Name: Workforce Planning Best Practices: Position vs. Headcount-based Planning
Uploaded: 2025-04-02T16:01:09.430Z
Duration: 40 min 28 s
Description: Workforce Planning Best Practices: Position vs. Headcount-based Planning

Transcript for "Workforce Planning Best Practices: Position vs. Headcount-based Planning": Alright. Welcome, everyone. We'll we'll, we'll start in, in two minutes. Just wanna make sure everyone gets a chance to join. So today, we've got a a bit of a nerdy topic on, workforce planning around, like, position versus employee based planning. So, one of the first time, we do, like, a customer webinar like that on such, specific, topics. So, beginning of a of a series hoping to to do more in the future. Hi, everyone. I see we've got more and more folks joining. So like I said, we'll start in a in a minute or two just to make sure everyone gets a chance to finish their prior meeting. Yeah. And maybe while we wait for, for the webinar to start, couple of, like, housekeeping items. We're gonna be recording the webinar. Also, tomorrow, like, about the same time tomorrow, you should be you should receive, that, copy of the webinar. You'll be able to to rewatch in case, you wanna review some parts or you missed some parts. And, yeah. Also, please, if you have any questions, use the q and a, box. I think it's on the right side of your screen. At least it's online. And, yeah, just use that box, and, we'll do our best to to answer, live or or just have, one of us, reply. Alright. Okay. So 11:02, at least on the eastern side. So let's get, let's get started. So, tomorrow, we today, sorry, we we have a talk of, like, workforce planning. More specifically, we wanna talk about, position versus employee, based planning. Those are two models to approach you can take when it comes to, workforce planning, and both you can do, in pigment. So quick intro. My name is Aurelian. Everyone call me Aurel. I work in the customer, success advisory team as, as a PSP, owner. Basically, we help, live customers, with coaching, adoption, enablement, on the on the technical side, to make sure your, pigment journey is, continuing after the, the go live. And I have Haley with me today. Hi, everyone. I'm Haley. I'm a customer success manager at Pigment, based out of London. And I think since we're an audience of mostly customers today, hopefully, you you know what a customer success manager is and you've worked closely with yours. But, just in case, we, work closely with our our customers to make sure that you get the most out of the platform. So, quite wide encompassing, but, yeah, I think we can get started. Yeah. Let's jump in. Alright. So today, we're gonna, talk about the importance of workforce planning. Why is it such important so important to to to come up with a plan? We'll, get into specifics of position versus employee based planning in terms of the process, the architecture, what are things to to watch for. We'll have a nice demo with some very practical examples of, like, how it differs in a in a pigment instance. And then we'll, have sort of like a wrap up in in terms of strengths, weaknesses, and if you're, maybe some of you considering moving to a position based model, what are some, transition, considerations to to have? And finally, we'll talk about, some of the pigment features features you can use with workforce planning, some really cool new ones or ones we we really think you should, you should enable on your platform. Alright. So in terms of the importance of, workforce planning, maybe for some of you working in finance having been there for quite some time, if we can move on. Yeah. Great. It's it's I feel like I'm saying that every year, but planning's never been more, important. As you, I'm sure now know, hiring and firing can be extremely expensive. To have, someone ramp up, it can take four to six months, depending on the role. Also, you need to make sure you structure your team, the proper way, to make sure you've got, an ability to to grow and and scale into the future. Also, it forces you to think strategically, making sure, it's not just finance talking about the plan, but it's finance with, the HR team and and also all the the the the leaders and and business partners to make sure, you you have a strategic view of, like, how, again, do we grow and do do we scale. Keeps you ready for disruption. Again, we've seen that the past five, ten years with, like, supply chain disruption, COVID, work from home, and, like, geopolitical, like, changing landscape. Like, we need to be able to to plan, have a tool, and and be agile and and adjust. And and the last one on skill requirements, also something, we we can achieve and we can do with both models, maybe position based, a little bit easier in terms of, like, skills, assessment. Today, we talk a little bit about AI, for example. Five years ago, it was, Blockchain. Like, how do we make sure we stay, ahead of the curve so so we, we hire the the right folks? Okay. So we're gonna jump into, a quick overview of the two different models. When we look at employee based planning, we're really talking about the employee dimension being the primary data leveraged to build your workforce planning models. So in an employee based model, you have your existing employees, which are brought in from your HRIS system, and then the concept of what we at Pigment call, to be hired employee, which are added in Pigment for the purpose of planning and creating your budget and your forecast for people costs, including those potential future hires. So the life cycle of a to be hired is from when you create it to the estimated start date. And then