The Hiring Insider

Work from home

I currently work from home and travel to other sites as needed to check in with team members and meet with departmental staff. Yesterday I traveled to a site within driving distance. I had to stop for gas (ouch on the price of course). The gas station had an attendant going from pump to pump to offer us coffee and a cookie! Maybe it calms some of us and serves as a distraction while filling up at close to $4 a gallon I don't know. But I thought it was innovative and a nice value add.  I had brought my own coffee but accepted the cookie!

As we look for continued differentiators to attract and retain talent, working from home can be simple and inexpensive to implement. In addition, with many organizations averaging 3-5% increases to salary a work from home offering where possible (and gas savings) can really make a difference in someone's net take home - spend pay.

Do you have a work from home policy or would you like some help developing guidelines? If so - shoot me a note.

Workforce planning

I'm doing some workforce planning for a practice in our US consulting division. Gathering data from finance, including financials, utilization, targets from practice for headcount and open reqs from my own team is taking longer than I'd hoped. Next is to review historical data, select a turnover target everyone can live with (even if we don't like the number!). A review low performers or those on the edge and retirements upcoming, sucession planning, those who might be HYPOs and may move into different roles etc. Don't forget to review any work targeted for offshore or onshore (this does happen!).  Then we're ready to select number of requisitions to add, what practice and geo area and in what quarter!

This is my task. Yours might look different. Do you build your budget on a revenue model, by headcount etc?

While you can do all of this work in excel you must still engage the parties that have the data you will need to make decisions, review, achieve level of agreement and go. Doing a plan by quarter especially if workforce planning is new in your organization allows you enough time to make adjustments and monitor progress.

Questions on workforce planning? How to get started - or what is it and why is it important? email me - happy to chat.