workforce planning

Strategic Workforce Planning involves analyzing and forecasting the talent that companies need to execute their business strategy, proactively rather than reactively, it is a critical strategic activity, enabling the organization to identify, develop and sustain the workforce skills it needs to successfully accomplish its strategic intent whilst balancing career and lifestyle goals of its employees.

Strategic Workforce Planning is a relatively new management process that is being used increasingly to help control labour costs, assess talent needs, make informed business decisions, and assess talent market risks as part of overall enterprise risk management. Strategic workforce planning is aimed at helping companies make sure they have the right people in the right place at the right time and at the right price

Through Strategic Workforce Planning organisations gain insight into what people the organisation will need, and what people will be available to meet those needs. In creating this understanding of the gaps between an organisation’s demand and the available workforce supply, organisations will be able to create and target programmes, approaches and develop strategies to close the gaps.

Different Types of Strategic Workforce Planning

Strategic Workforce Planning is fundamentally different from many processes in that it is not prescriptive, sequential or linear. There are various approaches to Workforce Planning

Supply/Demand Approach:

This is the traditional approach to workforce planning that analyzes supply/demand to identify gaps. The intent being to develop strategies to close the gaps, so that supply better fits with demand. The seeemingly plausible approach is the easiest way of going about the business of supplying work force.

Workforce analytics approach:

The focus is to analyse current and historical employee data to identify key relationships among variables and use this to prode insight into the workforce they need for the future.

Modeling approach:

This approach incorporates forecasting and scenario planning. Forecasting uses quantitative data to create forecasts incorporating multiple what-if and modeling the future. Scenario Planning being the more useful tool where there are uncertainties, therefore incorporating quantitative and qualitative.

Segmentation approach:

Breaking the workforce into segments along the lines of their jobs and determining relevance to strategic intent. Provides a technique for prioritizing.

Steps in Workforce Planning

Though there is no definitive ‘Start here’ activity for any of the approaches to Strategic Workforce Planning, there are five fundamentals activities that most Workforce Plan models have: • Environment Scan • Current Workforce Profile • Future Workforce View • Analysis and Targeted Future • Closing the gaps •

Environment Scan

Environment Scanning is a form of business intelligence. In the context of Workforce Planning it is used to identify the set of facts or circumstances that surround a workforce situation or event.

Current Workforce Profile

Current State is a profile of the demand and supply factors both internally and externally of the workforce the organisation has ‘today’.

Future Workforce View

Future View is determining the organisation’s needs considering the emerging trends and issues identified during the Environment Scanning.

Future View is often where the different approaches identified above are applied: Quantitative futuring: understanding the future you are currently tracking to by forecasting; Qualitative futuring: scenario planning potential alternative futures in terms of capabilities and demographics to deliver the business strategy.

Analysis and Targeted Future

Qualitative and quantitative futuring creates the content for an organisational unit to analyse and identify critical elements. As the critical elements are identified the Targeted Future begins to take form. The targeted future is the future that the organisation is going to target as being the best fit in terms of business strategy and is achievable given the surrounding factors (internal/external, supply/demand).

Closing the Gaps

Closing the gaps is about the people management (human resources) programs and practices that deliver the workforce needed for today and tomorrow. The process is about determining appropriate actions to close the gaps and therefore deliver the targeted future.

There are 8 key areas that Closing the Gaps needs to focus on -

Resourcing, Learning and Development, Remuneration, Industrial Relations, Recruitment, Retention, Knowledge Management, Job design.