Smart Bench Workforce Management and utilization to enhance brand value and employee moral

We as a team are all sports fanatic, so taking examples from our favorite sport Cricket makes sense. If you want to create a consistently winning or successful team than just having few stars won't help, it's your bench strength that would make the difference. If you look at the typical composition of any sports team for that matter, you'll see a mix of all types of talent: veterans, Upcoming stars and beginners. As leader of this team, the coach/captain is responsible for player's engagement, creating a strong bench, and ensuring every position is filled or ready to be filled with equally capable talent at any given time, despite of injuries, trading etc — all in an effort to win.

In any sport, there will be times with highs and lows, but most often, it's not the team with the strongest individual player that wins, but the team with the best bench strength. Building a strong bench can be as critical as creating the starting line-up. This scenario applies to service organizations as well; today's human resources (HR) departments face similar challenges.

In a typical service company, having Bench workforce is very important but at the same time effective Bench Utilization can't be ignored. Unlike sports, in service organizations, among many viewpoints there is are negative or wrong perception towards a bench workforce.

This can be verified by doing an internal survey or seeing past national employee engagement surveys around the bench workforce. We have to change the perception, mindset and make best use of these talented individuals on bench, by utilizing the modern techniques, innovative ideas and learning from other companies. Lot of companies are doing different things in this regard and adopting modern techniques to handle their bench workforce, which is yeilding great results. We wish to propose a Bench Utilization Strategy/Plan which will be result oriented and outcome driven. The long term benefit of effective bench utilization can be directly seen in regular utilization as it allows more bench buffer which in turn is very crucial for the kind of business we are in.

To effectively obtain, deploy, and train resources, providers need to apply supply chain management principles that enable them to forecast future needs, minimize excess "inventory," and quickly deploy resources in a just-in-time fashion. This concept though understood by many is not really deployed that effectively in the service industry workforce planning.