As operating environments become more fluid and less predictable, it becomes more important to build organizational adaptability and resilience, especially for the leadership team. In such circumstances, human resources and finance departments must collaborate effectively to meet two related challenges: how best to enhance workforce agility and how to eliminate unnecessary friction in the daily routine of work. Along with addressing the obvious policy and process requirements, organizations must ensure that they have and share all the necessary data between operating units, HR and finance to support these critical objectives, and that they are employing the right software to collect and manage that data.
In order to achieve workforce agility and utilize it as a source of competitive advantage, an organization must first have a clear workforce strategy. That strategy must enable the organization to define on an ongoing basis its resource deployment requirements and its shorter- and longer-term staffing needs. It must also afford leadership the means to assess all viable options for meeting those goals, and it must support the ability of teams to respond quickly to various business or data triggers. Furthermore, any such strategy must fit within any fiscal or other structural constraints and be responsive to all applicable legal and regulatory conditions.
Beyond that, an organization’s workforce strategy should define priorities that will balance any required trade-offs, especially in terms of developing budgets and setting pay scales. The strategy should also incorporate the broader considerations of how the workforce is structured, especially in terms of how an organization combines full- and part-time employees with gig workers, then take into consideration the methods the organization uses to ensure pay equity. Lastly, the strategy should incorporate processes and tools to up-skill and re-skill workers for maximum productivity, whether in their current, future, or multiple concurrent roles.
To support the strategy and cultivate an organization’s ability to consistently make better personnel and staffing decisions, the management team must have ready access to all relevant data. For example, leadership must have a reliable assessment of the supply of talent in the external labor market for certain jobs, typical pay rates for the required skills and experience levels, and they will need to be aware of any differences between those rates and the organization’s extant internal compensation levels. All of this must be considered relative to budgetary constraints and financial objectives. In planning personnel and staffing budgets across the organization, executives and managers must have visibility into data from both HR and Financial systems to fully understand the implications of their specific decisions. For instance, in order to prevent employee dissatisfaction and unwanted turnover, some pay rates and structures might need to be adjusted so the organization can recruit and retain people with scarce skillsets in specific geographies. This will often require knowing how existing compensation compares to prevailing levels in those geographies as well as harmonizing the pay rates for new hires with current internal compensation levels.
The other challenge is how to reduce friction in the employee experience (EX). One solution is to reduce the time workers spend on administrative and other peripheral tasks. Eliminating or at least minimizing these tasks has an effect on employees, directly affecting their productivity and indirectly affecting their engagement and satisfaction levels, all of which affects retention rates. Friction can be reduced by simplifying routine administrative tasks, such as the paperwork required for time-off requests and in making changes to personal information or benefits elections. Technologies such as speech recognition and artificial intelligence (AI) make it possible to simply ask the system to book time off without having to log into a system and fill out forms.
Streamlining these tasks and rationalizing and consolidating the systems and tools that employees need to use in the process are important steps in reducing friction and doing so requires a close working relationship between the finance and HR teams, who share the complementary goals of reducing workers’ unproductive burdens while also achieving departmental objectives.
HR and finance teams must collaborate well in order to build a level of workforce agility that strikes a balance between operational requirements and financial objectives. Technology plays a critical role in this balancing act, enabling executives and managers to connect strategy and objectives with the people who need to meet those strategic objectives, and helping teams meet the related financial targets. One important objective is to be able to quantify the financial impact on the organization of having—or not having—the right talent. With joint effort, HR and finance departments can identify all areas where meaningful collaboration will benefit the enterprise, and the lens they use can reflect the core data, processes, systems and expertise of both areas.
The right technology can facilitate a more robust and effective collaboration, one that reduces friction in the EX, increases productivity, utilizes resources more effectively, and that allows everyone to respond quickly to business risks and opportunities.