How well are your employees aligned with your overall business objectives? Workforce planning is a process that fulfills strategic business goals via regular planning, assessing, and forecasting the gaps between your current workforce and your future human capital needs. Its importance? Workforce planning ensures the right people are in the right positions at the right time—maximizing your workforce.
In fact, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management reports five strategic workforce planning benefits you won't want to miss out on:
- Aligns your business plans with workforce requirements
- Uncovers gaps in current workforce competencies and what you require in the future
- Informs gap reduction strategies
- Helps you make better decisions on the best ways to structure and deploy your workforce
- Enables you to overcome internal and external barriers that hold you back from achieving strategic workforce goals
To help you get started, here are all the main elements of workforce planning.
Workforce Planning is a Strategic Process
Workforce planning involves aligning the company's workforce with its business goals and objectives, focusing on short-term and long-term needs. Short-term business goals refer to the objectives you hope to achieve within the next quarter or less. Long-term goals are the objectives you hope to accomplish in the next 3-5 years.
After establishing those short-term and long-term goals, you'll need to determine how to align your workforce to achieve them best. The Office of HR in the National Institute of Health recommends considering the following questions in the process:
- What are your organizational strengths and challenges?
- What legislation, policy, or regulation changes may impact your organization?
- How well positioned is your organization to survive change?
- How does your department's plan align with your agency's overall strategy and direction?
Requires Accurate Data and Analysis
The workforce planning process also requires a lot of gathering and analyzing data on things like:
- Current workforce skills
- Future business needs, and
- External labor market trends
This information will help determine your workforce's size, composition, and skills. As a result, you'll be in a better position to decide whether to grow your team. The best labor moves going forward (i.e., promote within if the work ethic and skills are observed in your team, or hire experts outside the team that can bring in the skill, experience, and expertise you need to scale successfully).
Should be Proactive and Flexible
The insight you gain from your workforce planning allows you to anticipate and prepare for future workforce needs rather than reacting to them after they arise. In return, you experience fewer debilitating surprises and take action before minor problems get bigger. The ability to adapt to changing business conditions and respond to new opportunities and challenges is also important because those that can make quicker decisions make a more significant impact than those that wait too long to respond.
Involves All Levels of the Organization
There's a lot of input and collaboration from various departments and levels of management in workforce planning. This ensures that all have a say in the workforce planning process, as it is a plan that will affect the entire company. As a result, the plans are more relevant to all departments than just a small portion.
For instance, each industry or department of your business will require different challenges, risks, and requirements. Involving those from each to develop the workplace planning process reduces the chances of mistakes and errors while informing your decision-making.
Considers Diversity and Inclusion
The final primary principle of workplace planning is diversity and inclusion. The diversity of the workforce and the needs of all employees helps create a more inclusive and equitable workplace. Not only does it optimize your workforce by accommodating unique needs, potential, and perspectives in the planning process, but it also appeals to the changing work environment we're experiencing today.
In a market that holds diversity and inclusion in such high regard, there is no room for error when integrating it into every business decision, including workplace planning. Companies that invest in being more diverse and inclusive are often 35% more likely to outperform their competitors. These companies also attract more candidates and retain more talent because at least 70% of job seekers cite a commitment to diversity and inclusion as 'valuable' and important when evaluating employers.
Maximize Your Workforce with PRO Resources
When it comes to strengthening your workforce and aligning them with your business, there's no better expertise and guidance than that from a PEO well-versed in all things HR. Get more from PRO Online+, our Human Resources Management System that centralizes data in an all-in-one place, giving you real-time updates on performance while tracking the life-cycle of employees. Reach out to our experts to start a conversation to discuss your team, business objectives, and how we can help you bring them closer together!
