Table of contents
No matter the industry you operate within, your people will always be your greatest asset. Headcount planning and headcount planning software allows you to strategize the best way to allocate these human resources to achieve your organizational goals.
The challenge, however, lies in the fact that many businesses lump headcount planning into a generic recruitment process and fail to align their team’s skill set with their broader company mission.
According to a survey from CareerBuilder, 74% of employers report hiring the wrong candidate. Mistakes like these can cost you — on average, $15,000 — so it may be time to rethink the headcount planning process. Let’s take a deeper look at the reasons why headcount planning is often misunderstood and what your organization might do to approach it differently.
What Is Headcount Planning?
Headcount planning is the method through which you hire the right people to meet your company’s needs. On paper, the process sounds simple, but in reality, the headcount planning process is as much an art as it is a science.
That’s because the process demands that you plan your hiring decisions around your organizational goals for growth, as well as fill the gaps that are left when your current staff members exit the workforce.
With that said, what might your headcount planning strategy look like? For most organizations, headcount planning best practices include the following:
- Defining short and long-term goals
- Creating an organizational chart that aligns with these goals
- Identifying gaps between your existing structure and goals
- Designing a recruitment process that fills these gaps
Deploying the right technologies can help immensely. Workplace Adaptive Planning, for instance, can empower you to build a team that matches your organizational goals both now and in the future, and with Workday headcount cost planning software, you’ll be able to create and test models that align your organizational structure with your company’s budget.
Why Is Headcount Planning So Misunderstood (and Avoided)?
Unfortunately, many employers tend to make incorrect assumptions about what the headcount process is and isn’t, often built on years of past traditions or even other assumptions about the nature of corporate management. Let’s examine and debunk some of the most common myths about the headcount planning process, which are as follows:
Myth 1: It’s All About the Numbers
For some companies, it’s all about numbers, believing that long as there are enough qualified staff members within the office, the business will have an aggregate of skills and experience to get the job done. Thus, their recruiting processes are all about maintaining the “right” number of employees.
Frankly, such an approach is a bit like throwing noodles at the wall just to see what sticks. Headcount planning is a numbers-driven process, no doubt, but at the end of the day, it isn’t about the quantity of employees that you have and hire, but their quality; that is to say, what they bring to the workplace, and how they help your business achieve its goals.
Myth 2: Workforce Management Is for Larger Companies
Small to midsize businesses commonly assume that they’re simply too undersized to benefit from a headcount planning strategy. Even some larger companies wrongly assume that headcount planning is best reserved for corporate giants.
But even if that were true, headcount planning is still a forward-facing activity. Sure, your company or department may be small, but you may have goals that need to be reached in the not-too-distant future. Tomorrow’s results start with today’s plans, which is why you need a recruitment strategy that considers the long-term plans of your company.
Myth 3: Headcount Planning Is Reserved for HR Experts
It’s not uncommon for small to midsize businesses to ask their employees to multitask. For instance, you might have an accountant or bookkeeper who also oversees human resources. If that’s the case, it can be tempting to assume that workplace management strategies are too advanced for non-specialists to perform effectively.
Headcount planning doesn’t have to be a complex process at all, though — just a thoughtful one. In fact, it’s a process that should involve as many people as possible, from company leadership to input gathered from other employees, and with software like the Workday headcount planning center, it becomes easier than ever to build a headcount strategy that matches your budget.
Myth 4: Headcount Planning Is Only About Adding New Positions
Business leaders might presume that headcount planning is all about hiring new employees in the future, meaning the process is always about adding new staff members to meet your growing needs. In the wake of what’s being called the “Great Resignation,” however, some companies are more concerned about filling unexpected vacancies here and now than they are about hiring for future needs.
Headcount planning is an aspirational process, make no mistake, but it’s more about finding a structure that fits your company’s vision and mission. Your headcount planning strategy can therefore help you evaluate the effectiveness of your team, and should you have to hire to fill current vacancies, the right strategy can ensure that you make the best decisions for your company.
5 Ways Headcount Planning Software Is Essential to Your Business
Software can dramatically improve the effectiveness of your headcount planning process. Tools like the Workday headcount software can make the process much faster, as well as help you evaluate how hiring decisions fit your current budget.
Let’s take a look at five distinct ways in which headcount planning software is essential for your business:
1. It Helps to Simplify Expense Planning in Multiple Currencies and Tax Rates
If you work with international employees or contractors, it can be challenging to integrate multiple currencies into your larger organizational budget. Not only does that make it harder to cover your current personnel expenses, but it also makes it harder to plan ahead.
Workday Adaptive Planning software can easily manage multiple currencies and help you align these international expenses with your native corporate currency.
