Mining org chart best practices: Master your HR data

As a HR tech company aiming to help organisations optimise their workforce during any disruption, we’ve teamed up with lots of amazing HR teams to get a better understanding of current workforce challenges. We’ve been running a series of industry-specific webinars that delve into these unique challenges and next on the radar is around mining org charts and HR data.

Looking back through our list of mining customers (shout out to Roy Hill, Fortescue, Goldfields, Xstrata Glencore, Iluka, INPEX and CITIC Pacific Mining), there was a consistent use case for org charting software. They all had to plan and design a new operational site based on people data such as skills, availability, salary and locations.

Creating such operational sites can be easy with the right tools. Org charts, for instance, provide an easy process for designing multiple ‘what-if scenarios’ to securely share with stakeholders for fast review and approval.

What’s happening in mining and resources?

This industry can be very complex, especially when it comes to managing people data to plan for key activities. The most time-consuming being:

• Mergers & acquisitions
• Changes in the operational process (merge departments and processes, separate departments and functions)
• Ad hoc strategies
• Costing analysis for new contracts/upskilling
• Compliance
• Visualise diversity targets against actuals across every level of the business
• Combining FTE workforce data with contractor data for a holistic view of your workforce (multiple data sets combined and analysed)
• Succession planning for key roles/highlight risk
• KPI data across divisions

Below are some common challenges faced by the mining and resources industry. If you’d like to learn more, watch our webinar linked below. During the webinar, we’ll share a few options on how to best manage HR data, as well as the key steps for workforce modelling and examples of effective HR data visualisation.

Key HR challenges

1) Single source of truth

We discovered that when trying to create a mining org chart, there are often a couple different data sources that hold all the information you need to operate. It can also be quite time consuming to try to consolidate all the information into a useable (and useful) format. By the time you’re ready to use the data, it tends to already be out-of-date as someone is usually manually piecing the information together.

 

 2) Holistic view of the organisation 

We know that the mining and resources workforce is very large and is usually divided into employees and contractors. Some organisations have a lot more contractors than employees and many of them store their contractors’ data in one system and their employees’ data in another, which can make understanding your entire workforce a difficult task. This also ties in very well to the first point of getting all your data in one place, so you have a clear picture of your workforces’ cost and skills.

 

 3) Changes in operational processes 

Mining companies are often large organisations with multiple departments and functions whose needs are constantly changing.

You might need to merge departments to do a cost saving analysis, or maybe you need to create a new department with different specialisations to complete a project. In order to do that successfully, you’ll need to understand the underlying key metrics. For example: you don’t want to create a team full of employees that are close to retiring or the opposite, newbies who lack experience. All of this information is important to ensure you’re able to create teams who have the right balance of skills and tenure.

In a mining org chart, we often see that one department might need to scale back, while another is in hyper-growth mode. These two activities might happen simultaneously and it’s best to have a tool that’s flexible enough to meet these contrasting needs.