How People Analytics can support your workforce planning during COVID-19

18 November 2020

Liaison Workforce

As a workforce or HR manager for the NHS, it is very likely that 2020 has been the hardest year to date in your career. COVID-19 has brought increased sickness levels and the need to allow staff to self-isolate or shield, which when coupled with rising demands on capacity, may have left your workforce at breaking point.

As a HR team, you may be experiencing an inability to conduct effective workforce planning, leading to ongoing uncertainty for your workforce. So, can you do anything to turn this around in the midst of COVID-19?

Writing in the foreword of Skills for Health’s recent COVID-19 Insights impact report, Dean Royles, President of the HPMA, notes that the report finds that workforce planning should be on a list of “must-haves” for organisational leaders to look to in order to support staff in both the immediate and long-term future, post COVID-19.

This is where an effective People Analytics programme can provide your HR teams with the trends and data insights to pinpoint high risk areas for workforce planning, including identifying staffing gaps and potential COVID-19 exposure points – allowing you to move towards more proactive workforce planning, and away from HR firefighting.

As in the NHS, large workforces create a lot of data for HR teams to make sense of, People Analytics allows this data to be streamlined into workable dashboards, allowing HR teams the time to identify the narratives coming from the data, and the actions they should take next to provide workforce solutions.

These actions can then be turned into workable solutions to emerging or apparent problems facing the workforce, enabling ongoing planning to be implemented.

David Jones-Stanley, Head of Workforce Advisory Services at Liaison Workforce, says: “With the NHS feeling the ongoing effects of COVID-19 on its workforces, there has never been a better time to transform HR data into usable information to allow HR and workforce leaders to make better decisions regarding its teams. This is essential in the aftermath of COVID-19 and will allow HR teams to identify the trends suggesting those teams most at risk of burnout or in need of additional support, amongst other benefits.”

Find out more

David will be speaking at the upcoming HPMA Annual Conference on Tuesday 1st December 2020 on People Analytics and the Changing Role of HR. Click here to find out more and register your space.

To discuss how Liaison Workforce can support your organisation with People Analytics, please contact our team on:

Phone: 0845 603 9000
Email: PeopleAnalytics@LiaisonGroup.com