What is strategic workforce planning?
Strategic workforce planning is a process of making sure you have the right person in the right place within the organization. By mapping this out, you ensure that there are not too many people available, but certainly not too few. Through business analysis, financials and input from the HR department, you can create a strategic workforce plan that meets your business goals. By doing this, you solve staffing problems for now and for the future.
Why is strategic workforce planning important?
Having strategic workforce planning is not only fun and easy, it is even necessary in the road to organizational success. For example, such workforce planning allows you to hire or hire the right people at the right time, keeping you always one step ahead of competitors. In addition, good strategic workforce planning ensures that problems are identified earlier or even prevented, gives you insight into expected staffing costs, competition and pensions, and ensures that you can fill important key positions (such as managers and leaders) on time. Ultimately, then, strategic workforce planning ensures that you are prepared for (unexpected) problems, which saves a lot of time. All this allows you to achieve business goals easier and faster.
How do you create strategic workforce planning?
There are many different approaches to strategic workforce planning. Yet the process toward it is often similar. Consequently, it almost always adheres to some of the same basic principles. For example, it is always aligned with the organization's strategy. This is because the organizational strategy defines what the company wants to achieve over the next five to 10 years. This is a great guideline for setting up your strategic workforce planning. In addition, good workforce planning always follows the 80/20 Pereto Principle. This means that an input of 20% will get you 80%. It is therefore important to focus on the organization's primary functions. These are the functions that contribute most to the organization's results. Finally, strategic workforce planning always assumes the long term.
How can software help you with workforce planning?
Without the right tools, it is difficult to properly establish strategic workforce planning. For example, many organizations still conduct workforce planning in Excel. Because the process is extremely data-driven, it can be difficult to capture the entire workforce planning process in Excel. Fortunately, there are several workforce planning software tools that help analyze the current capabilities and future needs of the organization and employees. With the help of these workforce planning software, you can discover the gap between the current situation and the desired future situation. For example, with the help of Treams' workforce planning app , you can very easily gain insight into qualities of employees. With this workforce planning software, you easily run reports that allow you to easily and quickly compare which talents you already have in house and which talents you still need ( Fleet Review ). After your strategic workforce planning is in place and you have begun to implement it, the work is certainly not done yet. Today's world is constantly changing and therefore your strategic workforce planning is also constantly evolving. It is important to stay on top of the process and must make adjustments as needed.