HR and Finance collaboration – the key to workforce agility?
With operating environments becoming more fluid and less predictable, organizations need to be resilient. And to provide organizations – and their leadership teams – with the resilience they need to succeed, HR and Finance must come together to address two key challenges:
- Enhancing workforce agility
- Eliminating unnecessary friction in your peoples’ working patterns
This is the argument of Ventana Research’s CEO and Chief Research Officer Mark Smith in his latest Viewpoint briefing. Here’s our 3 top takeaways from this piece on Improving the employee experience and internal mobility for workforce agility.
1: A clear workforce strategy is a prerequisite to workforce agility
If your people are going to have the flexibility they need to deliver competitive advantage for your organization, you’ll need a strategy that clearly defines both deployment requirements and your short and long term staffing needs.
Your workforce strategy should also give your leadership team the means to assess the options available for meeting these needs. And give your teams the ability to respond quickly to various business and data triggers as they become available.
Collaboration between HR and Finance will be essential in formulating a workforce strategy that actually works – after all, it’ll have to fit any existing fiscal and structural constraints, along with any legal and regulatory frameworks.
2: Implementing a strategy that makes a great experience possible requires the right data
Cultivating your organization’s ability to make robust staffing and personnel decisions requires your management to have access to relevant data in real time. Without a reliable assessment of your talent pipeline or an overview of the external talent market – including how your organization’s ability to compensate people measures up to going rates and competitor strategies – it’ll be impossible to make good decisions that support your success.
3: Cultivating a good employee experience requires using technology to minimize administrative burdens
Making your workforce as agile as possible also depends on giving them the freedom to pivot to different areas of interest as needed. And one of the simplest ways of doing this lies in eliminating or minimizing the effect of peripheral tasks like administration, data entry, and other redundant tasks. Doing so can boost productivity and job satisfaction in a way that has a measurable effect on retention levels.
Although you will be able to reduce friction by simplifying routine workflows, the real difference requires a careful application of modern enterprise technology. Rationalizing and consolidating the systems and tools employees use to complete tasks streamlines their working environment and improves their experience of work.
Looking beyond the use of HCM systems for workforce management and ensuring full data visibility between HCM, Finance, and ERP systems allows leaders to balance the needs of teams with the practical constraints of resource limitations and compliance.
Want to know more?
To learn how your HR and Finance teams can work together to create employee experiences and facilitate internal mobility in a way that boosts productivity and allows the whole organization to respond more quickly to business risks and opportunities, check out Ventana Research’s full Viewpoint here.
