How to Restructure and Plan a Workforce
To get started, there are many ways to achieve a task. This is the way that I like to work and has worked for me.
During a time of uncertainty there, especially when money becomes tighter businesses like to look at how they can become leaner and reduce costs. But what is the best way to actually weigh up whether you need to move, reduce or hire people?
Research
This is to help you find out what the norms are. This could be using previous data you have or looking at what others in the sector might be achieving. Anything you have is good and anything you can get your hands on is even better!
Here I am not saying you are like others in your sector but this is just to help you measure what you need and where you are.
For example, if you work in maintenance and construction, it can be the number of jobs completed per day, cost of jobs, and maintenance spent and this can be translated into any business. If you can figure out what your productivity rate is then you can start to work backwards from there.
To figure out a productivity rate all you need to do is the below (which is the most common method):
productivity = output / input.
You can also measure productivity by seeing how many jobs have been completed in previous years by people and then dividing that by the working days in a year. That should give you a number to work from.
The number of jobs completed in the previous year (working days only) / amount of people = Productivity per day.
If we complete 30,000 maintenance jobs per year, divide that by the amount of maintenance staff we have which gives a very quick number as to how many should be completed per day on average. The key point is average, some days there are big jobs and others small jobs.
You need to translate this into your line of work.
What you need is a rough number to benchmark. You also need to remember that people aren’t productive 100% of the time, it’s almost impossible because there are going to be items that reduce productivity. so when we say people need to be X productive per hour or day, make sure there is some contingency in there.
Application
Now you know what the productivity rate should be, now apply those numbers to the current workforce and see if you have the right amount of people.
You should be able to see where you might have too many or too few people.
You might also find that there isn’t a demand for a job and you may be better off changing the parameters of the job.
Finally, look at what trends and market research is coming through and make sure that you are going to hit those trends by planning it into the current workforce.
Plan
Plan the new structure, workforce or area using the numbers and evidence you have and then start grouping them into relevant jobs, areas, tasks or structures so that people have clarity over the structure, line management and communication channels.
Once drafted, offer it out to key stakeholders to check and review.
Spend a good chunk of time in these stages, the change bit is where you will find out if you have planned enough or not, but the more time you can spend here to reduce issues down the line is time well spent.
For example, if you have a lot of data analysts, you might group those together, sales, marketing etc. It does depend on the structure of the organisation, if it’s a matrix style then it offers freedom, whereas most are usually a product or hierarchical and this allows you to group certain groups of people.
Implementation
This is where we go about putting in place all the items spoken above into practice. There are models out there you can follow and I would urge you to have a look at them. Some of them are ADKAR and Lewin and Kotter.
It is also a good idea to map out all your stakeholders as well so that you know who you need to keep in the loop and who you just need to keep updated with emails.
As you progress through the re-structure and let people know to be open, be honest, be transparent and make sure that people are kept in the loop.
Communication is more than just an email to the global list as many might like to do, however, offer the time for small groups, 1–1s and teams to talk about the new structure, jobs or redundancies.
A restructure starts when the organisation has become too inefficient and needs to reduce costs, however, getting to the restructure can take a period of months to make sure everything is set up and planned properly.
Key points that I have taken away from restructures
- Job descriptions need to be updated with clear roles
- Understand the productivity mark and numbers to have sound evidence, this stops decisions from being emotional and stays rational
- Numbers only tell a small part of the story
- Stakeholder analysis is important, understanding who the key people are
- Spend time researching and speaking to others, especially when you are going through a change.
This is probably a little different to your structured models and processes but I like to think this is an insight into how you might apply a restructure.
