More than half of global recruiters have job openings they fear will never be filled. The global talent ecosystem is in the middle of a talent war with rising attrition rates, a growing talent gap, and skills rapidly turning obsolete. As an HR leader, it’s your responsibility to prepare for an uncertain future by utilizing specific talent data to construct a robust workforce using strategic workforce planning.
What is Strategic Workforce Planning?
Strategic workforce planning is the process of determining current and future staffing needs by utilizing relevant talent data. This process relies on extensive data analysis and forecasting to determine whether existing employees can fill skill gaps and, if not, where new hires would be needed.
Using a strategic workforce plan, companies can build stable staffing levels across departments while ensuring they have the right people with relevant skills in the correct positions. This delivers consistent results in the long term and a higher ROI than most companies.
Let us explore the 5-Step Strategic Workforce Planning Blueprint you need in 2022 to craft your future workforce effectively.
#1 Think Long-term
The aim of strategic workforce planning is to ensure your workforce will be able to deliver on the business goals you’ve set. For this, it’s imperative to consider your organization’s long-term goals carefully.
“37% of top organizations integrate their workforce plans with their business strategy”.
For this to happen, all stakeholders need to be on board, not only from HR but from every department in your organization. Stakeholder buy-in will cement the foundation for your upcoming workforce plan and will set the course for the journey you’re about to undertake.
Before you begin planning your workforce, make sure you’ve set appropriate long-term goals that you wish to achieve with the help of your workforce.
#2 Analyze Your Workforce Dynamics
Once you’ve understood your stakeholders and developed a collective vision for the future, it’s time to analyze the present. A few questions you need to ask yourself at the beginning of this stage include:
- What does my workforce look like at the moment?
- What skills and people do we have at the moment?
- Does my current workforce need improvements?
These three primary questions will enable you to start diving into people analytics to derive insights into your workforce’s demographics, evolution, and skillsets.
Two key areas you should focus on should be the quality and quantity of your workforce.
The quality of your workforce is about assessing your employees’ current performance and future potential. Quantity of your workforce is about identifying new hires, employee turnover, internal promotions, and total workforce size based on DE&I.
#3 Forecast Future Skills Gaps
Once you’ve mapped out your current workforce through careful analysis, it’s time to forecast potential future skills gaps.
You must begin with a skills gap analysis, including identifying who will retire when or how the attrition could affect you. You must also consider global digitalization, technological developments, and other emerging trends that can potentially disrupt your workforce.
Once completed, you will have a snapshot of what the future might look like and what actions you need to take to effectively steer your workforce to the next generation of work.
The future is unpredictable, but with careful planning, you can be prepared for a range of unexpected events that may occur. Preparing for unforeseen scenarios goes beyond industry-specific developments and deepens into various internal and external movements.
These could be significant changes in your company’s financials or even bigger scale events, such as a global economic slowdown. Maybe rapid technological developments, workplace trends, automation, and/or changing jobs can affect your strategy.
Some events will change your company, while others will change the world as we know it. At such a time, preparing for an uncertain future will significantly stabilize your organization.
#4 Power Up With Technology
Strategic workforce planning is not easy, and considering the current talent ecosystem, it shouldn’t be taken lightly either. Outdated data and scattered planning can put your workforce at a huge risk than it is today. To prevent this, it’s crucial to use talent intelligence platforms that support strategic workforce planning, such as Draup for Talent. Draup For Talent provides Real-time talent data extracted from tried and tested global sources that power up your workforce planning efforts.
#5 Monitor and adapt
Once you have a robust workforce strategy in place and have started implementing it, the first thing you must develop is measurement metrics. These can be KPIs attached to certain milestones that you can constantly monitor.
When you carefully monitor, you can make changes too. If you need to adapt your workforce strategy, you can make decisions confidently based on data you’ve acquired in the monitoring phase.
Since the modern business environment is constantly changing, the technology, the workforce, the customers, all these elements are moving. This makes monitoring and adapting highly crucial in the 2022 business world.
By leveraging data from over 8000 data sources, Draup has extracted and analyzed data of over 4500+ job roles, 2500+ locations, and 100,000+ courses spread over 33 industries. It has also analyzed over 4Mn+ career paths and 30,000 skills and has it all in its extensive database. Talent Intelligence platforms such as Draup enable talent management teams to plan high-impact strategies that transform their workforce for the future.
