Achieving Efficient Workforce Planning—Org Charts and Other Tips
Strategic workforce planning is an essential part of the human resources (HR) workload. It ensures that an organization has the right people in the right places and that these people are doing the right jobs at the right time.
And, as any HR and/or executive team will be aware, planning and achieving an organization’s need for human capital is one of the greatest challenges faced (and often one of the most difficult!) This is because it has such a huge impact—get it right and it can positively impact your company’s overall strategic plans, budget, and finance… but get it wrong and it can spell disaster.
Naturally, therefore, it is easy to feel overwhelmed when faced with workforce planning.
5 Tips for Efficient Workforce Planning
Luckily, there is are many steps you can take and tips you can follow to help you analyze current capabilities, anticipate future needs, and put the wheels in motion.
While you do not need to follow each (or any, even!) of these steps to the letter, they may inspire you and enable you to come up with ways to chop and change things to tailor them to your organization’s own needs.
1. Define Your Organization’s Objectives
Before anything can be planned, your organization needs to have identified its business objectives. What is your company’s vision? Its mission? Its goals and motives? It is impossible to conduct workforce planning if answers to these questions are not available because you and/or your HR teams will not be able to plan strategically to align your workforce with your objectives.
It is not for us to tell you what your organization’s objectives are—only you and/or other key individuals within your business can.
2. Know How Your Organization Currently Looks
Simply having a rough idea of how many members of staff you have and what the roles are is not enough. You need to take a deeper look at your current staffing situation so that you and your workforce planning team are able to identify where understaffing may occur and where skills gaps exist, for example. It also helps you identify potential problem departments (e.g. where there are larger turnover rates) and other issues.
A brilliant way to build a clear, real-time picture of your organization’s structure is through the use of virtual org charts.
With the right org chart tool, you can plug it into your current systems and automatically build an up-to-date organizational structure that updates in real-time as employees come and go. Org charts are the perfect reference tool for workforce planning because they paint a simple, clear picture of departments, staffing levels, and organizations as a whole.
3. Research Industry Trends…
The best way to remain competitive and ahead of your rivals is by being constantly up to date with the latest trends from your industry and how they may affect you. Furthermore, by hiring the right people with in-demand skills relevant to current trends, your organization will be able to launch innovative products and services that blow your competitors out of the water.
Keep an eye out for candidates that have an established background related to current industry trends. An example of trends affecting most industries today are those related to emerging tech computer science. To that extent, look for candidates with backgrounds in data science, software development, and machine learning. These don’t necessarily need to be candidates’ core areas of expertise, but knowledge of and experience in them is beneficial to any modern organization.
4. …But Look Beyond Your Industry
Industries are not as narrow as they once were. Today, thanks to increasing demand for advanced skills, organizations are employing people from industries that are completely different from their own.
For example, automotive regularly hires from the high-tech industry to secure employees with artificial intelligence expertise and banking and finance industry organizations are searching for candidates with software development expertise.
No matter what your organization does or what industry it is in, this tip can be effective for all.
5. Utilize Quality Software Solutions
This is something that is often overlooked, particularly by organizations operating in industries that are perhaps not the most inherently tech-focused.
There are plenty of powerful tools and solutions out there for workforce planning and management that can help carry out research, put a plan in place, carry it out, and anticipate future needs. For example, we mentioned org chart software earlier in this article. Creating automated org charts are just one example of what can be done by software to aid workforce planning.
Using Org Charts for Efficient Workforce Planning
Using our org chart software, Organimi, you can create a top-down view of your organization in a matter of minutes in some cases, allowing you to identify where there are skills gaps, cases of underemployment, and frequent turnover, among other things, which aids workforce planning.
Why not start your free trial today and see for yourself just how powerful and useful our seemingly simple piece of software is?