Workforce planning involves strategic analysis and ‘future state’ modelling of your structure to ensure you maintain a sustainable workforce. Basically, it’s making sure you have the right people, with the right skills, where and when you need them.

In order to optimise workforce plans, you need tools that will help to streamline the process, providing you with critical insights to make effective decisions.

For example, a workforce modelling tool does a lot more than just design restructures – it provides meaningful visuals and effective planning around talent, succession and scenario testing too.

In this article, we’ll cover 4 tips (for enterprise organisations) on how to optimise workforce plans – using examples from the workforce modelling platform, org.manager.

1. Collect the essential people data

The important data sets you should be collecting include:

• Labour data
• Performance data
• Skills data
• Career and succession data

2. Bring all your data into one place

A crucial requirement of building a workforce plan – where many organisations tend to hit roadblocks – is making sure all relevant information is collated into one place.

You can easily join your human capital, workforce management and financial data together using a workforce modelling platform such as org.manager.

Since org.manager can do the data work for you – HR/planning teams can spend their time on more value adding tasks, including evaluating, monitoring and making adjustments to your ‘future state’ workforce model.

You can even streamline the data cleansing process using org.manager too!

3. Perform deep & wide analysis

Workforce planning requires HR to access a wide understanding (bird’s eye view), together with a deep understanding (detailed view) of their workforce. This helps them to:

• Check alignment to strategy
• Undertake a current state assessment
• Propose a staffing model
• Determine current talent gaps
• Challenge the status quo
• Confirm longer term workforce needs

Here’s an example of a high-level chart (bird’s eye view) and a detailed view, in a split side-by-side screen.

These views paired with visualisation rules allow you to understand big and granular data at a glance, so you can quickly identify skills and gaps across a large workforce. 

4. Perform strategic, operational & tactical planning

Workforce plans should optimise your workforce strategically, operationally and tactically.

This calls for an understanding of your workforce across multiple time periods and from different angles, for example:

org.manager is purpose-built to allow HR to examine scenarios using all the relevant levels and timeframes required. All of which can be achieved in the one platform and with on-demand data.

org.manager also allows you to:

• Create multiple scenarios
• Collaborate and share proposals securely
• Measure the impact of scenarios

Use visual drag-and-drop functionality to examine and create workforce scenarios with key metrics – all while seeing real-time updates of your proposed changes. See an example of a change report showing the delta values below:

More key benefits for using org.manager to optimise workforce plans

• Faster identification of workforce risks (retention, retirement, resignation)
• Improved visibility into target skill shortage areas
• Clearer identification of career progression gaps
• Easier substantiation of plans by measuring change/impacts to important metrics (e.g.headcount, spans, reporting relationships, geographies, structure and budget)

A little about Navigo

Navigo is the A/NZ leading provider of workforce visualisation and modelling solutions. With more than 20 years’ experience in the industry, we’ve proven time and again to deliver successful solutions with long-term impacts.

You can always be confident your data is secure when working with Navigo and using org.manager.

Here are some reasons why:

For more information on how we can help you optimise your workforce plan, book in a quick, no obligation chat with our Workforce Specialist.