5 Tips for Effective Workforce Planning in 2021
- Written by Lilly Miller
Do you know if your employees can handle the incoming workload without issues? Do you have seasonal fluctuations in demand, or do you have a steady influx of business throughout the year? What about the future – do you plan to grow, expand your services or products, or do you want to expand in terms of offering the same service to more clients?
Business growth is often perceived independently from workforce growth, and it shouldn’t be. As a core process responsible for protecting your reputation, workforce planning deserves the same level of attention as your customer-oriented processes.
Knowing that, you should be prepared for 2021 in terms of your employees and your entire workforce. Let’s see what kind of strategy you can devise with the right practical tips targeting optimal hiring processes, diversification, and many other issues that HR experts need to face. Hopefully, this will help you prepare for 2021 and the following year with a stronger plan moving forward.
Conduct thorough analysis and evaluation
If you’re winging it, you cannot expect to really benefit from your hiring processes and initiatives. You cannot wait for a problem to happen to solve it – you need to be able to anticipate workload dips and surges, recognize trends that define your workforce needs, and create a strategy.
With the help of ongoing evaluation and analytics, you can create thorough, data-driven reports that will point you in the right direction. As soon as you learn what to expect in terms of business growth based on your plans and goals, you can then start hiring people in time to avoid crises and workload distribution problems.
Consider temporary reinforcements
Unless you’re running a brand-new business, you already have some idea of what kind of projects and workload to expect throughout the year. Sometimes, when you’re facing a surge of work during the summer months, which is, for example, very common for the hospitality industry and the travel industry depending on the region and attractions, temporary workers are the best solution.
To help the HR department focus on core tasks, businesses are using contractor workforce solutions in Australia that specialize in contingent and temporary employee relationships. This approach helps organizations allocate their most vital resources (such as people and funds) towards other, more pressing matters. Contractor workers are a great solution when you need to boost your workforce temporarily, to avoid the high costs of permanent hiring for certain positions.
Empower remote collaboration
Effective workforce planning doesn’t end with your local workers. In fact, now that the global business scene is becoming more competitive by the day and the pandemic is pushing more companies to work remotely, why not use the hybrid model for your organization, too?
Plan for remote work, even if it has caught you by surprise in the last year or so – now that you can actually see what trends are affecting your industry, you can also evaluate which roles you can fill with remote workers, thus cutting your costs drastically.
Rethink your hiring procedures
Have you been looking for highly skilled contingent workers only by posting job ads? The world has changed drastically, especially in regions where the workforce is getting younger, like Australia and the US, where people spend most of their time, you’ve guessed it, on social media.
In addition to LinkedIn, which has been a stable for building professional relationships, people are now finding work via Facebook, as well. Posting your job openings and advertising them across these social platforms should be a no-brainer. Whether you need to fill a full-time, on-site position, or you’re looking for seasonal workers and freelancers, this is your opportunity to find them more quickly and easily.
Use the right tools
Like in project management, sales, and marketing, your HR experts need to use the right tools to make sure they’re on the right track. Keeping track of your contingent workers, managing the tasks for your full-time employees, and successfully completing rounds of hiring for multiple departments can be prone to human error. Leveraging tech tools and software solutions of varying complexity will allow your employees to work seamlessly, and your HR teams to hire the right people at the right time.
Use workforce management software like Humanity or Zoho People. These cloud-based tools make strategizing easier on your business and enable automation for your organization when it’s time to hire new people or wrap up temporary relationships.
As complex as this process can be, it’s definitely easier for your entire business to plan and strategize instead of dealing with a surge of issues stemming from the lack of workforce planning. This process should allow you to enter a new season or greet more work with the right people at your disposal, without overwhelming anyone in your team or causing burnout for your hardest-working employees.
Take these tips to heart for the sake of your business success and the wellbeing of your employees. The bottom line is, you’ll provide a much better service and protect your business reputation when you’re able to create a workforce planning strategy that keeps all of these factors in mind.
