It’s hard to believe we’re almost a year into the pandemic, which also means a year of working from home. Working from home has taught us many lessons about productivity, efficiency, employee resilience, and company culture. It’s also taught us that supporting employees in a hybrid setting comes with new challenges and complexities. As we look to recovery, HR teams are now focused on preparing for the hybrid workforce.
Many companies are still defining what going back into the office means. Will they need more or less office space? For those who worked on-site before the pandemic, will they have to go back? What will recovery plans look like? It will be an extremely difficult and daunting task for companies to make these types of decisions without the proper insights.
Not all companies have the luxury of having a 100% remote workforce, so a hybrid model will be critical when companies start to reorganize and plan for the future. Now is the time to get out in front of the coming hybrid workforce, and organizational design and HR analytics can help teams prepare.
Leveraging Data and Analytics
We’ve been working remotely for almost a year, and surely HR teams have collected data and insights every step of the way, right? Data on productivity, core competencies, employee satisfaction, training, and more. Unfortunately, that isn’t always the reality, and many teams lack the data needed to inform decision-making for long-term hybrid work.
Organizational design and HR analytics tools that empower HR with accurate data and analytics will be essential while preparing for the “new normal.” To successfully make the transition, HR leaders will need data on diversity and inclusion programs, pay equity gaps, hiring initiatives, employee burnout, preferences for home/office balance, and much more.
These data will be critical as you reimagine your workforce so that you can create equities between groups, map out new processes, and create and track key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor the health of your hybrid workforce. Your HR team will also need advanced analytics to model various scenarios and gauge organizational impact before finalizing decisions.
Decision-makers need visibility into where people are, both remote and on-site, and the ability to drill down into the relevant data. All of this information can guide discussion and allow teams to structure programs in a way that drives hybrid workforce success.
A Digital Transformation: Technology-Based Solutions
While it’s important that HR teams have the data and insights needed to inform a successful hybrid workforce, it’s equally important how they track and manage those data. Using multiple spreadsheets to manage data was never a good solution, not even before the pandemic accelerated the move toward a hybrid workforce. Accuracy is a persistent issue when HR manually updates spreadsheets, as is a lack of access when information has to be pulled together quickly for decision-makers. Not to mention, it creates a poor employee experience, taking up a lot of HR’s time that could be spent more efficiently. Now, the stakes are even higher.
A better way is possible; HR technology exists today that is capable of pulling all relevant company information into an interface designed with HR in mind. With the right analytics and organizational design technology, you can access an organizational chart and filter tools to gain visibility into the workforce and solve today’s business problems—and those that come up tomorrow.
Preparing for the Hybrid Workforce
To prepare for workforce reconfiguration and the hybrid future, HR teams must be able to rapidly access workforce data, make edits across systems, and deduce findings that inform decision-making. You’ll also need the ability to audit data to ensure accuracy for planning purposes and tools to track the progress of key initiatives like diversity and inclusion programs and pay equity projects.
The hybrid workforce is coming, and now is the time to get ready with a modern organizational design strategy that improves data accuracy and expands your capabilities. With the right tools and technology, leaders can manage the transition to a hybrid workforce with confidence and ease.
Euclides J. (E.J.) Marin, Nakisa’s Head of Solutions Engineering—HCM, has over 25 years of experience in ERP technology and HCM management. Before joining Nakisa, he worked for SAP America and SAP SuccessFactors, with key roles such as engineering architect and Latin America and the Caribbean regional service delivery leader. In these roles, he led various customer experience improvement initiatives and service deliveries. Now at Nakisa, Marin is a subject matter expert on business transformation through organizational design and leads the Center of Excellence, Business Development and the Pre-Sales team to discover customers’ business challenges and create enterprise solutions.