Leveraging Global Market Data to Prepare for Remote Workforce Readiness

The year 2020 has, without a doubt, created many obstacles for employers around the globe. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a major shift in workplace locations and a heavy reliance on digital technologies to complete tasks, operate businesses and communicate with teams. Recruiting and retaining skilled talent is a must-have, as it’s the new currency for business and economic growth. As employers seek to optimize global workforce strategies, comprehensive data can inform better decision making.

Today’s organizations need to make complex and quick decisions regarding sourcing, hiring and retaining unique workforce skills to compete successfully in global labor markets. The role of HR is experiencing dramatic change as many organizations are applying remote readiness to their strategies. Luckily, there’s a data-driven tool to help.

The Total Workforce Index™ (TWI) from ManpowerGroup Talent Solutions empowers organizations to leverage comprehensive data and insights to address their unique and most pressing workforce needs. The TWI is the only index that examines the total global workforce (including both permanent and contingent) using a proprietary formula to determine the rankings of total, contingent and permanent workforce insights across 76 global markets. It uses 200 key factors related to the skills availability, cost efficiency, regulation and productivity of the workforce of each country. The resulting data and insights help organizations make data-driven decisions around their workforce strategy.

The TWI helps employers address the challenges of workforce planning in today’s dynamic world of work. As COVID-19 has made remote work a necessity, the 2020 Total Workforce Index (TWI) report is specifically focused on remote readiness and introduces new factors which help to measure the remote workforce capabilities of each market. This addition to the Index has resulted in a significant shift in the rankings year-over-year. The Total Workforce Index also provides organizations with a remote workforce even more options for finding talent with the skills they need outside of their present geographic location. This ultimately means these organizations are less limited by geographic constraints, which opens a wider pool of available talent and can significantly increase the diversity of talent.

The extensive amount of information available at the local market level can define workforce characteristics and support sourcing strategies, compensation levels and productivity measurements. While this type of data is becoming more readily available, it only provides value when paired with context, experience and deep insight. ManpowerGroup Talent Solutions’ analysts and experienced workforce strategy consultants work with organizations to go beyond the numbers and rankings to provide a deeper understanding of these workforce dynamics.

In fact, organizations can customize the Index to align with their specific business requirements and priorities. Organizations can then execute a precise talent strategy aligned to their exclusive needs while also future proofing them against a changing world of work. For example, a leading provider of engineering services was considering two markets for its new engineering center based on highly technical requirements and specialty talent needs. The company also was debating moving one of its offices to either another suburb or to a downtown location.

By combining the company’s internal data with the external workforce factors from the TWI, Talent Solutions was able to garner deep insights into workforce considerations at both the market and occupation level. A comparison of each location’s ability to meet the technical skill requirements, cultural fit, alignment to the client’s global organization and more than 200 other data points were considered to determine which location offered the greatest sustainable pool of talent. With this thorough data aggregation, the company evaluated the most ideal locations from a commute perspective, along with those featuring client accessibility and growing talent pools.

To learn more about customizing the Total Workforce Index for your business, including assistance with location strategy, remote workforce allocation & planning, or workforce optimization, contact a Talent Solutions consultant today.