Position Management in HR: Key Uses, Benefits, and Ways to Get Started

HR professionals face a variety of challenges today, including talent shortages, rapid technological advancements, and economic uncertainty. To remain competitive, they need easy-to-use workforce visualization and planning tools that leverage position management. 

Position management is a strategic approach to defining, managing, and tracking positions. With this approach, organizations can effectively optimize resources, enhance accountability, and align their workforce with strategic goals. 

This article examines the primary applications and advantages of position management systems and position management software. Learn how your HR team can utilize position management to enhance efficiency and drive organizational success. 

Defining Position Management

Position management is the strategic process of defining, managing, and tracking positions within an organization. It is often used by HR for insight into an organization and workforce planning. Our article What Is Position Management in HR and Why It Matters explains the concept in more depth, including why it’s critical for modern HR leaders.

Position Management involves creating a clear structure and hierarchy of positions and responsibilities, and optimizing positions to support long-term business goals. 

Organizations primarily use position management to plan resource and budget allocation, track position vacancies, support strategic objectives, facilitate succession planning, and optimize compensation and benefits packages.

Without effective position management, many organizations base their strategy, structure, and organizational design solely on employees. However, there are clear benefits to analyzing a position-based structure versus an employee-based structure, including prioritizing what positions the organization needs to succeed. Then, all employees can be fairly considered for roles for which they are suited.

The Differences Between Position Management and Employee Organizational Planning 

Position management, planning, and employee planning serve distinct purposes within an organization.

When planning an organizational structure, leaders agree that position management planning is the most straightforward approach. It enables HR first to assess the positions and resources that will establish an organization for success.

McKinsey reports, “One of the most common and commonly ignored rules of organizational redesign is to focus on roles first, then on people,” in their best practices, “Getting organizational redesign right.” To be most effective in organizational planning, organizations need a position management system. 

This differs from employee planning, which is used to assess and build an organization around specific employees. Let’s compare the differences:

	Position Management Planning	Employee Planning
Description	Organizational plans built on positions needed at an organization, including vacant positions	Organizational plans built on employees currently at the organization
Uses	Define Positions & Goals: Outline duties, responsibilities, and required qualifications for each position and track these to organizational goals. Budget and Resource Tracking: Accurately track the budget and resources of each position and department View Vacancies: Visualize position vacancies alongside filled positions	Track Employee Performance: Evaluate the performance of individual employees Workload Allocation: Structure an organization based on the current employee workload
Best For	Long-term planning and analysis Organizational restructuring Succession planning Compensation design	Day-to-day decision-making Performance reviews Workload allocation

What Is Position Management Software?

Position management software is a tool that helps organizations define, organize, and manage job positions independently of the employees who fill them. As such, it is most commonly used for strategic workforce planning, including restructuring, mergers, and acquisitions. 

Unlike HR systems that focus on individual employee records, this software centers on the organizational position structure. It can track each role’s title, department, reporting relationships, responsibilities, status (filled or vacant), budgeted salary, and other data points. 

By creating a centralized database of all positions, companies gain greater visibility into their workforce and can plan more effectively for growth, restructuring, or succession.

This type of software is beneficial for organizations aiming to align their HR and financial planning. It enables HR teams to forecast staffing needs, maintain control over headcount, and ensure hiring aligns with approved budgets and organizational goals. Whether you’re planning future hires, modeling organizational chart changes, or ensuring compliance with job classification standards, workforce planning software provides the foundation for making strategic, data-driven decisions about your workforce.

What is Skills-Based Workforce Planning Software?

Certain position management software tools also offer skills-based workforce planning. Skills-based workforce planning software enables organizations to align their talent strategy with business needs by focusing on the skills employees possess or require, alongside their organization’s positions.  

This type of software helps identify current skill sets across the workforce, maps them against future requirements, and uncovers skill gaps that may hinder growth or transformation. By organizing workforce data around capabilities, it enables HR and business leaders to make more informed decisions about hiring, reskilling, and redeploying talent.

Key Workforce Challenges without a Strategic Workforce Planning Software 

Without strategic workforce planning software or a skills-based workforce planning system, organizations can face significant challenges that impact productivity, efficiency, and overall success. 

Challenges of workforce planning without basic position management capabilities include:

• Workforce Imbalance & Unnecessary Hiring: If your organization does not have clear insight into position responsibilities and position vacancies, there is an increased likelihood that you are under- or overstaffed. For example, if you lack clear insight into vacancies at your organization, you may be overhiring.  
• Role & Accountability Confusion: Unclear position responsibilities lead to inefficiency and reduced accountability. For example, you could have two positions performing the same function, but they report to different managers, so you do not see the overlap. 
• Career Stagnation: The inability to consider how positions progress over time can lead to employee dissatisfaction and increased turnover. For example, an employee who has been in the same role for years feels too stagnant. They are unsure how to advance their career within the organization and are considering leaving for new opportunities.

