Without Workforce Planning Your Organization Could Become Extinct
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Workforce planning is a key workforce management step for long-term survival
in a situation where workers are aging or leaving, and business environments are
constantly changing.
You need to replace over aged workers and workers who leave. You also need to
adapt to new business environments by getting people with needed skills.
Workforce Planning Goals
Existing workload determines current workforce levels. So the first step of
workforce planning is to assess this workload, its skills set composition and
location requirements. To assess this requirement, you answer the following
questions:
- What kinds of skilled workers do you need to achieve your organizational
purpose?
- How many persons with each kind of skill are needed to achieve targeted
performance levels?
- Where would these persons be needed - geographically and departmentally?
Answering the above questions is only the starting point of workforce
planning. A complete plan would also identify the strategies needed to get the
people required to man your workforce, and to keep the people with you.
For the longer-term, you need to estimate:
- The number of workers who would retire or leave and have to be replaced
- Additional numbers of differently skilled persons who would have to be
added to meet expansion needs
- Likely developments affecting your business and the likely changes in the
number and composition of your workforce under the new environments
Workforce planning is a continuous process that needs to be updated as the
requirements and forecasts change.
Implementing the Workforce Planning Process
The key requirement for successful workforce planning is to get your managers
to understand the significance and key importance of workforce planning. Without
their active involvement, you cannot expect to develop realistic plans that are
affected by diverse factors.
Create a workforce planning team consisting of employees from different
departments, with required knowledge and interests. Define the team's role and
responsibilities.
Use modern software tools and planning systems to speed up the processes of
data collection, analysis and generating preliminary plans. These can then be
human-reviewed for fine-tuning.
Start carefully with a smaller scope, review the processes, get feedback and
improve the effectiveness of workforce planning exercise.
In the case of large enterprises with geographically spread operations, the
workforce planning exercise should be decentralized and the unit plans should be
consolidated.
Workforce Recruitment and Development Strategies
Workforce planning is not just an exercise with numbers, though numbers are
important. You have to look at the labor market and competitive conditions, and
develop strategies to attract and retain the kind of workforce you need.
Think through the policies and practices you need to attract and retain
talented people. Build your brand as a good place to work in. Create working
conditions and a managerial culture that would make your people want to remain
with you.
Spell these out and include them in your workforce plan.
Conclusion
For organizations to survive in the long term, they must be able to attract
the right kind of talented persons and to keep them. Workforce planning helps
you to assess your people needs, in both skill sets and numbers, and start
developing and implementing strategies and policies to attract, develop and keep
the kind of workforce you need.
About the Author
Lucy Caudle, Marketing at SMART, writes about the benefits of
Workforce-Planning.
Follow us @Scopulus_News
Article Published/Sorted/Amended on Scopulus 2008-01-02 20:11:30 in Employee Articles
