Tips for Agile Workforce Planning in Unstable Markets

I know it's only June, but headcount planning is right around the corner. Based on 100s of discussions with finance and talent leaders, here are 4 tips for getting headcount planning right this year. 1/ Use scenario analysis to create and modify strategic workforce plans Scenario analysis allows business leaders to forecast headcount. Within the strategic workforce plan, scenario analysis can include how many people to hire, when to hire, how much to pay, what equity to offer, and so on. Here’s an example: Gusto’s team prepares scenarios based on high, medium, and low hiring budgets. They use the budget as the fixed input in each case and simulate the team composition. Then, they forecast the outcomes that the new team composition can deliver. This creates a clear line of sight between the hiring budget and business outcomes, based on which they can make decisions. 2/ Unify your headcount data Good scenario analysis incorporates all your ‘knowns.’ This could be any or all of the following: -Team composition: Employees, designations, and their reporting managers -Compensation: Salaries, bonuses, and stock options -Working model: In-office, remote, or hybrid -Location: Regional compensation trends and currency conversions -Hiring pipeline: approved roles, hiring in progress, offers sent and accepted, and backfills and internal transfers -Analytics: Offer-accept rates, burn rates, and attrition rates Does all this data live in disconnected systems, such as ATS, HRIS, and finance tools, that don’t talk to each other? If yes, it’s time to start evaluating strategic workforce planning tools to unify them. 3/ Empower business leaders to scenario plan At many companies today, if a department head wants to run three different scenarios to demonstrate their respective budget impact, they need to seek a financial analyst’s help. That usually leads to infinite back-and-forth of slightly altered spreadsheets. This is time-intensive and forces highly paid resources like VPs and Directors to do low-value, manual work. Instead, give them a self-service way to create different scenarios, see the budget impact, and adjust other variables like roles, compensation, or start date. Now they can design and modify their perfect strategic workforce plan. Finance and HR simply serve as collaborators and approvers rather than needing to perform a bulk of the work. Everybody moves faster. 4/ Enable agility in headcount planning Headcount planning is no longer a one-time activity at the beginning of the year. As the business evolves, department leaders must adapt their headcount plans to meet new demands. This requires agility. The most agile companies provide visibility into data with access control + workflows that enable them to make smarter, faster decisions. Let me know what you think in the comments! #workforceplanning #headcount #scenarioanalysis

Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP). Here's my cheat sheet to help align SWP and scenario planning. Many SWP efforts still operate as static, once-a-year exercises—often built around a single business scenario. But what if that scenario doesn't unfold? My cheat sheet has questions to help think through: 1️⃣ Business Context ↳ Define 2-3 plausible/realistic business scenarios ↳ Clarify scenario assumptions & supporting evidence ↳ Identify triggers to indicate a scenario will happen ↳ Determine the base (most likely) business scenario ↳ Evaluate the business impact of each scenario 2️⃣ Talent Implications ↳ Create a workforce plan for the base scenario ↳ Identify how plans will shift for alternate scenarios ↳ Identify talent commonalities across all scenarios ↳ Pinpoint talent actions that apply to all scenarios ↳ Prioritize talent actions that apply to all scenarios 3️⃣ Execution Factors ↳ Identify conditions for when you shift from base plan ↳ Identify risks and mitigation tactics for each scenario ↳ Tailor communication for different scenarios ↳ Engage key stakeholders and align them on actions There's more to SWP and SP than this. But this resource can help structure your thinking and conversations. Even directional insights in a few of these areas can help organizations respond more effectively to uncertainty. ❓Did anything here resonate with you? What would you add or change? ♻️ Repost to help others strengthen SP and SWP 🔔 Follow Brian Heger for daily insights 🗞️ Get my newsletter https://lnkd.in/dWThftwK for more #hr #workforceplanning

We had an awesome chat with Andy (CTO at SHRM) and Michelle (Head of People Ops at Hopper) a week ago. Here are my biggest takeaways: 📈 HR is now expected to lead continual business transformations The last 4 years have dramatically changed the expectations businesses have for their HR leaders. Shifts to remote/hybrid work, rapid headcount growth, subsequent contractions, and disruptions from AI have all demanded big changes from businesses and CEOs have looked to HR leaders to navigate them. It's no longer good enough to be a department that just runs a set of unchanging processes and operations -- executives expect HR to be modernizing as rapidly as the rest of the business. 🏃♂️ HR leaders need to be agile The business impacts of improving a process are being measured in shorter increments than ever. It's no longer acceptable to ask your stakeholders to suspend disbelief for a 12-18 month process or tool implementation before seeing results. You have to: - Pick the minimal subproblem you can solve to deliver value. Ex: "We're going to define and reconcile our job architecture for just Engineering at first, since that's where we're growing the most" - Roll out updates incrementally. Ex: "We'll run comp planning for HR & Finance departments in our new platform first to get feedback on the implementation before a full rollout" - Constantly get feedback on your changes from business stakeholders. If functional leaders don't understand or agree with process or tool changes you're making, they'll be dead on arrival 🔧 Make sure your tools are as nimble as you are The processes that serve your company today are not going to be the ones that serve your company tomorrow. If it's not headcount that's changing rapidly, it will be any one of the laundry list of other disruptions that we've observed over the last 4 years that demand adaptation and evolution. If you adopt a comp planning, workforce planning, or other solution that automates an HR process, you have to make sure that it allows you to change that process quickly, or either you or the tool will be left behind. We see agile HR leaders all too often abandon an inflexible tool that they've already paid for in favor of spreadsheets when their needs evolve past the initial implementation. Check out the rest of the conversation and the full recording in the comments below 👇