How to Build & Implement A Strategic Workforce Plan?

Introduction 

Today we are seeing a fundamental change in the nature of work – humans and machines collaborate to make decisions. The future entails further technology integration into work and life, even to the point where ‘adaptive continuous intelligent systems take over decision‐making’. The result – uniquely human traits such as emotional intelligence, creativity, persuasion, innovation, become more valuable. We may eventually even reach a point where the ‘future of humans at work is questioned’!

This digital-led redesign of work is forcing organizations to relook at human capital and its linkage with business performance, with a new lens. A lens that focuses on building organizational capability to meet both current and future needs. It calls for a more strategic approach to workforce planning.

What is Strategic Workforce Planning? 

Strategic workforce planning is a continual process of identifying gaps in the workforce and developing a methodical people plan to ensure an organization has the employees, skills, and knowledge needed to meet current and future business goals. The goal of strategic workforce planning is outlined in the 7 Rs of strategic workforce planning :

• Right size: The right number of people to do the job effectively and efficiently.
• Right shape: Management structures, hierarchies, layers and spans, DEI focus, etc. which shape the organization to achieve the business goals.
• Right location: The right location, geographically and structurally for best talent outcomes.
• Right time: In today’s skill-based economy, deploying the “the right skills at the right time” is critical to organizational success.
• Right cost: Financial costs, opportunity costs of talent decisions, and larger costs like cost-to-society.
• Right risk: How decisions create or alleviate risks, be it people or business risks like compliance and regulatory.
• Right capability: To arrive at the right capability for the organization, one must delve into aspects of Skills, Knowledge, Accreditation, Mindset, Physiology, and Environment. 

Why is Strategic Workforce Planning Important? 

The employer-employee relationship is changing, shaped by the Future of Work. On one hand, we see employees seeking more meaning and purpose from work. Tech advancement is creating a skills-shift and jobs-shift – 19% of the workforce could have over 50% of their tasks automated by AI. As a result organizations must build a forward-looking, skills-based talent strategy. The shift is already happening…

More organizations will prioritize skills-based hiring and upskilling to help widen their talent pools and find qualified workers.

Identifying one’s ideal workforce mix will help organizations build relevant future skills, such as agility, learning, innovation and resilience. It is the starting point to build effective capability and talent management practices that attract, engage, and retain the right-skilled talent. A great workforce strategy will help leaders be prepared for the future and drive sustained business growth. 

How to Build a Strategic Workforce Plan: A Detailed Guide 

A step-by-step detailed process will help arrive at your ideal workforce plan

• Business Goals and Objectives: Any talent strategy must be designed in conjunction with the business strategy. It is critical to first define and understand the goals and objectives of the business, long term and short term. A great starting point is defining the Vision, Mission, and then the Annual Operating Plan.
• Talent Supply Analysis: This is about understanding the organization’s current workforce status. A core question to ask is, “How well does the current workforce align/support your business strategy?”. Assess the current state of one’s internal workforce on each of the above 7Rs, and define the talent goals in line with the business goals.
• Talent Demand Analysis: A demand analysis is about understanding the organization’s future workforce requirements. This includes workloads, staffing needs, and factors that affect workload such as technologies, policies, legalities and regulations, customer changes.  Leaders must use the power of predictive analytics and ascertain future needs by leveraging data sources such as labour market statistics, future of work trends, technological predictions, etc.
• Gap Analysis: Assess the gaps between talent demand and talent supply and arrive at the best way to close the skills and capability gaps identified between supply and demand. One can use a framework such as the Kurt Lewis Model of Change to arrive at the current state versus the desired state, from both perspectives i.e. people and organization. These can be skills gaps, capability gaps, alternative talent pools, policies and processes, organizational structures and critical roles, compliance and legal, etc. One must prioritize the top gaps by assessing how much they impact overall organizational performance.
• Action Planning: A concrete action plan stems from a holistic people strategy. HR and business leaders must together plan workforce interventions around organizational development, talent management, learning and development, talent acquisition, total rewards, etc. One can use Dave Ulrich’s five talent management levers – buy, build, borrow, bind and bounce – and two demand optimisation levers – bot and balance. Design of key talent interventions requires building clarity around operational aspects like budgets, manpower, and other resources.
• Implementation: Taking design to actual delivery requires a strong commitment towards execution of people strategy. One can carve out a detailed RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted and informed) to outline who is responsible for which part of the workforce plan. A critical aspect is stakeholder management involving communication, governance, monitoring and reporting, and execution.
• Monitor and evaluate progress: Defining the key success factors, outlining metrics, measuring and tracking them periodically is a must to maintain an ongoing commitment to the cause. It helps continuously improve the solutions to maximize their effectiveness. This is essential to highlight the ROI of the workforce planning initiatives, and maintaining a sustained buy-in from top leadership for the long term.

A strategic workforce plan will be effective only when backed by Right-Reliable-Valid data.  Unfortunately, there lies a deep gap here…

67% of respondents feel HR professionals are not effective at using data for workforce planning.

Strong data backing can help business leaders consider talent implications when making strategic business decisions by assessing current state, anticipating talent risks, and visioning future possibilities. 

Drive Your Business Forward With SolveCube   

The first step to workforce planning is to invest in a high quality Workforce Planning Intelligence solution. Best is a blend of tech and touch. i.e. deep domain expert-led services, along with next-gen HR technology and tools. SolveCube’s integrated talent platform offers this and much more…

• Business-focused solutions, aligned with company goals and needs.
• A multidimensional platform provides access to domain experts -an on demand talent pool of 20,000+ and an aggregated talent pool of 580+ millionAl engine which Sources, Searches, Indexes and Rank-orders the right talent match.
• Cutting-edge tools like ice.cube, hr.ready and p.three to empower HR leaders and business leaders. ice.cube and p.three help diagnose people practices and devise workforce strategy, while hr.ready offers ready to use templates for HR policies.
• Global reach and access
• Innovative solutions tailored to organizations’ specific needs.

SolveCube’s suite of Advisory, People Strategy and Blended Workforce Solutions solves for a wide range of workforce challenges, revolutionizing the talent and business strategy for the better. 

Strategic Workforce Planning is not just an HR prerogative, it is a business priority at the CXO level. To gain the required buy-in and support of the CXO Suite, it is critical for HR leaders to build a business case for workforce planning. This will help integrate strategic workforce planning into the business planning process, and pre-empt any potential challenges on bringing the people strategy to life. Such a talent strategy will help unlock business success.