Plan your workforce like a pro with our complete guide to strategic workforce planning - what it is, why it matters, who’s involved, and how to ace it.
Strategic workforce planning is about aligning your human resources with your long-term organizational goals. Done right, it ensures you have the people and skills you need to ace your strategic objectives.
However, many businesses don’t engage in strategic workforce planning. Perhaps because they’re trapped in the vicious cycle of reactive resourcing. Or because they think they can’t plan far enough ahead to make it worth their time.
In this guide, we’ll prove the value of proactive workforce planning and show how to adapt it to business in even unpredictable circumstances - like project-based businesses and professional services.
From workforce analysis and skills mapping to scenario and succession planning, this guide to strategic workforce planning has everything you need to know.
Strategic workforce planning is about getting the right people in the right positions at the right time, over time- so your business has the capacity and capabilities to deliver its longer-term strategy.
It's not just about the here and now. It's about where you want your business to be in three, or five, or ten years, and understanding the mix of people you will need in your workforce in order to get you there.
The purpose is to improve your organizational efficiency, agility, and competitiveness by staffing your business with the perfect balance of people and skills. (Not so many that you’re wasting money on people you don’t need, and not so few that your employees are overworked and plotting their escape.)
And don't be mistaken: this isn't just about hiring the right people in order to fill the skills gaps. The goals of strategic workforce planning are achieved by aligning recruitment efforts, succession planning, internal mobility schemes, and staffing training and development plans, among other strategies, in order to make sure that you always have the workforce you need.
Without strategic workforce planning, organizations experience inefficiencies, delays, and lost opportunities. Do you recognize any of the following symptoms of poor workforce planning in your business?
Conversely, businesses that do have a workforce planning strategy gain a significant competitive advantage. They have:
With strategic workforce planning, instead of reactively addressing immediate staffing needs, organizations forecast and plan for future workforce demand. At a basic level, it involves:
This strategic staffing approach enhances operational efficiency, adaptability, ability to seize opportunities, and the quality of products and services.
We’ll explore some key components of workforce planning later.
Sometimes a business has a dedicated strategic workforce planning team. But often responsibility is shared between a cross-departmental team.
Here are ten teams that might be involved in strategic workforce planning in your organization.
Below, we’ve outlined the six steps of an effective workforce planning process. Follow them and you’ll create a future-focused, fit-for-purpose workforce.
The first step in strategic workforce planning is to recognize the value in doing it. If your organization has historically taken a reactive approach to resourcing, you’ll need to create a business case for doing things differently. Educate yourself on the benefits of strategic workforce planning and start getting buy-in.
Effective workforce planning needs cross-departmental collaboration. You’ll need to engage stakeholders from your senior leadership team, HR, resourcing, training and development, finance, and more.
The purpose of strategic workforce planning is to align your workforce with your organizational goals. So this step is key. Get your senior leadership team to articulate their vision for the business in the medium to long-term - typically three to five years. Dive deep into goals, objectives, growth plans, diversification, new initiatives, or changes in direction.
Remember to engage all teams in this discussion to avoid problems further down the road. For example, you’ll need a budget for any new roles you create, so finance needs to be in the loop. Similarly, new staff will need equipment and resources, training, and onboarding. Every team needs to align on what has to happen and why.
Equipped with a detailed understanding of your overall business strategy - and external factors like technological change and industry trends - think about the people, skills, and roles you’ll need in the future.
Use scenario planning in order to get an idea of how your workforce needs may vary given different circumstances or outcomes. For instance, if a new piece of legislation comes into effect in your industry, what skills demands would that create? And what would your workforce need to look like in order to respond to this?
Additionally, organizational capacity planning can help you to create an accurate picture of workforce supply and demand. And think about role design - how to create meaningful roles that maximize the contribution employees can make.
Now you know the type, number, and nature of roles you need for the future - it’s time to compare that to what you currently have. This part of the process will be easier if you already engage in centralized resource management and have a skills management process in place.
Analyze the fitness of the current workforce for the future. Look at demographics, roles, skills, and competencies. What gaps do you need to fill? Are you faced with an aging workforce? Are key players approaching retirement? Have you got a high turnover? Do roles need redesigning?
This is the exciting part - forming a plan and putting it into practice. This can include strategies around:
As part of your strategy, you should set KPIs - ways to monitor and measure your success. Regularly monitor progress against these KPIs and make adjustments as necessary. Conduct a full review your workforce planning strategy every time your corporate strategy is updated.
Here are five examples of strategic workforce planning initiatives - including what they are, and why you should do them. These are representative of the type of activities you’ll undertake as part of a workforce planning strategy. But it isn’t an exhaustive list.
Workforce capacity planning is the process by which you determine if you have capacity to deliver your future plans. It’s about working out the ‘demand’ side of the supply-and-demand equation.
For a professional service business, capacity planning ensures your organization has the skills and resources it needs to complete projects on time, on budget, and to customer expectations. Done properly, it answers two key questions.
Strategic workforce planning, of course, is concerned with answering the first question.
During your workforce capacity assessment, you might discover you have too few staff, in which case you have the time and information you need to recruit more. Or you could discover you have too many or the wrong type of resources. In which case you’ll have to think about how best to retrain and redeploy them.
Succession planning is the process of identifying and developing people with potential in your business, so they can take on more senior roles when positions become available. For example, planning to replace a retiring Head of Department with a talented manager from their division.
Succession planning helps ensure business continuity, providing a pipeline of internal talent to fill vacancies. It also provides growth opportunities for ambitious employees, helping retain them and their knowledge within the business. Plus it’s more cost-effective than hiring senior talent externally.
