Local Government: Building & Monitoring your Workforce Planning Strategy

Written by Prajna Shettigar

Prajna, Navigo's Marketing Manager, is passionate about HR Technology and all things digital. She is always looking for creative solutions to help organisations turn their HR data into meaningful information.

August 9, 2022

In this article, learn the 3 simple steps to improve your approach to local government workforce planning. We’ve also included our recent webinar covering a similar topic, click here to watch it.

But first, let’s set a baseline for workforce planning.

Understanding local government workforce planning

To start, you need a solid understanding of your challenges, strengths and workforce characteristics (people, skills and roles to meet your changing needs). Workforce planning is all about alignment of your workforce and business goals so you can meet your ideal operating model.

The best way to achieve this is through detailed workforce modelling, visualising your organisation, defining your workforce strategy, designing sustainable structures and testing these structures with what-if scenarios.

Download our free whitepaper specific to local government to learn:

  • The common challenges facing local government
  • 2025 APS workforce strategy and what it means for local government
  • How to test your organisation’s workforce planning maturity
Workforce planning

The Navigo team are always available for us and their guidance throughout was a big part of the success of the project. The communication from Day 1 was superb. The handover from introduction to implementation to support was seamless.

Continuous Improvement Team, Wyndham City Council

3 steps to accurate local government workforce planning

To allow managers, HR and senior leadership to engage in a base level of workforce planning, the answers to these questions should be immediately available in an up-to-date, simple and secure format.

Manually managing this process can be quite counter productive, as it’s time consuming, prone to error and data becomes immediately out-of-date once you hit publish.

For over 20 years Navigo has solved these issues for many local, state and federal government agencies.

It involves a three stage process:

1. Establish a data feed from payroll / HRIS into a visualisation tool

Every payroll or HRIS system has its own individual data formats, database and hosting architecture.

Navigo’s technical consultants have experience with almost every system in the Australian market including: Technology One, Civica Authority, Workday, Chris21, Ascender, Aurion, Payglobal, Oracle, SAP and SuccessFactors.

2. Setup your chart views

With a live data feed in place you’re now able to see your workforce and organise it visually with live reports that matter to you the most. Below are a few examples. 

a) Easily see secondments and view Substantive and Acting employees by position

local government org chart example

b) See department budgets and highlight those above or below

local government org chart example 2

3. Use it for workforce planning

Once set up, charts can be set up with Single Sign On matching existing data access rights so sensitive information can be securely accessed by anyone in your organisation. For instance, the Corporate Directory would be available to all employees, but your workforce analytics or leave liability chart will have restricted access only for managers, HR and senior leadership.

Org Planning includes three useful modules that you can choose from depending on your needs:

a. Plan & Model – Engage in workforce planning scenario modelling. Create, share and collaborate using a secure virtual copy of your employee workforce.

b. Succession Plans – Drag and drop to create a live, accessible succession plan for managers & HR to collaborate on.

c. Archive – Meet governance & compliance reporting requirements by accessing a permanent history of your people data.

 Once in place, an org chart tool quickly becomes one of the most used workforce planning tools in an organisation. New starters are able to place themselves in the hierarchy and learn who’s who in the zoo.

Most importantly, managers and HR teams have access to live, accurate workforce planning data that allows ongoing monitoring, evaluation and review of the organisation’s workforce planning strategic objectives.

Local government org charts [Webinar]

As mentioned earlier, we’ve recorded a webinar featuring real-life examples of local government org charts. Watch the full webinar now:

Have some specific challenges that you’d like to discuss for your local government workforce planning project?

Book a demo of Org Planning today.

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