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How to do Strategic Workforce Planning

Kolay İK
How to do Strategic Workforce Planning

In a business environment that is evolving over time and in a global market that is getting more and more competitive, your organization’s skilled workforce starts to bear great importance in ensuring the organization’s ability to deliver. With a workforce planning process that takes the current and forecasted state of your company into account, you can form successful talent and workforce management systems that will strengthen your company’s capacity to react to sudden shifts in both the talent demand and workforce supply. For a future-proof system that ensures the company’s continuity in having sufficient and adequately skilled staff, Strategic Workforce Planning specifically focuses on long-term tactics and results. 

Before going into how the process of Strategic Workforce Planning should be conducted and why it presents unique situations for different organizations, it is important to point out the main goals and advantages of the process. 

What should you aim for?

First of all, one of the main goals of Strategic Workforce Planning is to form a workforce with an adequate size. A strategically planned workforce should neither be overstaffed nor understaffed at any time, and it should be prepared to answer the foreseen fluctuations in the workforce demand and supply.

Another goal of Strategic Workforce Planning is to have a workforce with the right shape not just in the current conditions, but also in the possible future scenarios. So, it is important to create a workforce that has compatible skills with the company’s organizational strategy. 

Also, one of the main aims of this process is to find an optimal cost for your workforce, since unnecessarily higher or lower costs will lead to either revenue loss or productivity decrease for the company.

The workforce’s agility is one of the most important goals of Strategic Workforce Planning: the company needs a flexible staff that will be ready to adapt to shifting market demands and take actions accordingly.

So, what do you get from Strategic Workforce Planning?

Having a strategically planned workforce means obtaining total control in processes like recruitment or employee turnover, which will eventually lead to optimization of your labor cost since it will help you form systems that are able to react to these certain situations. Moreover, productivity will rise as a result of thorough strategic planning depending on the skill inventory of your company. 

An aging workforce will necessitate your company, and specifically your HR department, to react and take actions in order to negate the effects of a demographic change in the workforce that may eventually result in increased skill gaps or understaffing. 

Even though it seems like HR is responsible for the conduction of Strategic Workforce Planning, it necessitates an organization-wide, inclusive, and thorough process of strategy making in order to ensure the company’s capacity to stay competitive and prevail. And with a plan that is detailed and thought out, it is possible to create long-term workforce management plans that are able to deal with nearly all changes in your workforce, including immediate departures. 

What to do, then? 

First, you need to start with a detailed analysis of your current workforce situation: Who do you have right now? How skilled are they? How do they feel about the changes and improvements in your organization? How can they contribute to your company’s organizational strategy?

Exploring the quantity and qualifications of your workforce is greatly important when starting Strategic Workforce Planning in order to be aware of when your organization may fall short of the worker need, and how you can cover for it. Also, an internal assessment is especially helpful to evaluate the internal recruitment options when needed since it is more feasible due to its lower cost and shorter time to hire.

While making an internal workforce supply analysis for your Strategic Workforce Planning, the Kolay Core package helps you access your company’s employee records and organization charts whenever and wherever you want thanks to its simple and effective app, and track and manage the training processes of your employees. Also, the Kolay Performance package lets you actively evaluate your employees, assess their competence, and get constant feedback to make a quality analysis of your current workforce.

Leave management is also another important part of the strategic workforce planning process since it helps you ensure your team’s capability to answer to your organization’s needs. Our article on leave management focuses on various ways you can optimize the leave management process. 

Furthermore, finding out what the company’s organizational strategy suggests for the next several years of the organization is essential to form a strategically planned workforce, since the planned workforce needs to answer to the company’s upcoming challenges. In short, the workforce needs to be ready for the company’s strategic shifts at all times. 

Making a plan

After clarifying your organization’s business goals and deciding what your future business plans are going to look like, the workforce analysis you just did with your current staff needs to be examined in order to find out the possible skill gaps that may occur in the future due to reasons such as the aging of your workforce or the digitalization of your business. It needs to be decided upon whether your company should hire new employees when needed, or whether it should train its internal workforce to create possible candidates for the position in the future.

Advancements in technology directly affect the way businesses are conducted, so it is nearly impossible to be completely accurate when planning your workforce management. Fluctuations in the economic state of your company or that of the entire world may create unexpected situations for your organizational plans. However, formulating alternate scenarios and finding alternate solutions for those scenarios is greatly important to invalidate the next possible unexpected crisis in your business. 

Strategic Workforce Planning has a key role in deciding on the future of your organization, and it can give you the opportunity to create a workforce that consists of the right number of people with the right set of skills, at the right place and time. Keeping track of your staff for Strategic Workforce Planning is much easier with the Kolay workforce planning software, which enables you to easily access all your employees’ records, leave and overtime data, expenses, and bonus payments while also giving you the ability to dynamically track their training processes, company evaluations, detailed evaluation reports, and their competence based on their productivity, leadership qualities, and communication skills. 

Streamline your Workforce Planning with Kolay

With Kolay’s workforce planning services, you will be able to easily manage your employee data from anywhere and at any time in one organized and secure database. The Core package gives you access to your employee records from all your devices and lets you easily track your expenses, bonus payments, company assets, and employee training processes in one useful piece of software. With the Performance Package, you can facilitate your performance management by being able to constantly engage with your employees and make competence evaluations based on leadership qualities, communication skills, productivity, and more. You can also plan and manage your timesheet with precise data on employee availability with the Shift Package, and effortlessly calculate, store, and share employee payrolls in one place with the Payroll Package. To see the difference, you can try Kolay now for free and get started.

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