Author – Ankit Goyal, Vice President, Healthcare & Financial Services, Polestar Solutions 

Ever since the Great Resignation started dominating headlines in 2021, it has completely changed how, where and why we work. It has had a profound impact on employers of all sizes and with that has now become paramount that companies push boundaries to reinvent workforce planning. It is now critical to understand where your business is heading to in order to answer the following questions — 

• Will you have the right resources to enter new markets or launch new products/services? 
• Can your workforce support customers with the product/services where they are?
• Are you building the right skills and culture to support your business strategy? 
• Are you offering competitive pay to your valued talent? 

With the right approach to workforce planning, employers can minimize churn and remain proactive against it, as well as track, manage and assess the impact of hires and terminations on financial performance. 

A Move Towards an Agile & Connected, Workforce Planning Strategy

It is essential for HR decision-makers to keep in sync with the business needs and drivers from both strategic and operational viewpoints, and use business priorities to drive HR priorities. However, today’s organizations face difficulties across a range of areas such as visibility, obtainability, readiness and affordability — making it difficult for them to create new opportunities and stay ahead of the curve. Right from designing better well-being programs at work, to managing capacities of individuals and teams, to encouraging employees to make autonomous decisions, companies are reinventing their workforce and workplace strategies.  

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Keeping in mind the above, there is an indicative need for agile and connected workforce planning, talent strategy and compensation modelling to avoid being on the edge and letting the Great Resignation sneak up on your business. Here’s how the Great Resignation is impacting companies and the technologies and planning processes they can put in place to solve it; 

• Workforce Planning: With workforce planning, it is easy to connect strategic plans with day-to-day operations. It is about understanding who/ what we need pertaining to the capacity and capabilities of people, the right locations/ geo-distributions, and the optimal mix of the workforce. 
• Talent Strategy: Herein, we analyze the organization’s build-up, and understand the kind of organization it wants to become, as well as the organization to which people want to belong to. An effective talent strategy can be put in place by understanding pay parity (by gender, function), cultural elements like diversity, analysing cost, quality and trade-offs, and target retention models and risk. 
• Compensation Modelling: With compensation modelling companies can understand how the efforts of employees are being rewarded — right from whether the compensation structures are at par with the market/ competition, to what comprises compensation structures (salary, bonus, benefits, equity plans, variable incentives, benefits). Once this is in place, employers can develop a dynamic workforce blueprint to successfully;
  • align and execute business strategies and operations 
  • drive cross-functional collaboration for improved talent and business decisions. 

 Challenges and the Way Ahead 

Having said that, the road to success is quite bumpy because capabilities within HR are still limited, there are a lot of constraints around technology with limited options on the market, most being purpose-built, and there still remains a lot of complexity in bringing internal/ external data for HR and across the business for planning, scenario analysis and forecasting. Furthermore, the criticality of planning in HR is also not institutionalized. 

In order to plan and get insights into the downstream and upstream implications of what you want to do, employers need to connect not just the dots but process, data and people. It is important to look at the big picture and put in place workforce planning strategies that will truly help you tackle the challenges posed by The Great Resignation and thrive going forward.