Improved flexibility in your workforce, more engaged teams, better talent management and diversity. Those are just a few of the benefits to introducing workforce planning into your business as a strategic tool. And here’s another – you already have a lot (if not all) of the technology you need to make it easy. The key is understanding which applications to use, and how they can provide you with the right data for making great decisions. And if we had to put our money on one, it would be conducting your workforce planning in Microsoft 365.
The myth says HR don’t do technology. You’re all about the people, and spreadsheets and analysis scare you, but that isn’t true, is it? Your issue isn’t using the tools, it’s knowing which ones to use and having the time to link data together and present it as a full picture. Well, here’s the great news – you don’t need to, Microsoft does it for you. So, let’s explore:
- What workforce planning is and why it’s essential for business success
- The Microsoft tools HR teams need to master
- Best practice and AI integration in workforce planning
Workforce planning and it’s benefits: an overview
Used as a strategic tool, workforce planning helps you plan effectively for the future. Combining current goals and future business plans, with current and future skills and role requirements, you can identify gaps and define how to address them.
Many businesses use workforce planning as a tick box spreadsheet to map next year’s budget against. Yet, apply it holistically, and you can ensure the ongoing success of your business by getting the right people upskilled and ready to meet future goals and requirements. It’s a critical process which, when reviewed regularly, ensures you can reap the benefits of workforce planning, including:
- Lower retention costs thanks to more engaged employees
- Stronger relationships with employees through defined career paths and development plans
- Better talent management which spots risks, identifies untapped skills, and allows employees to perform at their best regularly
So how do you get the best from this process? By knowing which tools can make the process simple and gathering compelling data to convince your senior leadership team to use workforce planning to its full advantage.
The best Microsoft Tools for HR to use
How comfortable are you using Microsoft Teams? With the explosion of online meetings over the last few years, lots of people now know how to use Teams effectively. What about Viva Insights? Or Power BI?
Many HR professionals recognize these names as applications within their Microsoft stack (the Microsoft software and tools that you have). But what are they for and how can you better use them to create workforce planning in Microsoft?
Viva Insights: Understanding productivity, effectiveness and engagement.
This is a tool for gather information, about work patterns, workload, and employee satisfaction. Viva Insights can extract data from emails, meetings and chat messages to help you build a picture of any clashes between culture and employee experience.
It allows you to look at teams who might be working excessive hours, or those having too many meetings. You can look at the structure of the team, resource requirements, and identify any support they might need proactively.
Power BI: Helping you visualize the problems in your workforce plan
In simple terms, this is how you present your data. You can create dashboards and reports for retention, productivity and headcount. You can demonstrate trends and themes easily to help senior leaders better understand your talent challenges.
This isn’t just a marketing or operations too. Mastering Power BI allows you to pool information from your HR Information systems (HRIS), Viva Insights, Microsoft Teams and other apps to create a bigger picture. It overcomes the difficulty with presenting data in a way the leadership team will respond to, and is a core tool in your kit.
Microsoft Teams: Collaborating and communicating on your workforce challenges
As well as being a space for chatting with one another, Microsoft Teams allows you to have channels, instant messages, team chats. You can store documents and collaborate on projects, but you already knew that. Have you ever considered using that data to aid workforce planning though?
It’s easy to forget just how useful Teams can be, and how much data can be found there. Using tools like Viva Insights and Power BI, you can analyze what’s happening on projects, potential resource gaps, engagement data on how people are feeling about it. Start getting to grips with the full breadth of what it offers.
Strategic workforce planning in Microsoft
The best way to make workforce planning effective is to start using it. Move away from single spreadsheets which just map your current people to this year’s budget. Instead, create a proactive process:
- Do the analysis – make decisions based on your data. Explore the Microsoft tools you have available, collate the information, then spend time assessing at the implications
- Engage senior leadership – Using Microsoft tools makes this so much easier. You can present the facts to really drive discussion, address concerns, and take action early, whether through new career paths or specific skills training
- Embrace Artificial Intelligence (AI) – collating information about how people are feeling and performing has never been easier. Use AI to create holistic overviews, dashboards and reports of your business so you can regularly review the situation and make adjustments as you go
- Make your plan adaptable – the worst thing about the traditional spreadsheet approach is the lack of flexibility. You need to be able to bring in new people, hire new skills, and develop diversity and knowledge to meet future goals. Make sure your workforce plan can change with your business, so it moves as your priorities shift.
Creating an integrated workforce planning system
Workforce planning isn’t something to be ‘solved’. It’s an evolution. And that means having an ecosystem which supports what you need.
Ideally, you’ll have a performance management system (Perform365), a learning management system (Learn365), and an engagement platform (Engage365) which all integrate seamlessly with your existing Microsoft stack. Why?
Because it allows you to link employee aspirations with their Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). You can connect learning programs and courses to skills you’ll need for the future. And you’re finally able to assess engagement levels against development needs, and flag concerns before retention becomes an issue.
This is where workforce planning truly becomes strategic – when all the pieces fit together and support each other for a proactive, goal- and people-focused plan.
So start by understanding human success in your business, and how you can use skills development and career paths to get the best from your teams.
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