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How will your business do during 2009 and beyond?...
30th January 2009
How will your business do during 2009 and beyond? Do you have the right business planning mechanisms in place to ensure that your business is seizing opportunities, anticipating changes and reacting to them quickly enough?
Do you have a workforce plan? Do you know what skills in what quantities you will require to meet the challenges of the forthcoming year? Are you confident that your current workforce profile matches up to what will be required to keep your business moving forward?
There are a number of tools and methods to help business leaders ensure that their most expensive asset, their staffing establishment, is aligned to the requirements of the business.
The Business Plan and Workforce Planning
The business plan will form the basis of your workforce plan. The business plan will identify the priorities and timescales of what is required to be achieved. More often than not however, the ‘workforce’ part of the planning cycle is seen as operational rather than strategic. Although the act of recruiting, training and inducting staff is certainly an operational task, the planning of what kind of staff, with what skills and in what numbers and when they will be required, is a strategic exercise requiring foresight and close alignment to the business plan.
Too often staffing changes are reactionary and are therefore costly. A redundancy followed by a recruitment drive to bring in different skills will almost certainly be more costly than planning for the skill requirement and developing staff within the business to be able to successfully manage and thrive in the face of a new challenge.
Effective Management of Staffing Costs
During the current climate when managers are constantly being asked to reduce costs, pro-actively managing staffing levels and planning for future needs will help to reduce staffing costs. If your business can anticipate staffing requirements for the short, middle and longer term and put plans in place to respond to needs, then your business will certainly be better positioned to compete and will be able to pro-actively manage any staffing changes.
In order to manage resources and costs more effectively, the following can be considered:
Are you cross-skilling? Can your staff do more than one job, particularly in areas where posts are seen as high risk? To know that you have back-up and will not need to call on expensive agency or temporary staffing, or require other staff to work overtime, may reduce staffing costs.
Are your terms and conditions of employment flexible enough? Do they enable you to redeploy staff to alternative locations or shift patterns if the need arises? If your contracts of employment are rigid this will leave you with fewer options should the needs of your business change.
Can your business develop its own flexible workforce? Where demand varies and the cost of agency or temporary staff is high, can you keep a number of trained and inducted members of staff on your books on a zero hours contract who can be called upon should the need arise?
Does your business have the infrastructure to manage flexible working? When office space is at a premium, can staff work from home or share desk space (hot desking) by working flexibly?
Are you able to successfully manage and use secondments for staff, especially in areas where recruitment is difficult and skills are sparse? To manage secondments or rotations of staff into these posts to ensure the level of skill is maintained within the business will ensure that core knowledge and expertise is maintained. This will reduce recruitment costs which often include the costs of relocation, market supplements and enhanced terms and conditions to attract new recruits.
The above suggestions give an example of what can be done to pro-actively manage your staffing. However, unless you have identified what your business requires all or some of the above may not be what your business needs. If energies are to be spent on implementing one or all of the above within your business, the analysis to identify what is required is time well spent to ensure that the cost of implementation is not wasted.
Further Information
NorthgateArinso have HR Consultants who are trained to analyse your business and help you to identify strategies to ensure that your business plan is backed up by the staffing it requires to be a success. Do not hesitate to make contact through your nominated HR Consultant if this is a service which you would like to discuss further.
Happy Workforce Planning.
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