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Are you investing in FP&A for Workforce Planning?

Peter Popalis and Colin Sawford • Jul 21, 2021

The pandemic has created an unprecedented labour situation, and it’s compounding trends that were already growing pre-COVID. If your company is not worried about the war for talent already underway, you are already behind your competitors. Let us examine some of the major trends that have led to this nexus point for millions of workers in North America and how OneStream will be able to help you plan through it.

Is the Great Resignation real?

All you really have to do is Google the term to see hundreds of articles from large and small media outlets describing how COVID changed the labour force’s views on work, and the statistics are sobering.

In April alone in the US, 4 million people in the US quit their jobs, breaking all previous records. A recent Monster survey reported that 95% of employees are considering a job change and 92% are willing to switch industries to do so.

If these stats are not sobering enough, a report last week showed the employee to job ratio at an all-time low of 1.4 to 1. In other words, there were only 1.4 available employees for every job posting. This puts the war for talent into an all-new perspective. Canada’s government has a long-term view to help solve this issue by reaching a population of 100 million by 2100, mainly through immigration.

So yes, this problem is real.

What other factors are driving the war for talent?

What is apparent is that COVID is largely driving the increased resignation rates. Part of this drive is purely psychological, as people have had a lot of time over the last 18 months to reflect on their lives, acquire new skills and truly realize what their families, hobbies or passions mean to them. Often, the dreary day job, stuck in a cubicle working 50-hour weeks, pale in comparison to these realizations.

Secondly, COVID provided a real-world use case for hybrid and remote workforces. According to a recent McKinsey study, however, this hybrid model will mostly be available for just over 20% of the workforce and mainly for a highly educated minority. At Ascend, we see that most of your clients employ this highly-educated minority and may be affected by this situation more than other industries. For example, the hybrid model is dictated by activity more than anything. So technical trades and hospitality would not be good candidates for such a work model.

Another driver of the hybrid model is the gig economy that was in growth mode even before COVID. According to EY, by this year, potentially half of the workforce could be ‘contingent’ workers. These are non-permanent and non-full-time employees that are vendor or contractual relationships. Being able to plan, forecast and report on this new hybrid workforce is extremely important for organizations to succeed.

Why you need an effective FP&A solution

As a senior executive, you may have already realized that you are more reactive than proactive in your investments in human capital. For many companies, COVID created both opportunities and potentially even larger issues. Having a plan, forecast and budget for remote work, hybrid work models, and the plethora of contingent workers has caused a need to collaborate with departments beyond finance more than ever.

Planning and forecasting these critically important business-essential functions in silos is no longer possible if you want to lead at speed, innovate beyond your competition and stay at the forefront of leveraging the best talent in the marketplace.

Why the OneStream XP&A solution is world-class

Part of the strength of the OneStream platform is its Intelligent Finance solutions. It is specifically architected to address the complexity of financial operations, which expands the value of finance by unifying the finance office with all lines of business groups. eXtended Planning and Analysis (XP&A) is the extension of this platform for human capital.

The platform allows your finance team to align financial plans with people plans across your entire organization throughout all operational centres. No matter where your talent or hiring needs are, or in any relationship format, the tool allows leaders to make decisions at speed by forecasting and budgeting with accuracy and immediacy to take advantage of talent acquisition opportunities with the best information available for human capital planning within your organization.

OneStream’s XP&A’s Capabilities

Here are just a few of the platform’s human capital capabilities:

Import existing employee information from leading HCM systems
Easily add new hires and update existing employees
Leverage pre-built tax and benefit calculations that vary from country to country
Speed up data entry with pre-built data entry forms, rules, calculations, reports and dashboards
Integrate with other OneStream specialty planning solutions, including Cash Planning

This allows your finance and leadership teams to make hiring and compensation decisions in real-time and enable your firm’s agility in making critical hiring decisions with up-to-date financial reports and forecasts.

Expand your human capital information even further with these expanded features:

Empower users to create new plans, new hires and T&E scenarios without IT
Understand what impact hiring and staffing decisions have on financial results
Leverage pre-built global drivers for salary, benefits and payroll taxes by title, geography and salary band for real-time, dynamic planning
Collaborate with business partners across the organization with dashboards

With the onslaught of a global worker shortage, hybrid models of work, the gig economy and the Great Resignation all transpiring at the same time, it is even more important now to ensure your company is set to take advantage strategically when necessary on hiring and compensation decisions.

If you would like more information on OneStream or Ascend Partners, a globally renowned consulting and implementation team, contact us today.

Authors:

Peter Popalis, Co-Founder & Managing Partner

Colin Sawford, Co-Founder & Managing Partner

Sources:

https://www.uschamber.com/report/the-america-works-report-quantifying-the-nations-workforce-crisis?utm_campaign=JM-305&utm_content=r2xm54vr&utm_medium=ED&utm_source=for

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathycaprino/2021/07/06/how-professionals-and-organizations-need-to-prepare-for-the-great-resignation/?sh=5d6e67bc1123

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/09/career-expert-advice-for-quitting-your-job.html

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/24/1007914455/as-the-pandemic-recedes-millions-of-workers-are-saying-i-quit

https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/whats-next-for-remote-work-an-analysis-of-2000-tasks-800-jobs-and-nine-countries

https://www.ey.com/en_gl/tax/how-the-gig-economy-is-changing-the-workforce

OneStream, “Taking Performance Management to the Next Level with Intelligent Finance,” white paper, December 2020.