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Workforce Planning is often misunderstood, so lets unpack it
First up, what are the right reasons to do it?
Proactive pursue talent
Workforce planning is a tool and practice to assist organisations in anticipating their future workforce needs. An effective process ensures they can react proactivity, giving them greater time to recruit, train or redirect the talent that they need. The effects of this on your organisation are to promote greater options on how to fulfil that need, rather than taking decisions once you are under the cosh where your options are reduced.
Key Performance Indicators to measure
- Time to Approve - Time from Identification of need to approval of action
- Time to Hire - Approval of action to resource in place
- Recruitment time line of sight - Forward looking period of visibility of business needs that the recruitment team have to proactively plan their activities
Operational Efficiency
Your business, and the market that it operates in is in constant shift. The outlook of the workforce is impacted by a range of factors such as remote working trends, competitivenes of acquiring and retaining talent, leveraging the benefits of artificial intelligence to augment or change the work done by your employees, or monetary constraints and growth and decline factors changing the required demand for workforce, or the operational efficiency needed from workforce.
Key Performance Indicators to measure
- Dependent on the discipline of your workforce and the industry you operate. In principle operational efficiency should be measured by identifying the key business outputs and drivers for which the population of workforce support. Relating workforce to the business data at an appropriate level to drive insight and value, without constraining or demoviating your teams
Support Decisions On Workforce
Decisions on workforce are made constantly, and workforce planning should be nimble, continuous and embedded into the operations of the organisation to provide relevant data and actionable insights to support decision making at the time it is needed.
Strategy to Action, By The People
Your business is your people. Being effective at translating strategic or company objectives into objectives for your workforce ultimately drives your success. Whether that be addressing new markets, developing new business offerings, organisational change and restructure or strategies on location footprint. Having workforce plans to support these areas, tailored to your organisations needs, is what will drive the change to happen and accelerate and streamline these initiatives.
What does good look like, and where do many companies fail?
Process Burden
The running of your workforce planning process should not be a burden on your teams. At all times it should remain grounded in business value, and wherever possible augment existing processes seamlessly through tooling and automation to bridge the gaps between people, data and plans made.
Budgetary Control
It should not operate in isolation of other planning activities and strategic reviews in the organisation. Linking and aligning with your financial planning and operational planning in a manner that ensures ownership and responsibility is clear and duplication is avoided. This allows management to see and pivot across a holistic view.
Manual Process vs. Automation
Automate wherever possible. If data is available to support you, drive your plans from the data. Approach is clearly key, as is using tools and software to aid you to create a slick, efficient and enjoyable process.
Adoption
Adoption is king. Achieved through ensuring a quality experience for teams who are part of the process, they feel and understand the value to the business, and they have an appreciation and empathy for the dependencies of their colleagues. Change is often difficult however identification of true end to end impacts through well thought out stakeholder engagement, user training and support can manage this.
Approach
Getting the level of detail and the approach to forming workforce plans right for the subsets of your organisations workforce population are the keys to success and will unlock the value in workforce planning. This can be acheived without creating a painful process that frustrates users and leads to resentment or lack of adoption.
Its worth pointing out at this point, this is an area where one size definitely does not fit all, in how your plans are approached, and the data that is relevant for your teams. Yes, seek consistency where it is appropriate to do so, particularly around the standardisation of outputs to maintain effective management across the entire population. But the two sides should not be mutually exclusive, you want to have your cake and eat it.
Acknowledge that this is cross discipline and identify and work across those dependencies in your organisational processes. Seek and unlock the none-people data that can support you in making your workforce planning relevant and valuable to the business.
Walk First
It is important that you start at a sensible place and grow and iterate, don't jump on bandwagons and chase shiny objects of something like skills planning or strategic workforce planning, without first having the foundations in place. Its vital that you have a vision for the future, but don't skip the learning's that come on the road to it.
Culture
One of the fascinating aspects of projects that are working cross disciplines (Data, Sales, Finance, HR, Operations) are the inherent cultural differences that you experience in how these teams operate. By this we mean the viewpoints for which they experience, and their ways of working and thinking about the challenges that they face in the operation of their roles. Don't let this be the elephant in the room. Early in the project seek to get this on the table, identify, understand and appreciate these carefully. Approach friction and conflicts head on. If you don't, this will secretly become the poison for your progress, and lead to the reforming or strengthening of the silos in your organisation.
Value
You want to improve the business. Your workforce planning will deliver value. You must spend the time up front to identify and documenting what you want to improve, the key metrics that should be impacted, the value expected to be generated, and the efficiencies to be gained. Our Value and Return on Investment tool here can get you started, but we would also be happy to support you in going deeper into your specific metrics and business challenges with you, to support you this process.
Typical Metrics to focus on
- Time to Hire
- Time to Approve
- Recruitment Line of Sight (approved/committed)
- Recruitment Line of Sight (unapproved/uncommitted)
- Workforce Attrition - impact attributable to better processes to manage and influence employee satisfaction such as training and development opportunities
- Workforce Productivity - Measured in accordance with relevant business metrics to subsets of your population at an appropriate level and associated cost impacts
- Revenue Improvement - Acceleration of initiatives or revenue generating workforce population
- Time savings - Process efficiency leading to higher value work by employees
You've established your baseline. You don't get the benefits of this now. This is a yardstick to come back to once your process is operational, as it will support the realisation and learning you gained, which will then support how you iterate this process in future to drive more value.
Where to start?
Set Strategy
Define your objectives and strategy, keep it about the business benefits and align it to the operational and strategic goals of the organisation. Baseline your expected value and when you expect to realise on this.
Assess Curent State
Go outside HR and speak with your stakeholders across the business and share your case for change, and how it fits with both the businesses objectives and their objectives in their area of focus. Use this as an opportunity to understand what they are doing, why they are doing it and how it correlates to workforce. Later you can limit the scope if you need to, but start from the basis of having a fuller awareness.
Your Road Map
Design your road map. Workforce planning should be a nimble and iterative process, you don't want to create a monster and go big bang which prevents you from realising benefit sooner. Initially focus in on the areas which will deliver the most value to the business, and are the easiest to achieve. Over time you can then phase in additional aspects logically, with a short-term and longer-term vision. You need to identify the dependencies of the areas you want to deliver on your road map, as wherever possible these should be phased to stack on top of each other, without reworking what came before it.
Build On Solid Ground
As you get going and you uncover new information, be strict about your scope, while allowing the learning process to continue. Take care not to fall down rabbit holes and always challenge complexity for complexity sake or detail where it is not sufficiently justified. Be ruthless if it does not contribute to the business value you are trying to realise. If you need to add to the road map do so in a structured way. If you start to uncover data issues, take care if you are using sticky plasters and wherever possible fix the root cause rather than masking over it through creating manual processes that require effort and maintenance.
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Looking for some help along the way?
If we can support you, we'd be happy to help. If you would like to find out more how Viridian supports customers to deliver effective workforce planning head here