No one likes losing good talent. After all, high employee churn is not only bad for morale, it’s also a costly problem for employers. According to Gallup, “The cost of replacing an individual employee can range from one-half to two times the employee's annual salary—and that's a conservative estimate.” This cost is largely driven by the productivity lost while finding a replacement and the time cost of ramping up replacement employees. So, imagine you have an employee who earns $80,000 per year. Their departure could cost you anywhere from $40,000 to $160,000. With annual turnover at 12-15%, this scenario can easily scale to 100 employees and you’ve got a multi-million-dollar problem on your hands.
If you appreciate the math, than reducing employee turnover should be a huge focus for every business owner. And here’s how the right resource planning solution can help.
1. Resource planning improves communication and collaboration.
Like it or not, remote and hybrid work is here to stay. Why? The benefits are obvious.
- Less commuting
- Larger hiring pools
- Lower office overhead
Having a flexible workplace is just too valuable for organizations to refuse, but, with disparate teams, communication and collaboration become inherently more difficult. Modern resource planning tools, however, provide employees with a real-time picture of what’s happening inside the organization. They bring everyone into the conversation, which allows organizations of all sizes to work as a cohesive unit (regardless of how many miles separate their employees). A capacity planning heatmap allows you to easily split time between competition project, engagement and initiatives to properly prioritize cross project collaboration while avoiding overbooking.
Having a platform dedicated to improving communication and clarity across the board will ultimately change relationships throughout the organization for the better.
2. Resource planning increases employee retention.
Per this Gallup study, unmanageable workloads are one of the main causes of burnout, which manifests in exhaustion, reduced mental and physical health, and ultimately, resignation. But with an intelligent resource management solution, managers can automatically track who’s working on what. A capacity planning heatmap allows you to see who is at capacity and who can take on more work, splitting time and determining priorities across competing projects, helping circumvent burnout before it becomes an issue.
3. Resource planning tracks workload demand.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way employers could forecast when they need to hire more employees—and more specifically, what positions they need to fill? Well, by tracking workload demand, the best resource management solutions can flag hiring needs before the volume of work spirals out of control. Having this level of workload visibility is critical to effective operations as it provides leaders with the data they need to manage proactively, rather than reactively.
4. Resource planning reveals growth opportunities and monitors engagement.
By analyzing historical employee data, managers can use resource planning to understand their employees’ skills, motivations, values, and career goals—and then use this information to structure professional growth paths. This is an important employee retention tactic as 40% of employees cite a lack of career growth as their reason for leaving an organization.
Similarly, this data can also be used to better assess the likelihood of an employee leaving (e.g., absenteeism, job satisfaction), enabling managers to fix the underlying issues before it’s too late.
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