Nonprofit HR’s Blog

In the world of organizational consulting, a phrase that has become increasingly stated over the last few years is “We need to conduct a workforce assessment.”  A workforce assessment is a process by which your organization determines whether you have the right organizational structures, people, skills and practices in place to achieve your mission and strategy. To put it more directly, it helps you understand if you have the right people in the right roles to be a successful and sustainable organization.

On the surface, an external partner stating a workforce assessment as a need might sound like consulting jargon to sap resources from your organization’s bottom line. Conversely, when the pressure and need to conduct one originates from within your organization’s leadership, it is very likely that it is a necessary next step in your organization’s evolution to become more effective.

Workforce assessments help organizations:

• Evaluate whether current roles, skills, and capacity align to your strategic goals, growth plans, or shifts in direction. This is often an invaluable process to understand if you have the optimal people resources and are not overly reliant on historically inherited decisions about organizational structure.
• Identify capacity and skill gaps, with emphasis on where role function or people skills are missing, roles are overstretched, or critical knowledge is concentrated in too few people. This aspect of the assessment process is ideal for structuring a plan for staff upskilling, new talent acquisition, or even succession planning.
• Identify pathways to enhance organizational effectiveness, by reviewing how leaders and key staff spend their time and distribute workload. When formalizing inquiry on these components of business operations, it can become increasingly clear where needs reside. Commonly, organizations can benefit from improving role clarity, creating processes, optimizing decision-making protocols and ultimately creating an environment to foster greater collaboration.
  • These assessments may identify a need for a variety of possibilities such as staff growth and role augmentation, or even surface redundancy in functions which could free up staff time or organizational resources.

When do organizations most often conduct a workforce assessment?

In recent years, there are four scenarios that are spurring interest and need for workforce assessments. They include:

1. Recent Reduction in Force (RIF). Organizations that consolidate operations often find unintended consequences such as reduced capacity to fulfill mission or business priorities, or in extreme cases, are unable to complete basic business functions. One specific situation that comes to mind is an organization that downsized their finance operations team to better align to their overall scale of business, only to later realize that the role responsible for initiating invoice payment processing was included in that RIF, and the function was not picked up or executed by the remaining team members.
2. Maturing Operations. Organizations that achieve new milestones in their lifecycle are also prime candidates for workforce assessments, (ex. startups becoming more stable with their revenue and operating procedures, or well-established organizations that simply have a desire to create more effective and efficient structures in their next phase of operations, just to name a few examples). For well-established organizations, they often continue their operations using decisions that were made long before the current leadership and business needs were in place, and this presents a prime opportunity to evaluate where technology and market advancements can provide new insights into more optimal ways to perform their work.
3. Following Significant Growth. Organizations that experience rapid growth in business, increases in donor funding, increases in service offerings, business acquisitions, or simply were able to effectively scale operations are also good candidates for workforce assessments. It is not uncommon for organizations to outgrow their structures over time and this assessment process can identify functional gaps that have organically developed along the way.
4. External Factors. Effective workforce assessments must also consider the external environment, including economic conditions, technological disruptions, and evolving customer demands that will shape future skill requirements. In some cases, these assessments are conducted to strategically meet a future state that is being anticipated to ensure long term sustainability.

Who should conduct a workforce assessment?

When your organization is aligned on the need to conduct a workforce assessment, the next question is often who is best suited to conduct such a process? While some organizations have staff with the right mix of knowledge, skills and abilities to conduct the process, it is more likely that the expertise does not reside internally. Practically, an average organization does not generally require ongoing structural assessments to execute day-to-day mission or business objectives, so external partners are a logical choice for the formal steps.