when the employee joins, they ultimately replace this to be hired. So it's not as though the employee is sitting in a seat, but almost like a placeholder until they get there. The, two items, I guess, in pigment would have distinct data points, so you can have details associated with the to be hired to help determine the right forecasted cost, whether it be level, location, the different dimensions of typically your salary grid, and also to inform your recruiting teams. But, ultimately, the person who's hired for the role could have different details. So that is what we mean when we say they're distinct. From a maintenance perspective, employee data is typically maintained in your HRIS, and the to be hired information really only needs to be maintained for that period while you're planning or waiting for someone to join. It's not something that continues to exist beyond the point that the employee that that to be hired was planning for, comes in through your HRIS data. Both items are also separately mapped in teams or business units, however you structure your data, and roll up based off of your organizational structure using that direct mapping. Okay. And then on the flip side with position based planning, an employee is really sitting in a seat, and the position is the baseline of what you use for planning. So you can think about, the number of positions you need for the year. You might have employees who already sit in the majority of those positions, and you can leverage their data to help build out your plan, but when an employee leaves, the position remains. So it has, again, its own distinct data points, but specifically its own start and end date, to help you set up your operating model, plan for the longer term vision, and then employees can move in and out of those positions over time. From a data maintenance perspective, it does introduce a whole new set of data that does need to be maintained throughout the life of the position, which creates, you know, more process workflows, controls, whatever it may be. And then on the relationship mapping side, employees are associated with the position or the seat, but the seat determines the relationship to the business unit, the team, the department, whatever it may be, and any roll ups above that. So you wouldn't have direct mappings from an employee to a business unit. It's inherited through the position. Okay. So in terms of how the the process differs between those two, models, in terms of planning unit, like Ellie mentioned, when you're on, employee based planning, what you have is a list of existing employees. That's your most granular level you're gonna plan at, and also a list of to be hired for, your intention of recruitment for, the coming months, the coming year. When you switch to position based planning, the the most granular, approach is by position, and then you, you tag employees, to those positions. What we've seen with our customers so not saying, in terms of planning approach. I'm not saying it's, like, black or white here in terms of the bullet points we have. But, typically, customers with an employee based planning model will do a more like an annual semi annual, type of plan. It's mostly finance owned, and and then they they consult with the business, of course, but it's really, a model that's owned by finance. And, it's it's great for our short term planning, again, coming up with your budget, having an idea of, like, how much is my workforce going to to cost me. When we in terms of planning approach, again, based on, like, what we've seen, because you have to be a lot more, intentional with position based, planning. And, the fact that you need to create all those positions, typically tend to have, more, frequency in their planning cycle, up to, like, monthly, monthly plans. And, it's best if it's a shared ownership between finance and HR, again, to be able to maintain, like, the cost side of the house, but also, like, the the the list of positions and teams and that structure. So also great for short term planning, and you you could imagine, because, you're doing it more at a strategic position level, you could, have a a time window a bit, further in the future, based on on those positions. Again, not black or white. Not saying, boost cannot be achieved with the the other model. Just a high level, what we've seen. And, last one on the process part, the the vacancy, traceability. It's it's really limited to to employees and and to be hired, and the to be hired in terms of, like, the vacancy. And then when an employee fills that role, then then the the to be hired goes away. What what we can see with position because it's at the position level, position over time, you can see the vacancy. Employee number one filling out, filling it, and then another vacancy, another position another employee, filling that role. So you you've got a bit more traceability and visibility in terms of, like, how your positions are are filled. So now let's move on to the the architecture side. So quite a bit of content here. Don't wanna necessarily spend too much time, but, what we'll see in terms of the the pigment data model, is your usual, employee, cost center, country, months, department, you name it, depending on how you structure your data. On the position side, as we talked about, we're gonna add those positions in in top of it. So one more way you can drill and slice your data by. Data requirements, for for both models, we're gonna need a load from your, edge HRIS system. So your your workday, your your bamboo, your greenhouse. We're gonna load your data. What we'll see in the position based is the need to have