Completing a project from start to finish is like juggling a bunch of plates in the air. But if your team’s capacity is mismanaged, your project will fall apart almost immediately. Misalignment leads to delays, burnout, missed objectives, and more across your team. These implications have negative repercussions across the entire organization.
Workforce planning helps your organization avoid this. You’ll get the clarity you need to align staffing, policies and resources with real-time workforce data that reflects how your organization operates. You’ll see where teams are stretched too thin, redistribute work after a reorganization or make a case for adding new hires in order to best meet your KPIs.
In this article, we help you develop actionable strategies to understand, forecast and optimize capacity across your workforce. We’ll empower you to optimize your team to the best of its ability.
Why capacity misalignment slows execution
Workforce capability is inherently dynamic. What’s true one month doesn’t always apply the next. When executives don’t recognize this, they start seeing fewer results from the organization.
Strategy breaks when capacity isn’t visible
Workforce capability refers to the collective skills, knowledge and abilities of an organization’s employees. This doesn’t just encompass current competencies, but also their potential to develop future skills that will allow them to adapt to new challenges. When leadership doesn’t have insight into these data points, a well thought-out strategy will fail before execution even begins.
Roadmaps assume people are available when they aren’t
In theory, roadmaps help plan out workforce capacity in advance. But roadmap planning tends to assume employees’ availability instead of facing the reality of the current situation. Overbooked teams simply can’t meet multiple, tight deadlines, meaning multiple projects fall behind. When things don’t get done in a timely manner, the result is loss of revenue.
Workforce visibility provides a baseline of real utilization
Understanding your team’s work habits is key to maximizing productivity and properly optimizing your team’s capacity. Workforce planning tools offer utilization analysis and data tracking to understand your team’s current workload. You can run reports to determine activity and performance across teams, prime hours your team is most productive, work habits and productivity by location, and more.
See true capacity beyond headcount
When you start keeping tabs on employee productivity, you’ll learn that a busy employee doesn’t always equal a productive one. Workforce capacity helps you avoid endless busy work and instead ensures employees are properly utilized.
Time allocation reveals hidden constraints
Capacity planning is all about spending employee hours the right way. ActivTrak’s planning software gives you the data you need to create a step-by-step process for simplifying workforce capacity planning. Just follow these steps to assess gaps in capacity:
- Calculate the expected capacity for each employee by multiplying expected productive hours per day by anticipated days worked in a given period.
- Compare total employee productive hours to expected total productive hours to determine full-time equivalent capacity.
- Use available metrics to determine which team members are at capacity, who’s over and who has capacity to spare.
Utilization analysis shows where capacity actually exists
Every organization has hidden productivity gaps — time lost to misaligned resources, underutilized talent and more. ActivTrak’s Workforce Utilization report quantifies potential savings by showing where untapped capacity exists across teams.
In addition to identifying the greatest untapped resources, this report helps you establish a baseline of current productivity losses, monitor improvements quarterly and calculate dollar impact to prove ROI.
Strategize to match work to capacity, not intentions
To get the most out of your workforce, match projects to employees with the most capacity — not the ones who work as hard as possible. Companies waste 20-30% of workforce capacity each year through hidden inefficiencies, costing millions in unrealized value. Given this data, workforce optimization is no longer optional. Conducting a gap analysis ensures you see where capacity falls short and where adjustments are needed.
Your most important projects compete for the same limited resources. Individual projects across your team may have similar deadlines. Team members may suffer from over-allocation as well, leading to increasing burnout. When members on your team experience varying levels of emotional distress, you inevitably see delayed tasks and missed deadlines.
Activity Alignment identifies low-value work
Activity Alignment, which is a feature in select Activtrak plans, lets you compare time spent on high-value vs. low-value work.
Use it to identify which activities consume the most of your employees’ time. This includes frequently-used apps and websites for greater visibility into cost-output ratios.
Activities are divided into “Core” (high-value) and “Non-Core” (low-value) tasks, allowing you to make sure the right employees are reallocated to high-value work.
Forecast capacity before committing to initiatives
Your team can plan and anticipate which projects you’ll complete in an upcoming time period. But if you can’t accurately forecast your team’s capacity, it’s wasted effort.
Roadmaps fail when built on assumptions
A roadmap without data is just a dangerous wish list. You need legitimate data to complete an accurate roadmap. Without that crucial information, you’re setting yourself up for team burnout and missed deadlines.
Data-driven forecasts improve delivery confidence
Lean on your team’s previous capacity to make forward-facing decisions. Supply-and-demand forecasting leverages historical data to predict future capacity. ActivTrak can pull this data for you through three different reports focused on technology, workloads and top users.
With our Technology Utilization report, you’ll learn how employees used your software in a historical timeframe so you know exactly what changes to make moving forward. Our Workload Balance dashboard brings clarity to who’s overworked or underworked so you can ensure proper distribution moving forward.
Finally, our Top Users and Groups report helps you spot patterns in how people previously worked. With the trends you gather from this historical data, you can create an accurate and data-driven workforce capacity forecast.
Adjust in real time as priorities shift
Employee priorities are fluid. New high-priority tasks pop up, requiring priorities and deadlines to shift. Do yourself and the rest of the organization a favor by providing transparency into your workforce capacity planning.
When department leaders are given that visibility, they’ll receive early signals deadlines need to be shuffled around. That way, there are no surprises. Granting relevant leaders access to dashboards and alerts ensures they’ll have enough advanced warning to avoid competing deadlines.
Trend analysis highlights emerging risks and bottlenecks
One of ActivTrak’s many dashboards empowers you to keep tabs on productivity trends. You can analyze productivity trends on employee focus, engagement and utilization to make data-informed decisions on resource allocation. This data helps managers make data-driven decisions on burnout risk, workload balance and team comparisons.
Turn capacity insights into execution confidence
Best guesses and assumptions won’t get you anywhere. Data is what moves your business forward. When that data is leveraged in your workforce capacity planning, leaders will stay aligned on what’s achievable and realistic. This fosters alignment across all relevant stakeholders.
Executive dashboards connect the dots by bridging capacity to business outcomes. These dashboards help with not only workforce capacity planning but also delivering company-wide policies, individual coaching and other crucial resources. When you regularly use them, you’ll feel more confident in making decisions that are vital to the business.
Discover how ActivTrak provides the comprehensive tools and workforce analytics data you need to assess performance, streamline workflows and increase profitability.
