Strategic workforce planning entails analyzing current staffing levels and anticipating future hiring requirements. Organizations use strategic workforce planning tools to uncover the training needs of their current and future employees and align recruiting with their company’s strategic goals.

What is a Strategic Workforce Plan?

Strategic workforce planning is critical for aligning human capital needs with business objectives. However, the real benefits only come through effective implementation of the workforce plan across the organization.

According to Oxford Economics, 32% of companies are building a workforce toward a three-year vision. It is up to HR leaders to implement strategic workforce planning frameworks so they can anticipate trends and changes and launch attrition, retiring, and upskilling and reskilling programs to avoid massive layoffs.

What Are the Four Major Areas of Workforce Planning?

Ensuring your workforce planning strategy aligns with your business goals is essential. According to the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM), 37% of best-in-class organizations integrate their formal talent management strategy with their organization's business goals. These are four major workforce planning areas you should consider:

● Consider Long-Term Goals: Strategic workforce planning ensures your people can deliver on the organization's business goals. This is why you should define business goals such as: 1) Where is your company headed in the short- and long-term?  2) What does it want to achieve? 3) What does it need in terms of human capital to achieve this?

● Find Future Skills Gaps: The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Forum Report estimates that 54% of all employees will require considerable reskilling or upskilling. Once you have mapped your current workforce, decide whether you hire new employees or shift to a project-based employment strategy and use contract workers to fill gaps.

● Ask for Advice: Implementing strategic workforce planning tools is not easy and should not be taken lightly. Getting buy-in from all stakeholders before you begin is essential, including finance, operations, line managers, and senior management. Consider hiring a consultant or someone who specializes in strategic workforce planning to support you during the process. They will be able to provide useful advice and tips on how to get started and keep planning on track.

● Monitor and Adapt: Your job is not over once you have built and implemented your strategic workforce strategy. The 21st-century business environment is constantly changing because technology, your workforce, and your customers are evolving. To have a responsive staff, you must have an adaptable workforce plan. You must monitor your process using analytics to see what needs adapting. Then you can modify your strategic workforce plan accordingly.

Elements of a Strategic Workforce Plan

Here are some key steps to successfully implement strategic workforce planning tools.

● Get Leadership Commitment: Strategic workforce planning cannot be delegated to HR. The leadership team must be visibly committed to the process, communicate its importance, and hold themselves and others accountable for execution.

● Assign Ownership for Actions: Each initiative or program in the workforce plan should have an owner who is responsible for that component. This brings clarity to roles and improves accountability.

● Cascade Goals Throughout the Organization: The connection between strategic workforce plans and business strategy should be clearly articulated through the ranks. Employees become more engaged when they see how their efforts ladder up to strategic success.

● Integrate with Business Planning Cycles: The strategic workforce planning process should be timed to inform annual business planning and budgeting. Workforce plan programs need to be costed out and incorporated into budget requests.

● Develop Comprehensive Project Plans: Detailed project plans for each workforce program should cover goals, actions, owners, timelines, costs, measures, and risks. A program management discipline is required.

● Redesign HR Practices to Align: Initiatives like recruiting, development, and compensation programs should be realigned to support the strategic workforce plan and address talent gaps directly.

● Equip Managers to Execute Their Role: Managers need education and tools to execute workforce strategy, including interpreting talent data, delivering development programs, and forecasting headcount.

● Implement Talent Analytics for Insights: Use strategic workforce planning data to provide insights into program effectiveness and early warning signs of plan deviations. Analytics informs course corrections.

● Communicate Progress Companywide: Regular communication on strategic workforce planning tool implementation through dashboards, newsletters, or all-employee meetings builds understanding and momentum.

● Actively Monitor and Update Plans: Strategic workforce plans are not static. Progress should be continually monitored and projects updated as business conditions evolve.

The most successful organizations implement strategic workforce planning tools as part of a sustainable core business process, not a one-off exercise. They integrate workforce planning into culture through strong leadership commitment, clear execution discipline, broad communication, and embedded analytics.

With today’s rapidly changing business dynamics, adaptable yet rigorous workforce planning is imperative for building thriving companies. Those who invest in the capability to implement workforce strategies position themselves for continued success.

Get Started with Strategic Workforce Planning

If you hire for hundreds of roles each year, you must think strategically about how your workforce can achieve the highest productivity at any moment. A sound strategic workforce planning framework will help you optimize costs, navigate demographic changes, create a long-term recruitment strategy, and improve your bottom line.

Do you want to learn how implementing strategic workforce planning tools can help maximize resources and future-proof your workforce? Contact us to request a demo.