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5 top tips to prepare your workforce strategy for Brexit

Published by Orgvue February 13, 2019

Published by Orgvue 

Britain is scheduled to leave the European Union in just 45 days. If things stay as they are, the country will leave without a deal and revert to WTO trade rules. As many economists tell us, this will have a profound effect on all businesses in the UK, large and small.

With so little time left, we’ve put together these five tips to help you prepare your workforce for the changes that are coming and to navigate the new economic conditions that are already underway:

  1. Use the power of data for better decision-making –Consolidate, clean, and continually update your workforce data using automated processes. You’ll then have greater visibility of your current organizational structure and be able to access valuable workforce analytics (roles, locations, costs, and objectives) to assess how your business could be impacted by Brexit.
  2. Elevate HR’s role in the business using actionable insights – Go beyond workforce analytics to use the latest online workforce modelling approaches. Plan for different Brexit scenarios (e.g. changes to visa costs, application time or maximum stay length) by considering alternative organization structures with associated costs and benefits to select the right EU talent management strategy.
  3. Turn Brexit into an opportunity for workforce innovation – Be as proactive as possible. Your organization is a living entity, so your model needs to be reviewed regularly (not just for Brexit) to understand whether you workforce is aligned to your investment strategy. Introduce ‘organization planning and analysis’ as the forward-looking, ongoing, and internal responsibility of HR.
  4. Form a strategic partnership with the Finance team – Senior leaders are finding significant value from combining HR and Finance data to build stronger plans for Brexit. They regularly monitor whether they’re investing in the right roles and functions to deliver business strategy and whether their workforce is achieving goals. Cross-functional collaboration is driving better results.
  5. Empower your teams with the latest technology – Liberate your team from struggling with PowerPoint organization charts and labor-intensive Excel files. Many FTSE 100 companies are investing in a specialist online workforce analytics and modelling platform. In doing so, they are reducing the time taken to carry out tasks from two weeks to a few minutes for a fast and efficient response to Brexit.

Together, these actions will provide valuable insights that can help you to model workforce scenarios and strengthen your business plan. Brexit is one of many challenges that British businesses are likely to face in these disruptive times, and that challenge will not end on 29th March. Planning for continued change will help ensure your organization is resilient, adaptable, and positioned to thrive in difficult circumstances.

Meeting constant disruption with constant design


For more information on how leading businesses prepare for disruption with data-driven organization planning and analysis, read our whitepaper ‘Meeting constant disruption with constant design’.