Efficient allocation of human resources can make or break a businesses ability to meet its goals and navigate challenges. One key area that significantly enhances resource planning, is the ability to have clear and comprehensive visibility of the workforce.
Workforce visibility refers to the ability of an organisation to understand and track the activities, skills and availability of its employees. This insight allows businesses to make informed decisions regarding resource allocation, project management and overall strategy. Here are five reasons why workforce visibility can become a game-changer for resource planning.
Enhance human resource
A companies most valuable assets are its workforce. Having visibility about the workforce allows a company to identify and utilise the unique skills and talents of employees effectively. By understanding strengths and weaknesses of your team, you can strategically plan and execute where they will have the most impact across a business.
For instance, if a project requires specialised skills so that a job can be complete to either a standard or within a small window, having prior knowledge of who is best to allocate the work to, not only will ensure its likely completion but also raise the prestige of the company’s ability to work as such.
Balancing workloads
Workforce viability allows organisations to balance workloads more effectively. It allows you to identify if certain teams or individual are overloaded with tasks while others have capacity. This insight is invaluable for preventing burnout, maintaining employee happiness and ensuring that productivity in the business stays high. According to an article in OptimoRoute ‘employees experiencing burnout are 2.6 times more likely to look for another opportunity at a different company.’ ( https://optimoroute.com/workload-balance/)
Adapting to change
The business environment is dynamic, and unforeseen changes are inevitable. Workforce visibility provides the agility needed to adapt to these changes quickly. Whether that’s a sudden increase to a project scope, unexpected resource issues or the need to shift priorities, having a clear view of your workforce allows you to make informed decisions.
The ability to do this and to adapt to client needs gives you a competitive advantage and can lead to more work in the future.
Enhancing collaboration
Collaboration is key to success in any business. When teams have visibility into each other’s workload and skills they can collaborate more effectively, more efficiently and share resources to get the best result on a project.
This not only is a great advantage to a workforce from a quality perspective, but promotes knowledge sharing and skill development. It’s a win-win scenario where the entire workforce become more adaptable and capable. Enhancing communication can build a bridge between workers who might not mix on regular occasions, on-site and home workers for example. An article in Forbes suggested that as many as 42% of supervisors surveyed by the Society for Human Resource Management forgot about remote workers when assigning tasks! (https://www.shrm.org/about-shrm/press-room/press-releases/pages/-shrm-research-reveals-negative-perceptions-of-remote-work.aspx)
Strategic decision making
Resource planning isn’t just about the day-to-day operations; it is also about long-term strategy. Workforce visibility provides management with the data it needs to make strategic decisions about hiring/firing, training and development. Understanding this data allows business to align its workforce with its objectives.
By making data-driven decisions, organisations can ensure they have the right talent in place to meet future challenges and capitalise on opportunities in their marketplace. This is a proactive way of ensuring business success.
Having a platform such as HumanFacta to allow you to see where in a business you may be spending money unnecessarily or what areas of the business or workforce aren’t as cost effective as you may have thought, gives you the time to make change if necessary to improve that.