also, a position, mapping. So it could be actually with, like, a position management tool, or something also you could create and and maintain in, in pigment. In terms of process, we'll see it in the demo. To put it simply, once when you have a plan with to be hired and you hire those employees, we'll need to make sure those employees replace the to be hired placeholders. On the on the position side, it's a matter of mapping the position with the new employee that's being recruited. So that's kind of like the subtle difference. The bigger one is the position data maintenance. We we've bolded it. And the fact that over time, that list of position, and the different level, location, etcetera, is gonna is gonna continue to evolve. So you'll need to make sure, there's a a process in place, for that to be to be done. On the reporting side, we've got limited, option on the employee side, because it's mostly done by by employee. So so it's great. It's I think it's, it's great to have your reporting by employee. But, like I said on the prior slide, the the benefit of having positions as well, will will give you that ability to to track a position over time and and how has it been filled by whom and, and and have that, that that great, look on, on the on the past. Okay. Last point here in terms of, like, complexity, what we typically see in employee based planning, because you've got data coming out of your HRIS system, most of you already have an EPM or a spreadsheet type approach. So so you've been able to to come up with a plan by, by employee. So it's pretty quick to operationalize, build in pigment, start using your model, create some nice boards really quick, on the on the position side. Couple of things because you need to to build that position list. You need to share ownership with HR, and and you need to to have that coordination. It's gonna be a a bit more complex. And also on the build, it's gonna be a bit more complex. So, something you need to be, intentional about when you when you go to, to the position based planning model. Alright. So I think it's that's it in terms of slide for now. I'll pass it on to to Ellie for some, some really good, pigment a really good pigment demo. Awesome. So we're going to jump into, a practical example here. So in this case, we're looking at, employee versus position based planning. So employee on the left, position on the right. And it's the same data being built up in two different ways. So for simplicity's sake, we have all of our starting metrics the same. And in this case, we're going to be pretending that we have a locked plan we're comparing against, and we're updating information based off of changes that have happened to the workforce, maybe reforecasting, so on and so forth. For this example, we're gonna be using the org chart, but you could also do all of these actions through grids, as well in pigment depending on your preference. And you can see to, at this point before we make any changes, we've got the same, headcount, the same annual cost, but they're built up in two very different ways. So on the employee based model, we've got total employees plus those to be hired that we talked about. And on the position side, we have a total number of positions with 10 of them being vacant. So going down into the org chart here and, I guess, a quick overview, if you've not seen the pigment org chart before, there's a lot of really great functionality in here. So you can click on specific, in this case, employees to see more details in the side panel. You can do pretty seamless actions, which, again, we'll see momentarily. And recently, we've released an update to allow you to filter and highlight specific information in the org chart. So, for example, now we're down in the operations department looking at rev ops and people ops, and maybe we want to see who of these employees are based in London. So with the org chart filter, we can highlight this information. Or if you want to fully filter out employees not based in London, you can also do so, which is great for some high level analysis. Alright. So for the first example that we're going to look at, we're going to take a look at Thomas Harper here, who's currently sitting in the rev ops team. And we're going to say, okay. Our new HRIS load has come in with some updated information, and Thomas is actually leaving the organization. So once that has updated and come through, we can see that Thomas is no longer appearing in the rev ops team, and we have a variance from our locked plan that we're now under budget because, Thomas's costs are no longer being included in our live forecasted plan. On the position based planning side, we'll do the same thing. And so once our data updates, you can see the little icon here letting us know updates are happening. Thomas disappears from that position, and it appears as vacant, but it's still appearing and being included as a part of your plan. So one of the main things to highlight here is that you'll see the variance is different in the two cases, in an employee based model because the entire role is no longer being forecasted for. It's a much larger amount versus in a position based planning model. It's really comparing your planned cost, for that role, against, what the employee's actual costs were when they were in the position. So in the position based planning model, obviously, it gives you a bit more traceability to see that the revenue operations team is actually now working with one less person than, they were planned to have. But in the employee based planning model, it's not super evident at a first glance to be able to understand