Key Uses and Benefits of Position Management

HR departments most commonly use Position Management plans and strategies to help assess and restructure an organization. This includes:

• Insight into position budgets, headcount, performance, and vacancies
• Restructuring for organization expansion or reduction in force by position
• Merger and Acquisition planning by position
• Insight into position history and succession planning

The benefits of using position management for organizational insight and planning are:

Workforce Optimization	Align positions with organizational goals to ensure you have the correct number of employees with the necessary skill sets in the right roles, thereby preventing overstaffing or understaffing.
Budget Optimization	Track your position budgets to ensure you stay within your allocated resources.
Enhanced Career Development	Create clear career paths and growth opportunities to help retain top talent and foster a positive work environment.
Strategic Alignment	Align positions to the organization’s long-term strategic objectives, driving greater focus, efficiency, and innovation.
Proactive Workforce Planning	Anticipate future hiring needs by analyzing current and previous position structures, enabling you to develop a well-prepared workforce that supports growth.

Key Steps for Implementing & Using Position Management Software

What does it take to implement effective position management within your organization? Follow the action steps below to build a framework for success. 

Step 1: Map all Positions & Vacancies

The first step in having an effective position management strategy is to have an accurate representation of all your organization’s positions, vacancies, position descriptions, and budgets. This will set the stage for how you manage and structure positions.

There are many types of position management software you can leverage to help you automatically build position-based charts from your HR data and surface insights about your positions, such as budget and headcount calculations. Look for software tools that either claim to build position-based charts in addition to employee-based charts or tools that explicitly advertise themselves as workforce planning software. 

Step 2: Assess & Document Your Organization’s Priorities

An effective position management strategy is aligned with your organization’s priorities. For example, if your organization wants to increase revenue, you may need to add more sales positions. Alternatively, if your organization is more focused on profitability, you will want to analyze all positions to see if they contribute to the company’s success.

Step 3: Align Position Needs with Organizational Needs

Once you are clear on what your organization wants to achieve, model different position scenarios to achieve your objectives. Many position management software tools allow you to input KPIs, enabling you to track goals, such as target headcount and budget, easily. 

Step 4: Set Clear Career Paths

To prevent employee stagnation, dissatisfaction, and turnover resulting from new organizational plans, ensure that career growth opportunities and development pathways are clearly defined based on specific positions. Provide mentoring and coaching to support employee advancement, tailoring the development process to each individual’s needs where possible. 

A good place to start defining position-based career pathways is to look at position history. Many position management software tools allow you to analyze a position’s history, enabling you to see how long employees stay in certain positions and which positions they transition to when promoted. 

Step 5: Monitor, Analyze, and Adjust

On a quarterly basis – or when major organizational shifts occur – revisit and adjust your position management plans to ensure they remain relevant and practical. 

As always, aim to analyze workforce data to identify trends and make better decisions. 

You can also track employee performance and satisfaction to identify areas for improvement.

OrgChart: A Tool to Streamline Position Management

Luckily, effective position management doesn’t have to be a drawn-out, manual, mentally intense process. Today, HR professionals and business leaders have access to software solutions that can drastically streamline the position management process.

One option is OrgChart, an org chart software. It’s a platform to help you visualize and manage your organization’s position structure. 

OrgChart is a valuable asset for HR professionals and business leaders alike, offering a centralized platform for managing and optimizing a company’s human resources.

With drag-and-drop features, easy editing, and extensive customization options, you can plan, experiment, forecast, and convey various structural scenarios to determine the best choice. 

By creating a visual representation of your positions, OrgChart can help you:

• Simplify Workforce Planning: Quickly identify gaps in your workforce structure or skills. OrgChart workforce optimization tool allows you to visually map out your team to see where additional resources may be needed to support future growth. OrgChart also integrates with various HRIS software, allowing you to pull in the data you need for analysis.
• Facilitate Better Decision-Making: At a single glance, you can gain valuable insights into your organization. OrgChart enables you to easily identify reporting lines, analyze team dynamics, and make more informed decisions about resource allocation and talent management.
• Reduce Manual Errors: Eliminate the time-consuming hassle of manually updating spreadsheets, charts, or documents. OrgChart enables you to easily modify your organization’s structure and automatically update all relevant information.

With OrgChart, you can build a clearer picture of your workforce, streamline real-time position management processes, and ultimately, achieve strategic goals. 

Start Streamlining Position Management Now

As we’ve discussed in this article, following effective position management principles can significantly improve efficiency, reduce costs, improve resource allocation, and enhance employee satisfaction. It’s a strategic imperative that can have a dramatic impact on an organization’s success. 

While position management can be complex, it doesn’t have to be. Tools like OrgChart can significantly streamline the process by providing a visual representation of the organization’s structure, facilitating communication, and supporting workforce planning.

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