The current economic downturn presents organizations with a multitude of difficult questions about how to manage their human capital. Is a reduction-in-force needed to trim operating expense? What steps should HR take to maintain workforce engagement and productivity in light of decreasing employee morale? How should the firm continue to plan for human capital needs in the face of economic uncertainty?
While the short-term focus on managing costs and maintaining “business as usual” operations is extremely important, four reasons suggest a clear need to commence (or continue) long-term workforce planning:
- Accurately measuring the “health” of the current workforce: With resources in short supply, HR leaders should use workforce and business data to quantify individual, functional, and organizational performance—especially important for identifying potential gaps in workforce productivity.
- Planning for future economic cycles: Through scenario planning, firms should be creating alternative views of the future operating environment. Taking into account potential economic, regulatory, technological, and labor market shifts help prepare businesses for unexpected news.
- Understanding how short-term human capital decisions relate to long-term corporate strategy: Decisions made today will affect every organization’s 1-, 3-, and 5-year strategic priorities; workforce planning ensures that strategic plans are continuously reassessed in light of current activities.
- Modeling the “what if?” of human capital decisions: Creating financial models of how HR policy decisions taken in the next 3 months will affect costs, revenues, productivity, and other business outcomes will arm HR with the right financial data with which to make future workforce investments.
Making all of these issues more difficult is the fact that human capital is one of the least measured and analyzed investments that an organization makes. This is despite heavy investments in HR Information and Talent Management Systems that capture reams of transactional data but are ineffective in applying numbers to business decisions.
During this webinar, Infohrm’s Mick Collins and Bill Gilmyers will discuss how organizations should rethink the balance between short- and long-term workforce planning. Outlined will be several low-cost, high-impact workforce planning techniques that can yield immediate insights into current and future workforce performance and requirements.
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