this. From a a data maintenance update perspective, it really depends what you want to do next. So in an employee based planning model, if you do want to backfill for Thomas's position, you would go in and add a to be hired employee. So let's say we add a similar role. And once we put that back in, it'll be readded to your live plan, so that you can see it continuing to be forecasted or or planned for into the future. If you did, however, say maybe your rev ops team has become more efficient, maybe you implemented a tool like Pigment, and now you can work with only five team members, and you no longer want to backfill for that role, in a position based planning model, you would have to go in and actually close down the position, transfer it somewhere else, and you could use that budget, elsewhere. So that is the the first example. The second one we're gonna look at is an employee transfer. So, here, we're going to say Ronald Vance is moving to the people operations team. So we're going to do a quick change here, and we'll see, him pop up under this people ops team. And you can see in the cost from budget, variance from budget line within each team that change in, you know, the person's cost being moved from one team to another. The, I guess, the the framework we want to think about here is being able to understand what happened with that transaction. So it's not super clear that Ronald, moved to the people operations team to fill this to be hired position, which is maybe no longer needed, or whether he's moved into the people ops team for another role. Maybe they have greater needs, and the to be hired is actually still going to be available for external hiring. So you're not always sure off of first glance. There's not a high level of traceability to that. On the position based planning side, we're gonna do the same thing, but here we're going to assume that Ronald actually is going to fill that vacant position. So we're going to pull Ronald into it. And here we can see that, the budget impact is actually, nil in this case, almost nil, in the revenue operations team. Again, likely due to now there's a vacant position that probably had different cost assumptions. But it's super clear that Ronald was going to fill that vacant position, and that's where the budget is coming from. So those discussions become a little bit easier. Alternatively, you can also, in a position based planning model, move an entire position including the budget. So you're not going to fill a vacant position, but you're gonna move the position and the employee in the position. So if we were to transfer this position 462 as well as Sandra to the people operations team, in this case, you can see, actually, we've moved the budget, and the variance is still nominal. So really trying to add more granularity so that you're focused more on true variances, like adding a new position that wasn't accounted for in the plan rather than having a lot of fluctuation due to transfers changes within the business and people joining and leaving. Yeah. And so those are the two examples we prepped for for this, and we're gonna jump back into the slides now. Awesome. Thank you, Haley. Okay. So we wanna, like, bring it all together in terms of, like, strengths, weaknesses, and some maybe transition considerations you might have. So yeah. So let's go. Let's do it. K. So, what we said, what we see, in terms of employee base when it comes to strengths is, simplicity, rapid deployment. Within a couple of weeks, you can have, a model operational, and you're able to to start your plan. Led by finance, limited number of resources, needed. Make sure you, actually ask your different business leads, for for input and insights so you can come up with a with a great plan. But, if you wanna do workforce, planning primarily for, like, cost management, being able to come up with a plan or reforecast, it's it's really, really great. What we talked about in terms of, like, weaknesses, again, the lack of granularity, of, like, the the reporting and and also the so, like, the we call it the critical role insight in terms of, skills and taking a step back at, my organization, how do I wanna structure it, by team. And, because you you're really on, centered on your leaders and the individual contributors, within their team, looking it at a glance of, at a sorry. Lens, from, like, an employee based lens. On the other end, when we look at, position based, what you can see is the the that ability, to plan by position, allow you to, like, take a step back. I I have seen examples where you can actually do pretty much an entire, like, position based model, by, by position, without the employees. And, you could even, like, remove the concept of, of their individual salaries. Just look at the the position, location, band, have sort of, like, an average salary, and and you can come up with a plan that's, like, 98 percent accurate and that don't need that extra, like, security requirement when it comes to, showing salaries, showing bonuses, and things like that. You've got strong reporting ability. We we touched on that, and and it will help, will help you assess, skills gap you may have because by by listing, the the position, the level, and and really being, thoughtful about that that process will allow you to to have a a a better idea of, like, how you wanna drive that organization and how do you wanna tailor the recruitment as well. On on the flip side, I just wanna make sure we're, like, like, being transparent here, because it requires that cross team collaboration, creation and ownership of the the position data. It creates, additional