The business case for workforce planning is obvious and irrefutable. But the question for many businesses is, how do you build a business case for strategic workforce planning? The answer to this question is complex. However, it can be simplified by asking one simple question:
What are the underlying problems or issues you are trying to solve?
Organizations need to plan how they will create new jobs, retain their best employees, fill key roles and manage the changes caused by an increasingly competitive business environment.
The benefits of strategic workforce planning are well established: more effective hiring, better retention, higher productivity and improved process efficiency.
Workforce planners can help organizations to understand what their most urgent needs are today and where they might be in the future; identify potential candidates who could help grow or support your organization; assess whether there are any skill gaps within your team; understand how to align individual employees’ skills with business objectives; identify learning opportunities that will enable you to achieve these goals; foster employee engagement by providing training courses relevant to their individual roles; and much more.
Identifying talent opportunities and risks early provides a company with a competitive advantage
Enabling a company to build agile, flexible and dynamic workforce planning capabilities
Enabling a company to build future forward plans
Enabling a company to respond to market signals and business challenges
You're a forward-looking business. You know that being able to respond quickly to changing business conditions is key to your success.
You understand the importance of planning for the future, because you want to be prepared when it comes time for you to scale up or down as needed in order to adapt your workforce while also meeting market demand.
Strategic Workforce Planning enables them to respond to market signals and business challenges quickly, efficiently and effectively.
However, for over 15 years companies have been trying to build strategic workforce planning capabilities and have failed. They haven't been able to do it because they don't have the data they need.
Before using Faethm, most of our customers spent a lot of time trying to figure out why they were not seeing any improvement in workforce planning results despite doing everything right. They eventually realized that their data was not reliable because it had been entered manually and there was no way to automate how those inputs were gathered, which led them to make decisions based on potentially inaccurate information.
Strategic workforce planning is a deliberate and intentional process that aligns people, process and technology to your business strategy. You need data that is accurate and relevant so your business can make informed decisions about its staffing levels, rates of pay and retention strategies.
Just as important is the identification of talent opportunities as well as risks.
Your company's approach to recruitment should include a review of its current workforce profile in terms of skills availability vs demand; training needs; attrition levels; productivity metrics; diversity statistics etc. This information will help you understand where there are gaps between what is available today versus what could be available tomorrow if certain actions were taken now (i.e., increased investment in training programs). It also provides insights into which roles have an above-average turnover rate relative to others within the same department/function/business unit etcetera - these roles may warrant additional focus.
The right people, in the right place, at the right time. This is what Strategic Workforce Planning brings to your company: a clear vision of where you want to be and how best to get there. The first step is defining your workforce needs and identifying gaps between those needs and current resources. This can be accomplished through an analysis of labor market trends such as demographic shifts, skills shortages or compensation changes; it also helps you identify external factors that affect your industry such as technological innovation or regulatory change.
Once an accurate picture has been painted about current and future opportunities for growth within your organization, you can then develop strategies for developing talent internally or sourcing externally from other organizations in order to fill any gaps identified earlier in the process.
Identifying the right talent opportunities and risks, while they are still nascent, provides a company with a competitive advantage. It enables them to develop agile, flexible and dynamic workforce planning capabilities that enable them to build and execute future forward plans. And it enables them to respond to market signals and business challenges quickly, efficiently and effectively.