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The Essence of a Workforce Strategy

StrategyDriven Resource Projection Article | The Essence of a Workforce StrategyProductivity is a critical element in the growth of your business. Realizing enhanced efficiency requires observing various aspects, including workforce management, resource distribution, and excellent workforce planning. You’ll need to align your workforce to match your business culture, strategy, and objectives. Notable benefits come with a superb workforce strategy, including the following.

Plan for the Future

An excellent workforce strategy allows you to plan for the future. This strategy will enable you to anticipate workforce changes, including planning. Unless you are informed about workforce changes and trends, deciding on the future will hardly suffice.

Deciding on the future will depend on the objectives and targets of the company. For instance, you’ll need more workers during peak seasons. In such cases, while your labor costs will grow, you’ll be confident of enhanced efficiency and productivity. Thankfully, you can address this through a workforce strategy covering various future risks.

Manage Hiring Costs

A workforce strategy helps analyze your business needs, ensuring that you only hire when necessary. This strategy will provide enough employees to work on various production lines. You can increase the number of workers depending on business needs.

This approach will help you control hiring costs. While there will be enough employees at a particular time, the expenses will remain relatively manageable. In turn, it becomes easier to run the business smoothly.

Streamlined Recruitment Process

Nothing compares to the efficiency offered by a company that anticipates future changes. An excellent workforce strategy will give you insight into what changes your business could face in the future. This element allows you to plan your recruitment process according to your expectations. Through this, you get enough workers at all times, particularly during peak seasons.

At the same time, this strategy will outline what elements to observe during the recruitment process. This aspect allows you to hire qualified and experienced professionals, guaranteeing better outcomes in the long run. You’ll comfortably identify gaps in your talent acquisition and recruitment programs. With a comprehensive strategy, you are confident of better returns.

Your HR programs will also align with your business needs. Such alignment encourages employee retention in the long run. Achieving this goal requires observing various aspects, from data protection and employee assistance to career development and employee benefits.

Improve Business and Employee Culture

A comprehensive workforce strategy will look at various aspects of your workforce. It will touch on behavior, expectations, and changes. This aspect will inform your employee retention tactics. Ideally, it ensures that you breed a culture that encourages workers to stay, guaranteeing efficiency. With unmatched productivity, your business will thrive within a short time.

You can leverage predictive analytics to understand what employees might need in the future. This aspect ensures that your plans provide space for enhanced employee satisfaction. You could also devise ways to ensure that these professionals are significantly comfortable in the long run.

Having a reliable workforce strategy should be your priority. It will help improve efficiency and productivity, encouraging excellent returns in the long run. With the insights above, you understand why you should create a comprehensive one.

New Whitepaper Release – 80 Percent Efficiency Estimate

StrategyDriven contributors are pleased to announce the release of our eighth whitepaper: Resource Projection – 80 Percent Efficiency Estimate.

Perfect human efficiency? Not likely. How then should personnel resources be estimated?

Human beings are social creatures with both emotional and physical needs. Businesses able to satisfy these needs will be better positioned to attract and retain talented personnel; giving them a much needed advantage in the increasingly knowledge driven marketplace where human resources are increasingly limited. Such organizations will further benefit from increased worker engagement because employees feel more connected and valued.

Meeting these very personalized needs requires an ongoing time investment, social time to build and maintain co-worker relationships, to connect with customers and clients, to contact family and friends, as well as time to physically relax, refresh, reflect, and rejuvenate. This time investment varies day-to-day and person-to-person making it extremely difficult to measure. Time studies, project management research, and our collective managerial experience suggest that knowledge workers, on average, require a twenty percent time investment in these personal activities. Stated another way, professionals spend about one and a half hours of an eight hour workday on non-productive but personally necessary activities. Hence, professionals, those whose breaks are ill-defined, can be assumed to work at eighty percent efficiency when fully engaged.

The StrategyDriven 80 Percent Efficiency Estimate whitepaper provides business planners with an easy to follow set of rules to help them appropriately factor personnel efficiency into their project and business plan resource estimates. These rules are detailed with supporting principles and philosophies; helping users understand the reasoning behind each recommendation.


StrategyDriven Succession and Workforce Planning AcceleratorSuccession and Workforce Planning

We help clients enhance their succession and workforce planning programs through pipeline and capability projection, training and development program assessment, and improvement plan design and implementation assistance. Our evaluations identify retention, replacement, productivity, and quality risks while providing leading practice strategies for maintaining full staffing including temporarily filling vacancies with highly qualified personnel. Learn more about how we can help you enhance your succession and workforce pipeline planning programs or contact us for a personal consultation.

Resource Projection Best Practice 6 – The 45 Week Year

There are 52 weeks in a year. So a full-time employee works 52 weeks in a year, right? Wrong!


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Resource Projection Best Practice 5 – The 40 Hour Work Week

For the purposes of personnel resource estimation, what is an individual worth? The answer may seem obvious. A full-time equivalent (FTE) or full-time employee is typically considered to be ‘worth’ 2000 hours of labor per year; calculated as the product of fifty, 40 hour work weeks.


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Resource Projection Best Practice 4 – 80 Percent Efficiency Estimate

StrategyDriven Resource Projection ArticleHuman beings are social creatures having both emotional and physical needs. Businesses able to satisfy these needs will be better positioned to attract and retain talented personnel; giving these businesses a much needed advantage in the increasingly knowledge driven marketplace where human resources are increasingly limited. Such organizations will further benefit from increased worker engagement because employees feel more connected and valued.


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