Unlocking the power of workforce optimization: who's responsible and how to measure it?

The Rise of Workforce Optimization

When it comes to business operations, optimization has always been the name of the game. After all, businesses have always wanted to be as efficient and productive as possible and the imperative for this has led to most workplace innovations that are widely-known today.

For example, Ford's moving assembly line was born out of a need for higher productivity and less employee error, and it swiftly changed the manufacturing world going forward. Generally speaking, workforce optimization can be applied in any direction in order to reduce cost, improve efficiency, increase employee satisfaction, elevate customer perceptions, reduce error, or drive organizational learning. 

Workforce optimization has expanded with technology, globalization, and cultural norms. Consider the following:

• Automatic time tracking of employees (instead of punching in and punching out)
• Clearance badges for ease of security between workspaces
• Customer satisfaction surveys to learn how to better serve the market
• Employee surveys to understand employee needs
• Management training software to help reduce in-person meetings and human capital needed for lengthy training
• Perhaps most memorable, the printing press, which dramatically increased the speed, scale, accuracy, and productivity of printed materials and allowed for widespread book ownership and news dissemination

Of course, today, workforce optimization has moved far beyond the printing press, and exists largely in the digital and technological world. Modern workforce organization requires just as much creativity as landmark innovations of the past in handling a varied and quickly-moving workplace which considers remote work, multinational locations, digital solutions, and cross-functional department collaboration. 

Secondly, today’s workforce optimization is much more data-driven, and uses data to help contribute to the decision making process as well as deciding which optimizations are ultimately beneficial to the company. With this move towards data-driven decisions, questions remain within organizations about who should handle the data collection, where it should be managed departmentally, and ultimately how it should be measured. Let’s examine this more closely…

Managing Optimization Internally & The Data Points To Support It

Where workforce optimization data analysis and responsibility lies is ultimately dependent on the type of data collected and who is most invested and qualified to examine it.

Some of the most common modern examples of workforce optimization data points include:

• Employee utilization and productivity
• Internal mobility rate
• Redundancy savings through redeployment
• Employee learning and training completion
• Skills and growth development
• Regrettable attrition savings
• Employee engagement
• Customer satisfaction scores
• Cost of operations

At-a-glance, these data points and capabilities sit somewhere between what is traditionally seen as the domain of the human resources and business development departments. The multidisciplinary nature, though, should not be seen as a liability, but instead a superpower which helps to empower both departments to think more holistically and to capitalize on the talent, knowledge, and planning of people management. 

Designating Cross-Collaboration and Innovation Through Optimization

The siloed or separate nature of organizational departments, however, are not a superpower. In fact, failing to see the big picture and ignoring the needs of employees can cause negative workplace culture consequences. For example, the lack of flexibility and dialogue between organizational leaders and their direct reports has resulted in mass resignations in the past three years, where individuals leave their jobs because they feel that there isn’t the flexibility to make career changes where they are currently employed. 

In reality, well-organized and strategic organizations have the capability to retain and utilize their talented workers, and suffer when those employees are lost to other opportunities or perceived inflexibility. 

Working Together to Tell the Optimization Story

Human resource leaders and business development decision-makers have an opportunity to work together, fully cementing their goals (which are often in alignment) to help tell the workplace optimization story. Take employee training, for instance. Employee training, while often housed in the HR department, is actually a business goal and a people management priority in that training can be geared towards strategic future business endeavors, creating individuals who are well trained and ready for not just the needs of the organization today, but also tomorrow (and a year from now). 

Additionally, members from both departments can be intentionally cross-functional. That is, there can be designated personnel from human resources and business development that specifically and regularly work together to not only analyze these metrics, but also represent the needs from both departments, and then report on results and optimization outcomes as a team. 

Measuring Workforce Optimization

If workforce optimization is a priority for both human resources and business development, and resources are allocated to achieve this, the question remains: which metrics matter? The answer can be as varied as the goals of the organization, so what is more important is how to identify salient metrics. Think of the data points as helping to tell the story, and what the story is about is dependent on what the organization needs or prioritizes. 

For instance, a common priority for organizations today, in the wake of widespread employee turnover internationally, is retention. As research shows, people want to stay at jobs longer and have more organizational commitment when they are engaged. This sets the stage for retention and engagement as two key outcomes, and every metric should support better understanding, evaluating, and measuring towards those goals. Organizations interested in retention and engagement might be particularly interested in:

• How long their people tend to stay at the organization before leaving
• What is the average time till promotion?
• What are the skills and interests of their people?
• What are the skills and knowledge the organization needs in the future?
• How often do leaders have meetings with their followers on the goals and opportunities of their direct reports?
• How often do employees participate in engagement-related activities such as educational opportunities?
• What is the utilization of retention and engagement-related benefits?
• How often do employees move across departments or change their job functions significantly during their tenure at the company?

All of these metrics, when laid out in front of organizational decision-makers, help to tell the story of what is keeping people at the organization, what might be making them leave, and where there are opportunities for improvement. This story then relies on HR and business development to optimize, strategize, and set goals for the future. 

Partnering with the Right Optimization Solutions

Even when qualified and capable cross-functional employees are tasked with exploring optimization goals, a huge part of optimization is actually minimizing tasks that can be handled through technology or innovations. Therefore, digital solutions can help take the tediousness out of workplace optimization by streamlining measurement and creating a built-in analytics hub that helps to take the number crunching and number-gathering largely out of the equation. From there, the designated employees can use their brain power to help synthesize, present, and establish next steps towards organizational goals. 

These technological solutions and digital measurement solutions can be multifaceted in nature. For instance, when it comes to examining current workforce skills and skills needed for the future, an integrated workforce intelligence platform can help to gain complete visibility into the skills and potential of a workforce, assist with the intelligence to support data-driven talent decisions, and provide optimized insights that allow leaders to take action to get the right skills, in the right place, at the right time. This means digital solutions that understand the past, present, and future nature of business development and how that overlaps with relevant employee skill sets. 

Or, forward-thinking digital solutions may also provide the superpower of AI or artificial intelligence, when it comes to workplace optimization. AI can help to analyze CV’s of current and future employees, map career paths, and connect opportunities to online learning and training opportunities. 

When it comes down to it, human resources and business development are converging when it comes to optimizing the workplace, and both have a seat at the table to understand how to create and embody a more streamlined organization. With these interests (and complementary talents) aligned, the right digital and technological solutions can help create a trifecta wherein employees, the future of the business, and the metrics to see what the digital optimization story looks like going forward, results in a competitive and resilient workplace.

See how workforce intelligence can fast track your workforce optimization efforts. Download the Executive Guide to Workforce Intelligence today.