Many organizations believe that position management is something that’s only necessary for specific industries, such as the public sector or healthcare. The truth, though, is that there are advantages across a broad spectrum of industries, and this common misconception could be holding your business back from better organizing your people and having an end-to-end view of your positions and their impact.
Let's take a look together at what position management is, what the benefits are, and how HR technology can be your greatest partner in implementing position management.
What is position management?
Position management is a vital tool for managing your workforce and allows you to look deeper into the actual positions that make up your organization. With position management your team can define your current positions, determine the number of vacancies, define a position’s budget, and incorporate data points from other departments related to these positions to create a clear picture of your organizational structure. This information can then be used to make more informed HR and budgeting decisions.
What are the benefits of position management?
Beyond the broad advantages I just mentioned, position management unlocks a whole world of specific advantages for your HR team:
Track all positions and see historical data
Tracking all your positions and having a single source for all position-related data will allow your team to be able to make informed hiring decisions. Effective position management tools should be able to show a broad overview of all your positions, vacant positions, budgets associated with all positions, retain a comprehensive history of each position regarding the job titles and functions and the position’s past compensation and benefits, and make this data easily accessible on demand. When data is not tracked, this can lead to over hiring or understaffing — both of which can have negative impacts on your organization.
Identify job vacancies
While figuring out where you need to fill positions may seem like a straightforward task, in today’s job market it’s not as easy. By utilizing position management, your HR team will be able to take a step back and analyze which positions need to be filled and prioritize the hiring process to ensure the organization continues to run smoothly. With access to the historical data about positions you've filled in the past and which employees have gone on to succeed, essential skills that have been recorded for this job function will be able to help you make informed decisions about which candidate is the best fit for the position. This will also assist with formulating an offer once a candidate has been selected. In addition to being able to view the skills required and the budget available, managers are also able to see what the compensation and benefits have been in the past.
Another thing that’s very important to your current employees is growth. As your people advance their career, they’ll want you to give them career choices that let them grow and take on more responsibilities, so succession planning is crucial in order to retain these employees. With this in mind, position management will be able to help your team quickly formulate those succession plans while keeping the same organizational structure and identifying which roles need to be back filled as people advance.
Stay on budget and plan for the future
Without position management making it easy to organize and review all the data throughout your organization, it can be hard and overwhelming to see whether your organization should expand or not due to budgeting concerns. Uncertainty regarding the budget may lead to delayed decision making and can cause other risks such as being understaffed for an extended period of time, which can lead to employee burnout and higher turnover. By using position management, your team will be able to confidently hire the right people for the right positions without putting your budget in jeopardy. As your workforce expands and your company grows, the needs of your organizational structure will shift. Position management will be able to assist your team in making informed “what-if” scenarios and projections so that your steady expansion remains well-staffed and within budget.
How can HR technology help with position management?
An automated, comprehensive HR solution is key to efficiently managing positions, especially if you have a wide range of positions that are all very different. You want to have a tool that will capture an accurate overview of your workforce as well as data from other areas of your organization, such as payroll, in order to make informed decisions. This is even more crucial for companies that may have shifted the way they work since the pandemic and now have to take a multitude of data points into consideration.
Due to the complexity and amount of data, automated position management is key. By eliminating redundant data entry, you will help not only save your team time by avoiding entering and tracking position information manually from multiple sources, but will also ensure accuracy, avoiding uninformed decisions and costly hiring errors that may have long-term impacts on your budget.
Finally, HR technology that provides consolidated data from across your organization will allow you to have accurate, on-demand visibility into your positions, keep up with position budgets, and receive active guidance on next steps. Having access to reporting that is tailored to your organization’s structure will ensure all the decisions made regarding the growth of your organization are done so with as much information as possible.
Conclusion: Position management has benefits across industries
When position management is executed well and backed up with technology, your HR team will be able to have a complete view of your positions, what's needed, what the budget can afford, and if the right people are in the right places. This concept is applicable to any organization. Investing in an HR solution to help you reap the benefits associated with position management will inevitably help your company continue growing efficiently.
Of course, to get there you've got to convince your leaders. Don't worry, we can help with that too. Check out our ebook on leadership communication to see how you can move your organization toward valuable new strategies like position management.