4 Steps to Utilizing Workforce Visibility as a Business Strategy

When going on a trip, the first thing you’d verify are the weather conditions. After all, clear skies indicate long-range visibility, ensuring you’ll reach your destination on time. Similarly, when it comes to tackling people-centric uncertainties, no project activity can be confirmed without workforce visibility. It is the first step to getting acquainted with a vital business asset: the resource pool.

With visibility, you have an overview of the commitments your workforce undertake. When you have an updated repository of your staff’s experience, skills, availability and engagement levels, you’re ready to meet the rapidly evolving digital landscape. Your projects stay the course when your employees are able to deliver them on the dotted line. If senior leaders, they’d affirm how strategic staffing decisions are influenced by their team’s agility.  While you can keep abreast of your current situation, your ability to predict the likelihood of workforce changes in response to gradual or sudden market movement will decide if your enterprise will enjoy a project windfall.

Let’s enhance 4 realms of business strategy using workforce visibility !

Employee Engagement

The hiring process doesn’t stop at the door. Once you find the right talent, it’s important to utilize them such that their experiential prowess helps your enterprise achieve its organizational goals.

A rich foundation of HR processes results in the creation of a skills inventory that adapts to new trends disrupting the existing market. This way, you can explore relevant training programs that nurture and hone these skills. But first, you’d have to factor in the percentage of time for which your resources are available to take it up.

Based on the length and frequency these programs run for, it comes down to picking the ones crucial to your teams’ personal development. With workforce visibility, you can track certifications and skills which feeds into the skills inventory. What’s more, individual team members can stay informed of each others’ workload and collaborate with the view to providing support on project endeavors.

Healthy utilization rates are a direct result of smart allocations. Unduly burdening your staff lowers productivity levels which make them averse to even discussing new opportunities.

On the other hand, an excess of staff idling away on the bench would eat into the resourcing spend as they wait to be deployed. By the time a suitable project is found, you may find that your staff aren’t nearly as agile as you’d hoped, which is essential with today’s market watch volatility. In fact, 60% of Deloitte’s respondents concurred that mobilizing teams of staff to take agile-centric action was a challenge.

Besides, if skills are outdated in the time taken to use them, you’re likely to experience increased attrition and turnover rates. Optimal resource allocation is a sure-fire cure to prevent this from happening. It not only keeps your staff engaged and productive but ensures they’re able to work and retrain/recertify themselves minus the chock-a-block schedule.

Reinforcing the Optimistic Corporate Culture

A healthy work culture promotes increased productivity. After all, your resources are responsible for winning you repeat business by establishing a close rapport with clients. Referrals are the obvious choice to prospective clients who’re more comfortable handing over their projects to firms with a proven history of retaining capable and efficient staff.

In this regard, time brings with it shifts in the corporate culture. You can’t implement new strategies by sticking to old conventions, more so when there’s a slump in the economy. As you adopt a healthy work culture, you see a dramatic rise in people’s involvement which can be harnessed to drive new strategies.  

Workforce visibility gives you a single dashboard that hosts your resource information spanning the enterprise. From here, you can remain open to new ideas and incorporate them subject to feasibility, at the right time. You can even be creative with this visibility and explore the fascinating world of social media to broaden your audience. By attracting the right talent in advance, you expand your resource capacity and can chalk out a scientific gauge of your project demands that’ll require the latest addition of staff onboarded.

Boosting Overall Operational Efficiency

Most enterprises underestimate their reliance on the new wave of contingent workers ushered in by the gig economy. With these enterprises teeming with both baby boomers and millennials, it’s important to monitor changes in people’s movement, which workforce visibility accomplishes. It filters resources by skills, location, mobility and capabilities, helping you identify the need to hire or let go staff. This way, you can deploy different resource types that prove more cost-effective than solely relying on a team of full-timers. So long as this data is updated regularly, you’d always be efficient at finding the right staff for the right projects in time.

Gone are the days when recording employee information on spreadsheets were the norm. As your enterprise’s presence expands globally, it’s a time consuming process to manually enter and update data. Moreover information can be edited and overwritten, which may reflect haphazardly at a high-level. As an end-user, you end up doubting the veracity of the information before you.

By migrating your repository over to a resource management suite, you can work with a single system of records. With all your information in one place, you can use a host of visual applications such as charts, reports and graphs to note resource performance over days, weeks or an entire year. This way, you can reward your star performers as well as initiate programs to bridge any skills gap, helping the rest of your workforce catch up and bring value to your business. Moreover, you can monitor attendances and absences at a high level once your resources use a self-service desk to update their timesheets. This reduces the time on administrative tasks and frees your staff up to focus on project-centric activities that reinforce enterprise-wide objectives.

Creating Social Media Transparency

The right way to attract the right talent is to ensure your presence is felt both offline and online. With more people heavily using mobile-friendly platforms to access information, it falls on you to make your website and social media channels responsive without an information overload. With companies like Glassdoor rating firms by their work culture and interview processes, a social profile helps you connect with a wider resource pool.

Workforce visibility starts right from recruitment phases, where prospective candidates can learn more about what your organization does.

With more teams opting to work remotely, you can still engage with them with social media technology and create team building exercises that involve online participation.  The same logic applies to accessing training material while on the move, as long as important documents can be uploaded to the cloud storage. Once your staff gain clarity over their roles they’d have a better understanding of how and where contributions from their teammates help the project take off.

As workforce visibility widens the reach of social networking, your staff can unearth business opportunities spelling a project windfall for your enterprise. You can then make fact-based decisions based on people’s movement and avoid projects carrying high risk rates in terms of scope, costs and time.

A transparent social media channel allows people to register their interest in keeping up with the latest company news. The benefits your staff get are that

1. They can be informed of internal projects that align with their professional interest and upgrade their skills in time to apply for it.
2. It’s easy for your staff to obtain references from colleagues they’ve worked with in the past. Moreover, referral programs online can attract familiar faces which increases your team’s productivity as the internal environment becomes supportive and collaborative. In fact, Sage’s white paper suggests that companies that use social media technologies can raise the productivity of their workers by up to 25%!

Now that you know how workforce visibility strengthens your business strategy, the next logical step is to have on hand a robust resource management plan that gives you a unified view of your people and projects. This way, you can reshape your organizational pyramid and scientifically control staff numbers such that project delivery gets executed smoothly.

Let us know if 360° workforce visibility helped you plan your resource activities down the line!