Resource planning post-COVID: 4 important lessons
Resource planning
COVID-19, more than disrupting workspaces, has revolutionized resource planning within consulting and professional services companies. Remote working, in a pandemic situation, in a context of critical economic uncertainty, presents unprecedented challenges for human resources. Among them: supervision, effective communication, productivity and performance management. But also employee engagement, their advancement and their availability. THE resource planning must be renewed.
Convalescence will be done on a case-by-case basis and requires rethinking the different strategies for organizing resources.
Indeed, it is necessary to take a step back from events to draw the best possible conclusions. The Workbook “ COVID-19: Workforce strategies for a post-COVID-19 recovery ” built by Deloitte talks about: reflect – recommit – re-engage – rethink – reboot .
It's about making flexibility the new norm in order to respond to different situations with as much acuity and relevance as possible. This will involve an examination of work structures and team organization.
- Centralize communication with and between employees for better connectivity
- Monitor performance to optimize it
- Maximize talents to gain productivity
- Better visibility for better responsiveness
1. Centralize communication with and between employees for better connectivity
Working from home has reinforced the need for centralized communication spaces dealing with the progress of different projects, but also the well-being of teams and their availability. Management must have better visibility on the workload of its teams: who is available, at what time, with what skill(s).
THE resource planning has become more flexible as have the employees themselves. The LSE Business Review notes an increase in the willingness to collaborate, be flexible and quick to adapt. Faced with this development, the danger of micromanagement looms. Managers who, since it is out of reach, lose confidence in their staff and cause teams to lose productivity.
Thus, the solution is found in a tailor-made centralized platform connecting employees and reporting on their progress live. This platform must make it possible to manage the project as a whole to see the progress of the project and the overall workload of the teams, without micro-managing the employee.
In addition, thanks to COVID-19, we discovered that talents and projects do not have to be restricted geographically. Consulting and professional services companies can extend their expertise outside their local area. But only if they have the right communication, evaluation, supervision and monitoring tools to manage their resource planning .
2. Monitor performance to optimize it
With the dispersion of the workforce, a tailor-made overview, based on explicit and relevant data, is fundamental to monitoring team performance and engagement. A thorough understanding of the various activities allows appropriate positioning and organization of timetable tasks over the long and short term. On the other hand, spotting holes in schedules allows them to be optimized.
Therefore, event monitoring and reporting have never been so crucial. A solution like Stafiz allows teams to be placed on specific projects and tasks. By letting the employee organize their schedule and resource planning as he wishes, the platform allows you to indicate when the employee estimates that he will have completed the project or task and can be assigned to a project again.
Finally, employees must be able to report on a daily basis both for their performance and for each of their difficulties; and this in detail and to attentive ears.
Consulting and professional services companies are particularly concerned by these issues. Their work and exchange spaces can in fact extend from the office to the employee's home but also, and above all, to the client's home. This delicate and frequent geographic flexibility leads to distancing and increases communication difficulties. Report on your performance, clearly explain your schedule, work in a team, etc. are becoming significantly more complex in these areas and require an urgent response
Stafiz helps you manage your projects and your resource planning with more efficiency thanks to more visibility on your employees and their workload, and on performance indicators.
3. Maximize talents to gain productivity
Furthermore, it is necessary to identify and restrict each person's roles in order to maximize individual and collective performance.
In fact, 40% of employees report carrying out daily missions that do not correspond to their job description. As a result, this dispersion leads to a dramatic waste of talent. And possibly a loss of efficiency on the tasks in question and a reduction in the time allocated to missions that really match the employee's profile.
This dispersion has been accentuated with COVID-19 and working from home. This is why the search for profiles in Stafiz takes into account the criteria of availability, roles and skills. But also experience, as well as the wishes of employees: why not try to staff projects also according to the desires of employees when possible.
A large French banking group that uses Stafiz asks employees to specify the types of projects that could help train them and asks those responsible for planning to take this into account.
The focal point of resource planning seeks to answer “When, where and how to secure and mobilize talent, coming from inside or outside the company, in the face of this or that workload and this or that project? ". It therefore becomes essential to analyze and assess the availability of capabilities and talents.
Ask yourself the right questions:
- Internal offer: be careful not to disperse missions
- External offer: Where is the talent? How to find it and request it? At what cost?
- External demand: search for financial benefit for the company
Consulting and professional services companies, particularly because they are faced with as many specific situations as there are clients and do not fall into a protocol routine, have everything to gain from maximizing the allocation of each talent. What talent for what project? For how long ? For what ?
4. Better visibility for better responsiveness
A crisis, social or individual, like COVID-19, has a direct impact on the resource planning and work practices. The responsiveness of structures is decisive in order to deal with them effectively, quickly and in a relevant manner but also in order to learn lessons from each of these difficulties.
Consulting and professional services companies need to invest in tools that enable and facilitate work from home and virtual collaboration among their employees. It will be necessary to evaluate their bandwidth and update it in order to support these new deployments within their network. It will be necessary to periodically carry out stress tests on this network and identify alternative solutions for each critical task that cannot be carried out at home.
These still unusual reflexes will require great flexibility on the part of companies and individuals. This involves completely reorganizing the management of resources and resource planning .
Through a redefinition of work processes and the norm, COVID-19 calls on consulting and professional services companies to redefine, 'reboot' to draw inspiration from the Workbook published by Deloitte, the organization of their resources and their resource planning . The emphasis is to be placed on connectivity between employees, at all levels and even remotely, on the monitoring, evaluation and supervision of each person's performance, on intelligent maximization of talents and on dual responsiveness.
Stafiz helps you gain visibility and better manage your resource planning and your project progress thanks to real-time data. Stafiz is a SaaS management resource planning , project management and Business Intelligence. So budgets and margins are always respected and you make better decisions for your business.
To learn more about the Stafiz platform, request a demo.
