Entering one of the most confusing job markets in decades
Today’s business environment is more complicated than ever. Words such as recession, economic downturn, or market uncertainty are heard everywhere, driven by multiple macro influencers including labor market disruption, inflation, rising interest rates or geopolitical tensions. 50% of companies are reducing their overall headcount, even as they remain concerned about hiring and retaining critical talent.
Benefits of workforce optimization
Why workforce optimization?
An optimized workforce is a workforce that’s made as effective as possible at any given time, and that includes planning around cost, headcount, performance, skills, talent availability and many other factors.
In a market with both weak economic outlook and a robust demand for skills, organizations should look at rightsizing as opposed to downsizing. This is about balancing cost removal while ensuring the right resources are in place as your organization adapts to the fast changing economic environment.
Top priorities for workforce optimization
Rightsizing in the immediate term
Speed is of the essence when facing a recession if you want to remove cost. Too often, businesses resort to reducing their workforce for short term gain, only to find it costs more in the long run when productivity drops and they have to rehire. The key is to be data driven, and with the right application to support you, you can begin identifying pockets of opportunity and risk within days, not weeks.
Companies with data on work and skills are best positioned to make informed decisions, removing areas of poor performance or low productivity, and investing where skills are in demand.
With the right data insight you can create contingency plans, assess multiple scenarios, and see the impact of decisions you make. You can then communicate with transparency and be confident in your ability to achieve productivity goals.
- Figure out what work is essential and where your critical skills lie.
- Consider workforce optimization scenarios such as attrition, reskilling, redeployment, furlough or a reduction in force.
How to do workforce optimization
What should I do next?
Ask yourself:
- What roles are needed as your business adapts to new goals and conditions?
- Consider lessons learned from pandemic playbooks like skills planning, redesigning jobs and work, and retention strategies for critical talent.
- How will you build a sustained workforce optimization capability?
In times of uncertainty, whether you’re thinking of cutting cost, adding new skills, or both, being able to optimize your workforce means you’ll have an agile and adaptable business, able to act quickly and effectively in times of change.
Get started with our free two-hour optimization workshop to immediately identify the biggest opportunities for your business.
Free workforce optimization workshop
Apply now for this free two-hour advisory workshop with Orgvue’s expert consultants to quickly show you how to create sustainable productivity through workforce optimization.
In advance of the workshop we will sign a mutual NDA and securely build your real HR data into Orgvue’s platform to run some immediate analysis to identify workforce optimization opportunities. Apply now for fast insights.
Why you should attend
- Quickly understand early, highest priority opportunities for cost removal for your business.
- In-person or remote readout by our expert advisory consultants.
- Bespoke analysis using your HR data.
- A customized six slide analysis report which shows you how to create sustainable productivity through workforce optimization.
- Peace of mind – At Orgvue, we put your data security at the center of everything we do.
Answer questions like:
- How many layers do I have in my organization?
- Are my teams the size I want them to be?
- Are there too many contractors at the top of the organization?
- How do my headcount and costs compare to targets?
- Which department has the highest fully-loaded cost?
Request a free workshop now
Point of view article
Recession planning: moving strategy to the top of the list
Orgvue’s Chief Executive Officer Oliver Shaw discusses three key behaviors organizations can adopt to help plan for recession and thrive in the future.
Common workforce optimization challenges
Do you recognize some of these challenges? Although businesses have often been faced with the need to pivot quickly, leaders still struggle with the same challenges, such as:
Misaligned, incomplete and scattered data
Slow processes due to highly manual work
Increased risk of human error and duplication of effort
Lack of transparency, leading to missed opportunities
Short term solution, with the risk of repetition in a few months
So how can you bypass those challenges and improve profitability quickly and effectively while future-proofing your business?
Introducing Orgvue
Orgvue is a SaaS platform, built to help you optimize to your workforce quickly and immediately, while investing in productivity and agility in the longer term.
Whatever tactics you want to implement – whether cost cutting, workforce rightsizing, skills design, etc. Orgvue allows you to do it quickly, risk free and with complete visibility.
- Centralized and trusted data.
- Advanced modeling capabilities.
- Alignment across departments.
- Fast transformation and minimized risk.
- Long-term capability and increased agility.
What it looks like in practice
Once you load your data into Orgvue, you can immediately start modeling scenarios and quickly implement them within weeks. Whether you’re looking to make changes now, or build a long-term capability, Orgvue’s got you covered.
Quickly consolidate data in Orgvue and start analyzing your business
- Bring data from multiple platforms into Orgvue, such as your HCM, people analytics, payroll, skills, performance, etc.
- Clean the data and align it to create an accurate source of truth.
- Analyze different aspects of your workforce, such as overall cost, spans and layers, duplication of work, retirement risk, etc.
Orgvue dashboard showing an overall summary of the workforce as it is today
Showing the VP of Market Research being outsourced in the modeling process in Orgvue
Model scenarios and design your future workforce
- Using drag-and-drop, easily add, remove or change positions across your business
- See the impact of changes on your organization, and discard unsuccessful options
- Use criteria such as skills, performance, tenure, or activities to make data-driven decisions
Implement your plan, and allocate the right talent to your new structure
- Build talent pools by shortlisting people based on role requirements
- Once ready, confirm the right candidate for the right roles
- After changes have been decided, manage implementation and exits if applicable
Orgvue image showing the talent selection progress on an org chart
Orgvue image showing the comparison of current headcount and cost against targets
Monitor your progress, and maintain long term productivity
- Track progress against your plan and report on value realization
- Track employee movement (joiner, mover, leaver)
- Instantly iterate plan and re-model if necessary based on internal or external developments
Customer story
Re-designing 250,000 positions as quickly and effectively as possible
Under normal circumstances we would expect a 20-strong team to take 6 months to do this, but with Orgvue a team of 8 did it in 2.
Chief Transformation Officer, global bank with 250k+ employees
Business goals
- To re-design 250,000 positions in a global bank, into a new structure focussed on customer service experience.
- To automate select roles and activities with a target saving of $60m over 3 years.
Solution
- Using Orgvue, they modeled different design options and visualized scenario impacts.
- They then mapped the ‘to-be’ design against a sub-group of 45,000 employees and tested.
- They built a transformation center of excellence based around Orgvue for workforce modeling.
Solution brief
Survive and thrive
through market volatility
Immediately adapt your workforce in line with your long-term strategy. Read our latest solution brief to discover how Orgvue can help you to thrive and succeed in today’s dynamic business landscape.
Learn more about how we can help you:
- consolidate data and analyze your business
- model your future organization
- allocate talent to your new structure
- monitor your progress against targets.
More resources
Ebook
Workforce optimization ebook: How to avoid long-term pain
Article
Recession planning: moving strategy to the top of the list
Infographic
Infographic: Optimizing tomorrow’s workforce, today
Article
How to prepare for a recession
Book your free demo
Design your business of tomorrow, today. Discover what Orgvue can do for your organization first-hand.