Strategic workforce planning (SWP) is one of the most important tasks when it comes to the long-term health of a business. By making sure that you have the right skills and people in place, you can ensure that your business is well placed to succeed in today's fast-moving marketplace. In this post we'll look at how AI can make long-term strategic workforce planning more effective by helping you identify opportunities for cost savings or efficiency gains earlier. We also discuss how SWP works best when it's not being adjusted every year but instead remains flexible enough to handle unexpected changes in circumstances or market conditions without being overly prescriptive about what should happen next if something does go wrong.
Many people think that the SWP needs to be overly prescriptive in order to work. This is not the case, however. Rather, it is best when it is not overly prescriptive and can instead be reactive as well as proactive.
There are plenty of other tactics that you can experiment with on an ad-hoc basis to affect your workforce planning, in addition to those mentioned above. For example, SWP may be used as a framework for determining the most appropriate location for new facilities or offices. It could also be used as a tool for identifying opportunities for cost savings or efficiency gains when moving existing facilities or relocating staff in different parts of the country.
SWP needs to be flexible, but not overly prescriptive. It should be able to react as well as anticipate. How does it know how and when to react? The answer is through a combination of historical data, user-generated content, and machine learning algorithms that can help predict future events based on current trends.
SWP should not be overly prescriptive; however, it still needs to provide guidance on how the organization’s data is gathered and analyzed. With the amount of data out there today, there is a lot of noise in the system. While we can use machine-learning algorithms to help analyze this deluge of information and find correlations between different variables, SWP can also provide guidance on which metrics are most important.
It's important to note that SWP is not a one-off, it's a continuous process. A prescriptive SWP plan doesn't allow for this type of flexibility as once you've created it, it becomes difficult to adapt the plan over time when circumstances change.
Workforce planning is a complex process, and the future of work is only going to make it more so. As more companies move towards automation and AI-driven processes, SWP needs to adapt to become more flexible and able to react quickly to market changes.
It's difficult to predict what will happen in the next 5-10 years of your business, but if you implement workforce planning strategies today that are forward thinking rather than prescriptive, then you stand a much better chance of being prepared for whatever may come your way.