another company altogether. They may not even respond the same way they did during the last recession.  Keeping track of your most current customer and sales data, then, will help you better understand who your current audience is to anticipate where to spend your dollars when marketing in a recession. 3. Do Invest in Brand Awareness Investing in building brand awareness during a recession might seem counterproductive. After all, what’s the use of getting your name out there when your customers are tightening their purse strings too? But keeping your profile up by marketing in a recession will keep you top of mind. That way, when a potential customer is ready to make an investment—whether it’s now or once the recession is done—you’ll be the business they think of first. Knowing you’ve stayed strong during a crisis will also give them confidence that you have what it takes to go the distance. 4. Don’t Be Afraid to Launch a New Product Sometimes, if you have a particularly innovative idea or one that fills a need, launching a new product or service during a recession—and investing in the marketing you need to get the word out—can be a good thing. For proof, just consider Twinkies, Scotch Tape and Kraft Miracle Whip—all first released during the Great Depression.  What did these products have in common? They all filled a specific need: a cheap sweet treat, a quick fix that let things last a little longer and a cost-effective alternative to mayonnaise. But none of that mattered without a marketing budget to get the word out. Miracle Whip, for one, was launched with an extensive marketing and advertising campaign, showing again the power of recession-era marketing on building awareness that lasts long after the recession is over.  5. Don’t Get Into a Technology Rut We get it. With a possible recession looming, your instinct is to batten down the hatches. To make do with what you already have. And that’s likely true in the case of your tech stack as well. But spending on technology can add efficiencies to your marketing efforts, get you more visibility into your return on investment and help you improve the processes you already have in place.  In other words, continuing with your digital transformation efforts and adding to the toolsets you already have will empower your team to make smarter cuts and improved investments, while getting more from the money you spend. All of which will help you not just during a recession—but for years and years to come. Marketing in a Recession: Looking Past the Short Term While a recession and all that comes with it can be a stress on all types of business, if you want to come out ahead you can’t be short-sighted. Staying aware of current market changes is imperative, but so is keeping an eye on the future and not letting go of your growth goals. By remaining proactive and agile, you’ll be ready not just for anything the market crisis throws at you, but you'll be prepared for when the recession ends as well. But for that to happen, you can’t neglect your marketing budget.  Instead, you need to look for new growth opportunities and continue investing in marketing in response. You’ll be in a better position if you do.  

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. 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.

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.