In the same way, it can also assist with international tax rates. International employees are taxed at different rates depending on where they live and work, and Adaptive’s headcount planning software can keep track of these rates for you so you can better manage your expenses and tax liabilities.
2. It Makes Integration with HR Easy
Many companies face the challenge of using multiple computer systems to manage their core processes, but Workplace Adaptive’s software comes with “out-of-the-box” integration capabilities, so you can easily integrate it with today’s most commonly-used HR and payroll systems.
As a result, you’ll have total visibility into your current and prior operating expenses, not to mention personnel rosters, salaries, benefits, and other key data, all of which allow you to analyze past data to build forecasts for future needs and make adjustments to improve your efficiency.
3. Headcount Planning Software Provides Transparency for New Hires
Consider how your business would react if your employee headcount were to change suddenly. It’s not just about salaries: Bringing in new workers also means acquiring new software licenses, computers, and equipment, and if your hiring process is ongoing, you may have additional expenses that involve recruiters or a recruitment marketing campaign.
Workday headcount planning software can help you account for these expenses and build models that help you integrate these hires into your broader budget. You’ll be able to test these models in advance, finding the model that works for your organization.
4. Budgeting Is Possible with Our Granular Headcount Views
Adaptive allows you to plan at the granular level. You can view headcounts sorted by department, region, subsidiary, or any other distinguishing category, and doing so can prove useful when planning certain departmental expenses.
For example, you might use the software to allocate money for employee meals or travel expenses. Once you allocate these costs per employee, Adaptive can calculate and track these expenses across the department.
5. Integration with HR/Payroll Makes Reconciliation Possible
Since Adaptive integrates with your HR and payroll systems, reconciliation is easier than ever, and the tool can also be used to forecast new hires. These features can, therefore, help you manage the costs of maintaining your current workforce while also allowing you to evaluate the financial impact of your hiring process.
For example, when you plan a new hire, an open requisition is created. Once the “requisition” is hired, your HR system will be updated and send their information to Adaptive, which ensures that data is not missed or duplicated or that any employee information is overlooked. Otherwise, errors could creep into your HR records and hiring process and come back to cost you.
QBIX Analytics and Headcount Planning Using Workday Adaptive
QBIX Analytics specializes in helping organizations reach their potential through headcount planning. We rely on Workday Adaptive, a platform that offers business owners real-time insights into the composition and efficiency of their workforce.
With the power of Workday Adaptive, you’ll be able to make better, more-informed decisions about your core processes, including hiring, resource allocation, budgeting, and more. Additionally, the software’s advanced integration capabilities provide a centralized means of storing and managing data, giving you and other authorized users full visibility into your workplace composition and team’s performance.
Incorporating these features into your company’s technology stack can empower you to make better decisions across the board. For example, the difference between demand planning and sales forecasting depends on the type of data you’re examining and how it’s influencing your corporate decisions.
Similarly, Workday Adaptive can provide you with the data you need to make decisions about your workplace and leverage your personnel to achieve your organizational goals.
How QBIX Analytics Can Help
The right software can help you reduce costs, increase efficiency, and achieve your strategic objectives. To that end, consider partnering with QBIX Analytics. We can work with you to create custom reports and dashboards to track your most important data and highlight any areas of concern, thereby allowing you to optimize your current performance and address any areas of inefficiency that can be hurting your bottom line.
That’s to say nothing of the way(s) that QBIX can equip you to face the future with greater confidence. Our services can help you adapt your headcount planning strategies to ensure that you connect with the right people to achieve your organizational goals.
Contact us today to learn more, and we’ll discuss the ways that you can integrate headcount planning best practices into your organization and achieve the efficiency you’ve always dreamed of.
FAQs
Headcount planning is the process of forecasting and managing the number of employees you need to accomplish your business goals and objectives.
Headcount planning ensures that companies understand their hiring needs, which minimizes the need for sudden changes that disrupt the workforce, such as layoffs. As a result, employees can enjoy a stable work environment with greater job security.
Headcount planning software can integrate with your existing systems, providing access to a centralized database that features employee demographics, job descriptions, and key performance metrics. You can then use that data to analyze your operational efficiency and make informed decisions about resource allocation, hiring, and budgeting.
By leveraging state-of-the-art technology, QBOX empowers businesses to optimize their workforce through custom reports, intuitive dashboards, and other tools that track key data and highlight areas of improvement.
The best headcount planning tools offer real-time data visualization, forecasting capabilities, scenario planning, and custom reporting. Still, you may also want to consider a tool’s ease of use, data security, customer service, and how well the tool integrates with other HR/payroll systems.