Effective Dating & Conditional Workflows in Position Management

Behind the scenes at any school district, there are playmakers at work — including business officials who keep the gears moving with systems and processes. While tried and true methods get the job done, innovations save time and foster higher-level strategy for HR, Finance, and Payroll teams. 

Those professionals focus on Human Capital Management (HCM) — an HR practice of creating an environment that supports people and optimizes their output based on their knowledge, skills, assets, preferences, and needs. Within that practice is position management, which allows roles to be separated from people.

The Four Stages of a Position Management Plan

Without position management, vacancies can be a surprise and often go unfilled until it becomes an emergency. HR and Finance often find themselves at odds between yesterday’s hiring needs and today’s budget constraints.

With a plan, the group can become strategists, advisors, and high-level playmakers. A quality plan serves as a bird’s eye view into the personnel landscape at your district and supports proactive, intentional work. A good position management plan includes:

1. Organizational mapping
2. Designating information at the position level
3. Planning and forecasting with effective dating
4. Using conditional workflows for approvals, vacancies, and requests

Organizational Mapping

This means to dive into data to figure out:

• How many employees work in the district, and where they work
• Which employees plan to vacate their role temporarily or permanently (planned leave, retirement, etc.)
• Where those vacancies are and where the budget can support the roles
• What the recruiting effort will look like to maintain quality staff in the district

It allows you to look ahead to plan, prepare, and execute to keep your staff strong and full next year and in year’s to come.

Designating Information At The Position Level

This means treating roles as separate from the individuals who hold them at that moment; after all, people move on. You wouldn’t field a team without first communicating what each player must accomplish to win, right? You’ll see personnel gaps, opportunities, and needs exist. When you start taking addressing those gaps, opportunities, and needs — moving and shaking — you need two key processes in place to make it work: effective dating and conditional workflows.

Planning and Forecasting With Effective Dating

Effective dating allows you to work in the past, present, and future. Without it, the only personnel information available to you is what is true on that very day. This means that your hands are tied — or you’ll be putting in a lot of extra hours — if a stakeholder asks for data and stats from prior years, or projections into coming years. It means that you don’t have the full scope of employee data at your fingertips for your own efforts to get strategic at a high level. Old spreadsheets pile up and manual analysis grows tedious.

Effective dating helps you be proactive in managing the fluidity of positions in a school as teachers take on different roles throughout the year, such as a sports coach, club leader, or grade team lead.

Add-on roles like these mean that stipends are tacked onto salaries at different variables and timeframes throughout the year. And of course, sometimes unexpected staffing issues pop up. With effective dating, you can easily pivot when a last-minute change happens.

Looking into the future can be even more important than seeing the past. With a clear view of the organizational map and position-level designations, the grasp of HR and Finance on personnel needs grows as well. With effective dating, you can date a vacancy that you know is coming (planned leave, retirement, etc.) and begin the approval process for hiring long before it becomes a scramble to fill the classroom.

Add-on roles like these mean that stipends are tacked onto salaries at different variables and timeframes throughout the year. And of course, sometimes unexpected staffing issues pop up.

Looking into the future can be even more important than seeing the past. With a clear view of the organizational map and position-level designations, the grasp of HR and Finance on personnel needs grows as well. With effective dating, you can date a vacancy that you know is coming (planned leave, retirement, etc.) and begin the approval process for hiring long before it becomes a scramble to fill the classroom.

Conditional Workflows for Approvals, Vacancies, and Requests

So, let’s say you begin that approval process for hiring. What does it look like? There’s the old way, and then there’s the more efficient way, supported by conditional workflows. In the old way, a seasoned HR professional, Amy, has been manually processing approvals for years:

1. She prints the form
2. She walks the halls over the course of a few days, seeking signatures from the principal, Finance officer, and department chair
3. She catches the Finance officer on day one, department chair on day two, and principal on day three (after an email thread, of course)
4. She stays late a few days during the week, finishing up work that didn’t get done during the day

It’s not that Amy doesn’t want to say hello to colleagues or get a few steps in — it’s just that time-consuming, unsuccessful laps in the hallway pour her valuable time down the drain. She’d rather choose where to take that walk — say, in her own neighborhood after the workday is done.

A Better Way

With conditional workflows, approvals become part of an automated process. Each stakeholder in the role is included in the workflow and receives an alert when it’s time to review the role, materials, and give approval. HR and Finance are connected, with all the pertinent information in a shared space to work from, together. And as for Amy’s hellos, well, they feel a lot better when the work is getting done.

A strong position management plan in place gives time and power back to HR, Finance, and Payroll professionals. Vacancies can be identified and filled early with a position management plan, and conditional workflows support the approval process so that the right hire can begin with confidence before it’s an emergency.

Conditional workflows make room for easy human interaction by connecting all the people in the hiring process. In fact, they do a few things:

• Break down repetitive tasks into a logical sequence
• Help HR and Finance process data more easily
• Eliminate bottlenecks in recruiting, so stellar candidates are hired and onboarded faster

A strong position management plan in place gives time and power back to HR, Finance, and Payroll professionals. Vacancies can be identified and filled early with a position management plan, and conditional workflows support the approval process so that the right hire can begin with confidence before it’s an emergency.

The right process enablement software that supports organizational mapping, role-based effective dating and details, and proactive recruiting, are powerful tools. It connects HR and Finance in invaluable ways to turn those professionals from number-crunchers and hallway-walkers to advisors and project champions.

Frontline can help you implement a position management plan at your district. Learn more here.