Good day.

We’ve been rethinking how we structure workforce planning, because our previous setups hit a common roadblock: planning at an aggregated department FTE level lost all the compensation nuance, but bringing full employee rosters into spreadsheets tanked workbook performance. I guess each org needs to find the balance between both of those things, but we were rather ambitious and thought about how we could have the pros of high granularity planning (real compensation and departure-date precision, person by person) and low granularity planning (faster performance, aggregated views for the higher-ups), while also minimizing the cons of them both (losing precision when zoomed out, and performance when zoomed in). Rather ambitious, but with a bit of trial and error we built a model with 4 layers (one for each of our broad HR needs), with each of them being connected:

1. Workforce Compensation Cost & Tenure: Monthly planning at the individual employee level for existing employees (base, bonus, benefits, taxes) with costs automatically tapering off once someone's scheduled departure date hits.

2. Hire Gap & Cost: Comparing declared hiring demand against active headcounts to see how many folks we need to hire, then pricing said new hires using standardized salary band midpoints.

3. Skill Benchmarking & Capacity: Mapping required role proficiencies against approved employee ratings across core skill categories, so existing talent gaps are visible before we actually start hiring.

4. Consolidated Outlook: Rolling our headcount into a live stock-and-flow waterfall (Opening + Hires - Attrition = Closing) and total employer cost view (this one’s the favourite of the higher-ups).

Curious to know what approach other folks are using: is planning done at the aggregated level with FTE placeholders, or at the named employee level? How is the handoff between department hiring managers and financial models being handled?