How to Perform a New-Year Workforce Management Assessment

It’s that time of the year again. When workforce management professionals look back at the previous year to set goals for the new. Like most, you’re probably taking stock of the wins and the inevitable losses. While much has been accomplished, there are always things that didn’t get done completely or to your satisfaction. At this time of year, as you’re taking this inventory and preparing your plans for another new year, the following strategies for analyzing your 2017 workforce planning results (and preparing a plan for 2018) may come in handy.

Culled from best practices and ideas put forward by Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA) and the Society of Human Resources Managers (SHRM), here is a framework you can use to arrive at clear assessments of your past performance and guidelines for planning your future.

Step 1. Analyze the workforce implications of your business plan and develop a set of solutions to address them.

• Start by analyzing your organization’s strategic goals.
• Determine competencies required to attain those goals via a needs analysis process.
• Conduct a talent assessment of the employee population.
• Perform a labor market analysis to understand levels of availability within the job roles you’ll require.

This step helps an organization identify any gaps between existing capabilities and needs, and provides a framework for understanding whether it makes more sense to “build, borrow or buy” in 2018. That is to say where your program should focus the preponderance of efforts—either upon employee development, use of a contingent workforce and project-based work or staff supplementation.

Step 2. Assess your achievements in the following five, mission-critical workforce management activities:

• Attraction
• Motivation
• Retention
• Organizational Development
• Change Management

Rank your relative success in each of these areas to determine where to apply redoubled efforts in 2018.

Step 3. Focus on program performance metrics.

SIA says, “When it comes to reviewing CW program performance, we recommend utilizing the QECR (quality, efficiency, cost, risk) framework, which focuses on key dimensions that define a program’s overall performance.” In this article, they provide a detailed definition of a year-end review process focusing on those four important performance metrics and the types of questions program management might ask to reveal the overall performance of their actions (excerpted below).

Quality: Does the program deliver quality candidates to the engagement managers, do the suppliers follow the rules of engagement, do the VMS and MSP provide quality service to the program and the stakeholders? Were there goals or expectations for improvement this past year and were they met?

Efficiency: Did the VMS or MSP identify areas of improvement that brought additional value to the program or the stakeholders?

Cost: Were there any cost savings the program delivered? Did the MSP identify areas of opportunity for cost savings or cost correction (market bill rates) or did the program negotiate better fees with providers and or suppliers?

Risk: Were there any system improvements implemented to minimize any risks to service? Are there areas of opportunity to focus on in the upcoming year? Are there standard operating procedures and if so, are they up to date? Did the MSP mitigate any risk such as misclassification of candidates or improperly labeled SOWs? Are there areas that warrant focus for the upcoming year in this dimension?

We recommend reading the entire article from SIA which has tons more valuable information on performing your workforce management program assessment. If you’d like expert help in the design and execution of your assessment, you can also engage expert assistance from nextSource today.