What is Workforce Planning
Workforce planning is gathering information about the future needs of your workplace and analysing those details. Mainly to understand how many people and what type of skills you’ll need to meet those requirements and then build a whole plan to train or hire new people to meet those future needs.
Table of Content
What is Strategic Workforce Planning
Strategic workforce planning is a holistic approach, where you observe your company’s internal goals and determine what’s driving more business to you.
This is a great way for companies to determine and deal with the challenges and unpredictable situations they face.
What is the WFM Technique
Workforce management is a whole process that you use in your company to optimize the productivity of your employees. It’s a part of workforce planning itself, where you figure out the future demands of your organization and then work on the goals you set to achieve it all.
Examples of Workforce Planning
Workforce planning can be done for different components, such as:
- Recruitment
- Contingent workforce
- Career paths
- Potential retirement
- Technology implementation
- Internal placement
- Leadership development; and so on.
Let’s say, you have to do a workforce planning for leadership development. It can be something like this:
First, you’ll have to identify the types of leadership positions you have in your company, how are they run, which employees are likely to be the potential successors for those positions and develop your training and mentorship programs based on it.
The next step is to create a group of employees who would be a right fit for those leadership positions, implement your training programs, and get the skills set you need.
Evaluate and assess each employee’s performance who has joined the leadership training groups at different levels and manage their performance. Based on that, promote them internally into leadership roles.
Finally, ask the current leaders to mentor them, identify the skills and development plan gaps, assign these employees cross-functional projects, and have them get external training if required.
Benefits of Workforce Planning
Workforce planning has a number of benefits. Some of them are highlighted here:
- It helps you anticipate and plan the change in advance. You can strategically define your key benchmarks with the right knowledge of your workplace and business objectives.
- It can decrease your hiring cost as you’ll recruit for big roles with the right requirements from the beginning.
- It can improve your recruitment processes by using analytics. By knowing the right metrics, you’ll know what the ideal skills and traits of high performers are; meaning, it’ll make it easier for you to know what to look for in the candidate for the exact position you’re looking to hire for.
- It can help you align your strategic HR practices with your business strategy. The policies that you align can vary from employee satisfaction and data protection to learning and development.
- It can help you retain talent within your organization and use it to get the best results for your organization.
What are the 5 Key Elements of Workforce Planning
The five key elements of workforce planning are the following:
- Determining the goals of your business
- Coming up with the right strategy, policy, and process for alignment.
- Finding the right talent for it either within or outside of the organization.
- Planning the finances in advance.
- Investing in the right technology to make sure the whole process is streamlined and flows smoothly and easily.
What are the 5 Activities of Workforce Planning
The five activities that must be involved in workforce planning are the following:
- Starting in the right strategic direction.
- Analysing your supplies and understanding what’s the current demand of your organization.
- Analysing the gap between the demand and supply.
- Implementing the solution that you have formulated.
- Monitor your progress as you go.
What are the 5 Rs of Workforce Planning
The five Rs of the workforce planning are finding the right talent in the right place at the right time, right place, and at the right cost.
It helps you make sure that the future of your organization is always progressive, and HR strategies directly help the business grow profitable.
Conclusion
Overall, workforce planning helps you train you take your organization to the next level at a reduced cost of recruitment and secures your company’s future in the best way possible.