Why you should align your Headcount Plans to your Remote Work Policy

Remote work isn't going away anytime soon.

That’s because working from home has proved to be successful over the course of the pandemic. In fact, a recent Gartner survey found that 74 percent of CFOs plan to continue their remote work policies after COVID-19.

Even the businesses who will return to the office are thinking of ways to offer remote work options -- 72 percent of these leaders are investing in virtual tools to enhance remote collaboration with in-office workers, while 45 percent are intentionally designing unassigned floor plans to serve hybrid employees.

As companies grow, leaders need to think strategically about how they add headcount in the remote setting.

Why? One reason is simply preparedness. Rather than scrambling to accommodate remote policies -- like most businesses did at the beginning of the pandemic -- having the plans in place ahead of time can save time and ensure success.

But the benefits go beyond eliminating last minute headaches. Especially as business needs evolve and goals change, aligning your headcount plans with your remote work policies can have some serious long-term advantages.

Below are three reasons why building workforce plans with your remote strategies in mind can benefit your business.

1. Expand your talent pool

Without a remote work policy, businesses are limited to recruiting from the talent pools that live within commuting distance of their offices.

From a recruitment perspective, aligning your headcount plans to your remote work policy significantly broadens your access to potential new employees. When your employees can work from home, you can recruit from anywhere in the country, or even the world. In turn, you can tap into a greater variety of skills, backgrounds, experiences, and more.

This level of accessibility might seem overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. When it comes to headcount planning and hiring, it’s important to get strategic about the remote or hybrid workers you need to reach your goals. Instead of recruiting from the void, so to speak, be intentional with how you target the people you want to attract.

A platform like ChartHop allows you to visualize your organization’s workforce needs in one, dynamic platform.

With just a few clicks, ChartHop lets you see all of your people data, like demographics, benefits and compensation, tactical skills, and knowledge sets, in a single, up-to-date org chart. This allows you to recruit intentionally, by:

• Understanding your current talent: With ChartHop, you can quickly run a skills analysis to identify knowledge gaps, assess hiring needs, and plan accordingly.
• Targeting recruiting hubs: Talent hubs, especially in tech, are constantly changing. Visualize where your talent has been recruited from in the past to tap into similar geographic talent markets, or venture into completely new ones.
• Elevating DEI initiatives: Recruiting from different cities, states, and countries provides opportunities to everyone -- regardless of background, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and more.

2. Optimize business operations

It’s not just about productivity -- telecommuting can help companies save on expensive business operations. In fact, 6 out of 10 employers agree that saving money is a benefit of remote work.

When hiring plans and remote work policies are aligned, you and your business leaders can get strategic about how you’re spending money. A remote work policy eliminates or reduces the need for costly traditional expenses, like office rent or business travel. Continuing to hire remotely, and having the plans in place to do so, fuels major savings, so you can invest into other essential parts of the business.

Even if you intend to launch a hybrid policy, you can still cut down on infrastructure expenses. One way to do this is by consolidating office space. Maybe that NYC HQ is too expensive to operate when only a few employees are leveraging it. Or, maybe your team in Austin is growing so rapidly that it’s time to invest in a single office instead of multiple coworking spaces.

Whatever the case is, ChartHop’s map feature lets you see exactly where your employees are working. Combined with the proper headcount plans in place, you can strategize to determine where the best and most cost-effective places would be to invest or cut back on meeting space.

Think critically about compensation: Your team's salary model is another operational expense that can be impacted by headcount planning. Long-term plans for remote work might call for the development of a location-based salary plan, which factors in geography and local cost-of-living opposed to merit. While it can help companies stay competitive and cost-effective, it isn’t perfect -- value-based salaries are beneficial for providing equitable opportunities and building accountability. Whatever you choose, do your homework. Then, communicate your decision and its reasoning with everyone in the company.

3. Ensure cross-company alignment

Your company can’t move forward without everyone on the same page, marching towards the same goals. Having the remote work hiring plans in place ahead of time helps secure company-wide alignment, so teams can forecast effectively, mitigate risk, and succeed in reaching key business objectives.

With a tool like ChartHop, everyone has context and clarity around company plans. Not just executives and hiring managers -- with ChartHop, you can share your remote hiring plans with the entire organization, so everyone can visualize upcoming restructures, open job requisitions, and other hiring initiatives that might impact their day-to-day.

This level of transparency empowers your people to know where the business is headed and, more importantly, where they fit in within the bigger picture.

For recruiters and hiring managers, specifically, ChartHop fuels stronger alignment to accomplish remote hiring goals. With ChartHop, they can:

• Collaborate more effectively to know what roles need to be filled, coordinate interviews, discuss feedback, and streamline hiring decisions.
• Recruit strategically with robust metrics and reporting to review hiring-related data, iterate on recruitment strategies, and optimize the entire candidate experience.
• Foster team and cross-departmental communication to share information about new hires, implement onboarding and training sessions, and organize restructures as needed.

Get ahead of the remote hiring game

While the pandemic taught us remote work can be successful, it also taught us that nothing is ever certain. Despite vaccination efforts and the pending reopening plans slated for late 2021, companies have to be ready for anything, including headcount planning.

Having headcount plans aligned with your remote or hybrid work policy ahead of time has a variety of benefits: not only does it elevate efficiency, it expands your talent pool, optimizes business operations, and fosters company alignment.

Most importantly, it helps mitigate uncertainty. Even when things don’t go as planned, having clear ideas of how your company can respond in different scenarios -- related to hiring or not -- can put you ahead of the game.

The more aligned your headcount plans are with your remote work policies, and your overall company roadmap, the better prepared you are to succeed no matter what comes your way.

Planning your return to office but don't know where to begin. Check out our Return to Office Guide.

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