In this data-driven world, managing a workforce by the seat of your pants shouldn’t be an option. Subjective decision-making can lead to risky missteps – you want objectivity.
Today’s technology-savvy HR leaders bring data-driven people insights to their organizations. Objective, evidence-based workforce planning lets management make the best possible choices to drive business forward – and minimize the chances of putting the company in jeopardy.
Building Evidence-based Workforce Planning
When you’re examining HR solutions for evidence-based workforce planning, you have many different choices for business intelligence tools:
- Data gathering – various Human Resources software products that may or may not be integrated are the key sources
- Data warehousing and sorting – software or specialty vendors combine and store the gathered data as organized structures in one location
- Reporting – software tools for developing reports and/or in-house spreadsheets are leveraged for initial review
- Data visualization/dashboards – interactive software for data sharing and manipulation turns static reporting into dynamic discovery
- Data analysis – software or specialty vendors identify trends and patterns that lead to evidence-based decisions
Key considerations for deciding which products or solutions will work best are often usability (including available resources in house versus outsourcing), relevance to your size and type of business, scalability to keep pace with company growth, and cost vs benefit analyses that look at both the short and long term.
Obviously weighing the data options and key considerations together will help you decide on the best options for your company. Develop a list of criteria to help you compare potential vendors and software.
Crafting Actionable Analytics to Drive Decisions
Workforce analytics depend on a robust collection of data. Then that data is sorted and grouped in different ways based on particular characteristics. This is where ZeroedIn can step in and help you quantify the facts of your workforce.
Frankly, a silver bullet for every workforce insight just doesn’t exist yet. As a company whose sole practice is workforce analytics, we collect and classify a wide variety of workforce data to prepare the way for our forecasting and predictive modeling. Then we find answers from those models to your most pressing workforce questions – turning data into business insights that help your company make better, evidence-based decisions.
Optimizing the Benefits of People Analytics
Using workforce analytics removes the subjectivity factor. That can help tremendously when you’re trying to more precisely define the scope of an initiative or increase the accuracy of your financial planning.
With evidence-based planning, you can substantiate your decisions with leadership, employees, and your legal team.
Quantifying decisions mitigates the risks of making the wrong ones. Additionally, making the right decision the first time is always less time-consuming and less costly than having to reevaluate and pivot your position.
Workforce planning and analytics, done well, generates actionable workforce insights that drive decision-making. With strong evidence to reinforce decisions, workforce planning becomes a fine-tuned engine that drives the business forward.
To learn more about evidence-based decision making in workforce planning, contact ZeroedIn.