Whether an internal or external assessment is carried out, the key ingredients for success generally include:

• Advance knowledge of workforce planning and organizational design (understanding of common role functions, spans of control, capacity modeling)
• Deep knowledge of HR systems and practices (including job architecture, compensation practices, performance management, etc.)
• Advanced knowledge of applied change management principles (for preparing and actively navigating the realities of major organizational shifts)
• Industry and organizational context (nonprofit, public sector, and familiarity of related businesses)
• Economic considerations (understanding of external factors to identify a practical plan of action for sustained organizational success)
• Additional considerations for a successful workforce assessment process include the recognition that many workforce assessments fail not because of poor data, but because they lack:
  • Trust with employees
  • Strategic interpretation
  • The ability to convert insight into action

The most effective assessors combine technical rigor with human insight, ensuring the process is credible, inclusive, and results in meaningful, sustainable change.

What recommendations for action can be expected from a workforce assessment?

A thorough workforce assessment process may yield a variety of potential next steps for an organization. The four most common include:

1. Role augmentations. Assessment findings may also illuminate the need to add responsibilities to existing roles (ex. to offset for efficiencies gained from process development or technology advancements), or to split roles and functions apart to allow for greater specialization in a particular area (such as to formalize a marketing function which is being overseen by staff from historical ad hoc job expansion to satiate business needs with limited resources).
2. Role additions. The assessment processes can highlight instances where specific teams or functions are overstretched based on business needs, or can highlight limitations for improving quality or volume of outputs based on current role structures.
3. Role consolidations. While unfortunate, it is also common for organizations to outgrow certain functions such as manual data entry, or to improve the sophistication of their business operations. Some organizations may also need to engage in role consolidation due to exiting certain businesses, or due to decreases or halts in funding (such as grant or research projects concluding). Most organizations navigate these shifts over time as their internal and external environments shift.
4. Staff development opportunities. Even in instances where staff experience is aligned to the existing roles and organizational needs, the assessment process may illuminate opportunities for ongoing professional development to sustain that alignment. The recommendation to develop a comprehensive Learning and Development strategy ,which encompasses upskilling initiatives, professional development pathways and a commitment to continuous learning across all levels of the organization, is a common outcome of this process. Examples of specific components to include in that strategy would be documented for additional consideration.
5. Organization specific recommendations. While not always the focus of workforce assessments, the process often yields parallel insights about opportunities to improve processes or business functions beyond the primary role structures that exist. These insights are often included in final reports for additional consideration. Examples of these insights may include opportunities to improve processes such as performance management, information technology, organizational culture, development of key performance indicators for assessing organizational success, professional development needs and more.

What are indirect outcomes that may result from workforce assessments?

While structural impacts are the focus of most workforce assessments, there are potential ancillary benefits for organizations that strategically work on enhancing their structure and processes to optimize organizational performance. Some of these benefits include:

• Enhanced employee experience, collaboration and engagement: workforce assessments often surface issues related to burnout, decreased morale, barriers to trust and collaboration, opportunities to improve inclusion, and the need for more strategic and transparent communication about organizational change. These insights enable leadership to address root causes of organizational issues, rather than putting ad hoc solutions together to mitigate symptoms. Further, the topic of departmental or team siloing is very common within organizations of all types and leads to frustration and reduced organizational performance. In some cases, workforce assessments can illuminate opportunities to structurally improve collaboration opportunities through organization design or through manager and leader skill development. Ultimately, addressing structural issues can create opportunities to positively impact the employee experience for those who remain with the organization long term.
• Informed equity, compensation, and total rewards decisions: Insights gained during the inquiry process may help organizations assess pain points related to perceptions of pay equity, job alignment, understanding of career pathways, and consistency across roles, supporting fair and transparent people practices. All of these items are complementary to the direct outcomes of a workforce assessment and provide additional strategic workforce development opportunities to take advantage of.
• Reduced risk and increased sustainability: By identifying turnover risks, leadership gaps, and compliance or operational vulnerabilities, organizations can take proactive steps to ensure continuity and resilience.

In conclusion, organizations use workforce assessments to move from reactive staffing decisions to intentional, strategic talent management that supports long-term success.

Contributing Authors

Antonio Cortes, PhD Director, People & Organizational Strategy OneDigital, Nonprofit Practice  View Antonio’s bio	Juliet Jason, MS Senior Consultant, People & Organizational Strategy OneDigital, Nonprofit Practice  View Juliet’s bio