Using Workday Adaptive Planning to Manage Your Hybrid & Distributed Teams
These days, the average workforce is a hodge podge of people. Teams are scattered across regions and continents, consisting of temporary workers and full-time employees, all collaborating to achieve the organization’s goals and foster efficiency.
With shrewd management, leaders can use their multifaceted workforce to achieve greater flexibility, increased productivity, and reduced disruption. However, the challenges connected to these hybrid and distributed workforce models can also muddle workforce planning and forecasting efforts, if left unaddressed.
Leaders who effectively manage these blended teams rely on a centralized planning hub to satisfy and align HR, finance, and operational requirements. If you want to simplify the management of your hybrid and distributed teams, here are some ways Workday Adaptive Planning can help overcome your obstacles.
Deciding How to Fill Skills Gaps
Rapidly evolving technology paired with scarce but crucial functional talents has exacerbated the skills gap in recent years. For retailers, manufacturers, healthcare providers, and organizations with teams distributed across regions, this can create a pronounced disparity between the top and bottom performers.
Executives eager to elevate their performance benchmarks across their locations can do so with Workday Adaptive Planning.
Organizations can start by determining their deficiencies. Workday Adaptive Planning users are able to drill down into talent gaps within job profiles, job families, or regions by loading data from an external human resource information system (HRIS) and visualizing that information. Skills shortages will quickly rise to the surface.
By analyzing capacity across teams and aligning it with projected business demand, planners can identify where internal mobility or cross-training could bridge gaps. For example, if one location of a manufacturing company has underutilized staff with CNC or even AI skills, those employees can be temporarily reassigned to support functions or locations in need without requiring costly new hires.
Additionally, Workday Adaptive Planning supports cost-impact modeling, enabling finance and HR teams to evaluate the trade-offs between developing existing talent, hiring externally, or using contingent labor. Organizations can even plan by job profiles, modeling the financial impact if they need to raise the Pay Grade if lower-pay candidates are sparse. By simulating these workforce scenarios side by side, decision-makers can pinpoint the most efficient, cost-effective approach to closing skills gaps while supporting long-term business goals.
Plus, the ability to track your hiring plans against actuals empowers stakeholders to determine when it’s better to leverage contract workers rather than FTEs. Setting up a Workforce Plan that monitors the adherence to the working budget for Salary & Wages as well as Headcount Demand vs Supply, which can justify hiring FTEs instead of engaging temporary workers as customer acquisitions increase.
Simplifying Promotions and Succession Planning
Growth and adaptability depend on having the right people in leadership roles without interruption. To that end, Workday Adaptive Planning helps streamline promotions and succession planning by centralizing the data and insights needed to make informed leadership decisions.
Leaders can use intuitive dashboards and visual reports to identify top internal candidates ready for advancement. These dashboards pull in key metrics such as:
- Performance ratings
- Promotion readiness scores
- Skills alignment
- Tenure and historical growth
- Geographic mobility preferences
This centralized view allows HR teams and department heads to easily collaborate and compare potential successors side by side. For example, if you’re looking to fill a regional operations director role, the dashboard can quickly highlight employees with the strongest leadership indicators, skills in relevant areas, and even their willingness to relocate. Plus, skills mapping can surface overlooked contenders who might fall under the radar in traditional reviews.
And when you’re ready to make a move? Simply flag a candidate for succession in the platform, and they’re immediately included in workforce planning models. This automatic integration ensures that future forecasts account for the promotion by updating compensation plans, backfill needs, and org charts accordingly.
Restructuring Your Workforce
With the current volatility of the market, many organizations will need to restructure their org charts, reporting lines, and team roles across regions to adjust to tightened budgets. But without clear visibility into the workforce and the financial implications of these changes, restructuring can introduce more confusion than clarity.
Workday Adaptive Planning empowers organizations to manage restructuring proactively and intelligently by combining workforce modeling with real-time financial forecasting. Leaders can:
- Visualize the current organization structure and simulate new hierarchies.
- Model changes to reporting relationships, role counts, or team compositions.
- Assess how restructuring scenarios affect budget allocations, salary spend, and headcount plans across departments or business units.
For example, if a healthcare system decides to consolidate administrative functions from multiple locations into a centralized team, Adaptive Planning can simulate the potential savings, identify redundant roles, and model the cost of severance or redeployment. HR and finance teams can then align on the most cost-effective and operationally sound path forward.
And with scenario planning capabilities, decision-makers can model multiple restructuring options concurrently. Whether you’re streamlining functions, pivoting strategy, or adjusting to a downturn, Workday Adaptive Planning ensures that restructuring is a deliberate, data-informed process aligned with top-down workforce planning goals.
Unlocking Smarter Workforce Planning Software
The ability to manage hybrid and distributed workforce models is only the start with Workday Adaptive Planning. This workforce planning tool equips organizations with a robust, unified platform that brings workforce and financial planning into perfect alignment.
Whether you’re identifying and closing skills gaps, modeling restructuring scenarios, or preparing the next generation of leaders, Adaptive Planning gives you the real-time data and forecasting power needed to act decisively and proactively. With an experienced Workday Services Partner like TEKLEIGH, you can implement and optimize this workforce management tool.
TEKLEIGH brings the strategic insight and hands-on experience required to tailor Workday Adaptive Planning to your unique organizational structure, workforce composition, and growth goals. From aligning configurations with your business model to training stakeholders and optimizing dashboards for your KPIs, TEKLEIGH ensures that the platform becomes a seamless extension of your decision-making process.