complexities, so that will require, like, process transformation, that will require change management, that we potentially require, like, a a new tool. So, so I like to use the word, intentional here again because that's that's really how you need to think about it. So in terms of the pigment development, it's not not such a, like, a longer implementation. It's more, the work upfront to to make sure, you think about the the finance and HR process transformation to to get into that, mindset of position based planning. Thank you. Awesome. So, we're also wanting to highlight some of the considerations to think about when, when you're considering whether you want to move to a position based planning model or trying to choose between the two. I'm gonna start on the right hand side on the when and why. So in terms of organizational context and suitability or what is the best fit for position based planning, we've seen customers with really agile structures that have a lot of internal movement. So if you do a lot of transfers, if you have a lot of turnover, people joining, people leaving, it can give you that higher level of traceability to kind of filter through the noise and understand what has happened, what has changed. Additionally, if you're having, as I mentioned, high turnover or regular changes in your workforce needs for a very large workforce, sometimes you need something a little bit more robust to be able to manage this. And in that case, position planning can help address that need a little bit better. If you have specific operating models, so, whether it be team ratios, account executives to BDRs to solution consultants or on an engineering team, product managers to developers to designers, or other any other ratio you can think of. Position based planning can help to implement and monitor these operating models with a little bit more consistency and, again, using that word traceability. Same thing if you have certain operating models that you're aiming for in terms of the number of managers to, individual contributors, how you want that to be balanced. And another one is if you have significant control and are aiming for, like, a really high level of automation, it can help with that as well. In terms of strategic benefits, it enables modeling growth and reorganization based on skills, competencies, and levels a little bit better than employee based planning. And, you can align the positions with your target structure and your strategic goals. So, again, if you do have a specific operating model, then it it can help put that in place. It's also better suited for continuous planning efforts. So if you're only doing a semiannual, annual, quarterly cycle, having something this robust is likely not needed depending again, really varies. But it does help set you up if you want to do something like a monthly reforecast or always having a picture of a live plan. In terms of operational advantages, again, it can also help to automate your processes a little bit more if you require less manual intervention. Really depends. And increased collaboration between finance and HR, going back to what Aurel mentioned, because you do have to set up these processes and kind of build the framework around how positions are going to work in your organization. It does increase the collaboration between those two teams to make sure you're aligned on how things are gonna work moving forwards. With this in mind, there are certain investments needed to get position planning up and running. So, obviously, process transformation, everything from who can create positions, when can you create positions, how will they feed into our different systems, Can you add them into your HRIS? How are you gonna plan for them versus actualize those changes? All of those types of questions need to be answered. Change management, which is always a really important topic for something like this. We've seen with customers in the past when they transition from employee to position based planning. It really is a change in the way you think about planning for your workforce as well. So being able to, help manage that transition for everyone involved in the planning process, whether it be department heads on top of HR and finance or whether it's just centralized, a very important topic either way. There's, of course, an implementation investment to build out a position based planning model in pigment, of course, but also potentially if you need to add it into your HRS systems, downstream systems, whatever it may be. And then thinking about who's going to own the system and data maintenance moving forwards for the topic of position management. So who's going to keep the list of open positions up to date, make sure the information associated to those picture, positions is accurate. And, yeah, that's kind of a longer term investment as well. So we see kinda three levels of workforce planning maturity, more reactive and cost centered, again, less frequent planning cycles, without having those robust needs, maybe a stronger consideration as to whether the investment is going to provide and, address all of your needs where an employee based planning model, could potentially work without having to have as heavy an event of an investment. But if you are moving towards having standardized roles, standardized skills, or true strategic or design integrated planning, position based planning could very well be worth, looking at and putting into place in your organization. Great. Thank you. So let's talk about pigment features now. It's one slide I like. So I guess that's my nerdy side. And, its its features you you can actually, leverage