Glossary of Human Resources Management and Employee Benefit Terms
Workforce planning encompasses a systematic approach to anticipate and align future staffing needs with the organization's strategic goals. It goes beyond traditional HR functions by integrating workforce data, talent analytics, and organizational strategy to inform decision-making. By forecasting demand and supply of talent, businesses can proactively address skill gaps, mitigate risks, and capitalize on emerging opportunities.
Workforce planning is the process of strategically aligning an organization's human capital with its business goals and objectives. It involves forecasting the future workforce needs of an organization, determining the necessary skills and competencies, and developing strategies to meet those needs efficiently.
Strategic workforce planning is a subset of workforce planning that focuses on aligning the organization's workforce requirements with its long-term strategic goals. It involves analyzing current workforce capabilities, identifying future workforce needs, and developing strategies to acquire, develop, and retain talent to support the organization's strategic objectives.
Workforce planning includes various elements such as:
The purpose of workforce planning is to ensure that an organization has the right people with the right skills in the right place at the right time to achieve its business objectives. It helps organizations anticipate and proactively address workforce challenges, minimize disruptions, and optimize resource allocation.
Workforce planning is important for several reasons:
The five key elements of workforce planning are:
The benefits of workforce planning include:
The critical focus areas in developing workforce plans include:
The five steps in the workforce planning process are:
Workforce plans are closely linked to both business and HR strategies. They align workforce requirements with business goals and objectives, ensuring that the organization has the necessary talent to execute its strategy effectively. HR strategies, such as recruitment, training, and development, are developed in alignment with workforce plans to support the organization's overall strategic direction.
To implement workforce planning effectively, organizations should:
These are short surveys that can be sent frequently to check what your employees think about an issue quickly. The survey comprises fewer questions (not more than 10) to get the information quickly. These can be administered at regular intervals (monthly/weekly/quarterly).
Having periodic, hour-long meetings for an informal chat with every team member is an excellent way to get a true sense of what’s happening with them. Since it is a safe and private conversation, it helps you get better details about an issue.
eNPS (employee Net Promoter score) is one of the simplest yet effective ways to assess your employee's opinion of your company. It includes one intriguing question that gauges loyalty. An example of eNPS questions include: How likely are you to recommend our company to others? Employees respond to the eNPS survey on a scale of 1-10, where 10 denotes they are ‘highly likely’ to recommend the company and 1 signifies they are ‘highly unlikely’ to recommend it.
Workforce planning helps a business in several ways:
To create a workforce plan, follow these steps:
Workforce planning is important for several reasons: