Leveraging Workforce Analytics for Labor Strategy and Growth Plans
Overview
One of the world’s leading customer experience outsource providers, serving over 70 countries worldwide, partnered with hrQ to conduct a comprehensive Labor Analysis with the goal of developing a new Labor Strategy to optimize its current operations and provide a platform for enhanced future growth. This labor strategy needed to be nimble, and allow the organization to rapidly adjust to changing market and economic conditions.
Opportunity
The organization was seeking to accelerate its growth and optimize its current operations. To do this, it needed to look at all aspects of its current state including locations, labor skills, costs, automation, service models, and other factors. The organization also needed to determine how it would fuel its future growth including what locations would be best, where they would find the labor force of the future, and how they would control their key operational costs (labor and facilities) over time to ensure their growth would be profitable. Out of hrQ’s work, additional opportunities such as reducing turnover were discovered and addressed based on their potential impact on profitable growth.
How hrQ Helped
The hrQ team used comprehensive data analysis to review several key areas including how to source labor, optimize labor cost, optimize labor location, and how to respond to outside economic factors. Simulations of different business growth and economic scenarios that help drive workforce strategy were used to test the proposed strategies to confirm the organization had the best options available to respond to potential economic shifts that may occur in the future.
To ensure the workforce planning efforts are in step with their growth strategy, hrQ stress tested their highest concentrated industry sectors for potential vulnerabilities during economic downturns. To determine increased revenue opportunities, hrQ analyzed prospective growth areas in new sectors to find the opportunities most aligned with the organization’s business model. Next, hrQ provided a national analysis, by county, of future workforce resources based on a number of demographics including education level, wage standards, competition and cost of living to ensure new locations were successful and set up to grow a thriving community of employees.
Based on the analysis, the organization was able to identify new sources of talent and build a resilient labor strategy that could respond to changing costs, competitor actions, and regulatory changes.
Results
*Enhanced labor strategy to reduce cost and optimize locations
* Optimized location footprint including targets for new locations that improve labor pool availability, skills, costs, and long-term supply
* Developed approaches to heighten productivity in existing centers including increased use of call center simulations
* Identified priority growth sectors based on maximizing the existing and new potential labor forces
*Developed additional analytics to determine viable future locations based on long-term labor factors
* Recommended new screening tools to improve quality of hire and retention, as well as new coaching and retention programs to reduce turnover
* Wage adjustment recommendations to aid in retaining and attracting talent