and, enable today. So really hate happy to to have some time to to talk through them. So, the organizational chart, we had just just a great demo with Haley. It's a great way to, like, change, the the typical standard, I guess, spreadsheet type, approach or table, tabular approach where you can actually visualize everything by by team and and and also be able to do, like, all the the movement, the transfer, etcetera etcetera. So, really, really great tool I, encourage you to, to take a look at or or reach out to your solution architect or, if you have a PSP, happy to to help you with that. Data integration. So we've got quite a significant list of connectors that allow us to to have, using APIs like direct direct connection to, to your system, so your your workday, your greenhouse, your bamboo, your, even SAP now, you're gonna be able to to connect that and to to be able to to load that in. Even your, talent acquisition, like, data could be could be loaded into, into here. Scenario planning. I think we touched on it in the the very first slide with the importance of workforce planning. So, ability to to create, multiple, multiple plans. You never know how things are gonna are gonna go, so you could have, like, a a best case, a worst case scenario, and just just, be able to to not just have, like, one static picture of your budget, but but be able to to to to do a few iterations and, be, be conservative or optimistic. What happens if we we open a new country? What happens if we close down operations in a in a place? Scenario planning will help you do that. Map charts, I think that was released four or five months ago. It's a great way in your boards to have a visual where if you take, like, a a world map, you could visualize your your workforce throughout the world. You've got employees in New York, in San Francisco, London, Paris, and then you can actually, like, click on it, drill on it, and and get access to, all that, good data. I know the the product team is currently, like, evolving, that feature. Now we've got states and county and and all that we can, we can actually, look into. So, so do check that out. You should be able to to to create that from, from your board views. Sequences, also a fairly new feature. I think it was released last last month. It's gonna be great for your, end users. I really, really encourage you to check it out. Basically, up until now, we were, like, publishing boards and sending that to end users. Now we can, creating create boards that would be, like, simpler in nature with, like, a few task, and then we put them in a sequence. So when you send that sequence to your end users, it's kind of like a guided walk through where, it's, to somehow dampen down as much as possible. So, as a as a business user, I don't need to know much about pigment. I just need to do to come up with my plan, submit, and and I'm good to go until the the next cycle. So in terms of, like, user adoption, I think this will be this will be great. And the last, pigment AI, last but not least, a lot of release, came out, a lot coming, with, like, all the the agents, the the planning agent, the model agent, everything. What I do encourage you to to look at today is the, insights, feature. So once you've enabled AI and it's available for for all of you, you you need to to enable, metrics to be visible by the, AI tool. And then when you go in a board, you could, do a right click and and gain insights. And, if if we are talking about your, your workforce, you could look at your your headcount, and it's gonna give you, like, some insights in terms of over time, by country, by, by country, location, department. You can you can tweak it and set it up. So so it works well for you. And you can also have access to, the data analysis tool that will allow you to, ask questions directly and, and and then get, like, a a text to, text to view type of interface similar to, to a chat GPT. So lots of, like, cool stuff. Really, really encourage you all to check out the the pigment AI. And the last one I'll mention on the AI side, which, is the the documentation, AI, agent or or tool. Just like whenever you have a question, like, how do I do this? How do I build that? You can you can ask that, like like that, but and it will, basically do a synthesis of, like, what's on the community, and then add also the the the community articles. It's usually pretty pretty great, pretty accurate, and it, prevents you from having to go to the to the community and and check and scroll and all that. It it will give you that chat GPT type, server. Alright. And, Ismael, any other feature you wanted to to mention, Alex? No. Nothing from my end. I think you covered it, very well. Any, questions that we didn't get to in the chat? Yeah. I think we've got a a solid team behind the scene helping us with questions. So thanks for that. If there's any open question, Axel, Andres, Banu, don't don't hesitate to to tell us. Otherwise, we'll finish five minutes early and give everyone some time back. Yay. So as mentioned at the beginning of the session, you will all get, a recording in the next few days, so you'll be able to to to rewatch. And, yeah, don't hesitate if you if you have questions. We're super happy to to help you with any question, employee or position based, related. Yep. And, Karen just mentioned before you leave, please do take a second to fill out the survey. Helps us get feedback on the session and also understand, what brought you here, what makes you interested in the topic so that we can, continue to do sessions like this with topics that are relevant. Thank you. Thank you all. Bye. Thank you.