Workforce planning

This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. (March 2009)

This article appears to contain a large number of buzzwords. Please help rewrite this article to make it more concrete and meaningful.

This article contains instructions, advice, or how-to content. The purpose of Wikipedia is to present facts, not to train. Please help improve this article either by rewriting the how-to content or by moving it to Wikiversity or Wikibooks.

Strategic Workforce Planning is the business process for ensuring that an organization has suitable access to talent to ensure future business success. Access to talent includes considering all potential access sources (employment, contracting out, partnerships, changing business activities to modify the types of talent required, etc. By talent is meant the skills, knowledge, predisposition and ability to undertake required activities including decisions making. Strategic Planning considers the business risks concerning insufficient, disrupted, mis-deployed talent on the organization's business priorities.

Strategic Workforce Planning is analogous to the treasurer role which is concerned with ensuring the organization has suitable access to working capital. This role also looks at multiple sources for access and similar risks to those mentioned above.

One of the more restrictive and potentially dangerous assumptions is that Strategic Planning is only about talent in the form of employees. Hiring is a strategy for accessing talent and will often be the superior one. However, the use of employees to meet talent needs carries with it unique risks that can be mitigated using alternative access sourcing arrangements. Regardless of the access source used, insightful assessment of the strategy's attendant business risk is prudent.

The process for starting out Strategic Workforce Planning is link with the organization's strategy. This means identifying the critical talent needs that if not met can materially adversely impact business success. Once the business risks are fully appreciated then attention turns to schedule and timing. Assessing current internal capability and assessing its relative position when it will be called upon in the future. Speculating on future sourcing options and identifying the preferred sourcing option. Implementation and execution follow. Attention to periodically reviewing the "sanity" of the current plan is prudent.

Workforce analytics approach

The focus is to analyse current and historical employee data to identify key relationships among variables and use this to provide 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 organization has ‘today’.

Future Workforce View

Future View is determining the organization’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 organizational 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 organization 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.