Reconciling Finance with HR

Organizations that are not properly resourced cannot grow revenues and compete in the market to achieve their full potential. Talent is out there, but it is hard to attract and retain. When faced with growth imperatives, organizations must consider and plan for evolving variables that influence (and can sometimes inhibit) the effective hiring and deployment of talent, including:

• Economic uncertainty, currently characterized by inflation and varying degrees of a recessionary environment, which in turn forces organizations to make quick decisions about resourcing that can necessitate capital reallocations
• The paradox of the talent market, with the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting Great Resignation causing talent scarcities in some industries (i.e., health care) while a talent surplus in tech is causing layoffs
• Growth ambitions that require investment in new talent, upskilling of employees, improving productivity ratios, and strategic, longer-term workforce planning
• The reimagining of the workplace, as organizations pivot to hybrid or remote working environments that enable them to hire talent from all over the world

In this mutating mix of macro conditions, integrated business planning (IBP) is gaining momentum, given its fundamental purpose of activating all the data that matters across finance, human resources (HR), and sales into a single platform to drive decisive planning. Workforce management and planning is an integral part of an integrated business plan because it leverages historic actual information to create a realistic budget that empowers organizations to hire, maintain, and grow teams that power thriving businesses. As organizations emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic and forge the workplace of the future, the new realities we face have shaped an employee life cycle that is more evolved, more digital, and more dynamic than ever before.

A unified workforce plan enables organizations to:

• Strengthen the partnership and feedback loop between Finance and HR by using a single planning solution shared by both organizations
• Decrease time and resources spent on workforce budgeting by closing gaps in the planning process
• Integrate disparate systems and data to create a single source of truth that is visible to and usable by all stakeholders
• Protect employees and the organization from privacy violations by controlling access to sensitive data
• Activate the workforce portion of an organization’s broader ESG strategy

In collaboration with Jedox Diamond Certified Partner The better decisions group (bdg), this report explores workforce planning through both a strategic and tactical lens and provides insights and a framework of how new realities come to life both on the ground and in the C-suite.