Increasingly rapid technological transformation of our economies means that skills gaps in the workforce are a major concern - predicted to cost business $8.5 trillion globally by 2030.
But the first step to understanding what is missing is to understand what's already there. Developing skills maps and skills taxonomies will help you build a picture of the skills that your workforce currently has, and the skills that it needs to have in order to plug any gaps.
It involves identifying, documenting, and assessing the skills and competencies you have across your organization. Skills management software is extremely helpful here. The goal is to create a comprehensive overview of the capabilities available in your business - so you can deploy them effectively or develop them to meet future needs.
Because - sadly - you can’t rely on simply hiring new skills - top talent is in short supply. And savvy businesses know it’s more cost-effective to develop people internally, through training courses, apprenticeships, mentoring, and so on.
Learn more: How Skills Mapping Can Benefit Your Organization ➡️
Much as we promote training and developing internal staff, you do sometimes need to look outside the business and hire in external talent. Pipeline development is the process of nurturing that external talent so that it’s readily accessible when you need it.
A pipeline development strategy could involve:
By cultivating relationships with external talent pools, businesses can reduce time-to-fill critical positions and mitigating talent shortages. This means less disruption to business continuity and improved access to in-demand skills.
At Runn, we’re advocates for people-centric policies - business practices that put people first. We’ve seen how it can transform unhappy and unproductive workplaces into places where people want to work and excel.
Examples of people-centric policies include:
People-first policies can enhance employee satisfaction and retention, improve work-life balance, boost engagement and productivity, and attract a broader talent pool. All of which can help achieve your strategic workforce goals.
These are just five ways your organization can get strategic about staffing and align talent with organizational goals.
Depending on the sector you work in, you will face different kinds of obstacles during the strategic workforce planning journey.
The bigger the company, the more systems, tools, and data points you will be dealing with. Information is likely to be fragmented and scattered across different platforms, so pulling all of it together to form a single narrative around your workforce might be difficult.
The solution here is fairly simple: you need a centralized data system for all workforce-related information, but that might require a larger business change - and we all know what that means...
If strategic workforce planning is a new concept to your company, getting people excited about the idea of a wider company change might prove to be challenging.
You need to get leadership buy-in, financial resources to accommodate initial take-off, and approval or at least acceptance from the people who will get impacted.
In order to establish change successfully, you will need to consider how you intend to build buy-in, bring people along for the journey, and counter resistance with understanding and empathy. And if this sounds like it could be difficult, that's because it often is.
Luckily, because successfully creating organizational change is such a well-recognized challenge, there are a wealth of resources out there to help you.
Get stuck in with our guides to change management:
Ideally, you want everyone on the same page and aligned about the long-term business goals that will underpin your strategic workforce planning: this is where we are going, this is what we are doing, this is where we focus.
In reality, however, there will be a lot of grey areas, conditionals, and dependencies - not to mention differing opinions and ideas from coming from different stakeholders.
As the person responsible for strategic workforce planning, you will need to facilitate some conversation and work to help synthesize perspectives in order to broach gaps where alignment is lacking.
It's vital that you frame strategic workforce planning as a tool that supports the goals and direction of the business, and not as an attempt to impose decisions or close down opportunities.
Depending on talent supply in your industry, finding talent with the right skills and expertise at the right time might be your biggest hurdle. This, in turn, might impact recruitment costs and disrupt long-term plans.
We've already touted the importance of pipeline development earlier in this article, so let's be clear: if your industry is hyper-competitive when it comes to talent, pipeline development is even more crucial.
And once you've secured top talent, make sure you are working hard to retain them and not lose them to your competitors.
If you work in a project-based business, you’re probably thinking: ‘This is all well and good. But what if you can’t plan three to five years in advance? What if you’re not sure what the next six months look like?’
We hear you. Strategic workforce planning is more difficult in dynamic landscapes like professional service firms, studios, agencies, and the knowledge economy.
But there are still things you can do. Based on the step-by-step guide above, here are some tweaks for project-based businesses.
As with any business, it’s key to understand strategic direction. The difference is that you can’t look ahead with the same level of certainty as some businesses. You are reliant on winning work - and your workforce demand will depend on the number and type of projects you secure.
However, you still have a strategy. Your senior leaders know the sort of project they want to pursue - for example, whether it’s more of the same or striking out in a different direction. And they know whether they’re aiming for growth or diversification.
Understanding even this information can help you begin to forecast future workforce needs - the number of people, types of roles, and skill sets you’ll need to fulfill their vision.
Where our other businesses used organizational capacity planning to forecast demand, you might choose scenario planning instead. Scenario planning is planning for the what-ifs - preparing for different possible scenarios and assessing the impact on factors like revenue, capacity, and resources.
This approach helps you be as prepared as possible in an ever-changing environment. It lets you explore multiple possible futures - for example, winning Projects A, B, and E - and forecast likely skill and talent requirements.
If circumstances change and you end up with Projects A, E, and F - you have already planned for that scenario too, and are ready to put an alternative workforce strategy into action.
The same initiatives apply to project-based businesses as any other. So Step 6 above still applies. But the less unpredictable nature of project-based businesses may want to focus a little more on workforce agility.
For example, developing a flexible staffing model that comprises a core team of permanent employees, supported by a flexible roster of trusted contract workers and freelancer suppliers.
Or a skills diversification program. This upskills and cross-trains people in the most in-demand skills in the business, so they can be allocated to a wider range of projects, as demand dictates.
Gut feelings only get you so far. You need to base your workforce planning strategy on hard data. Analyze historic and current workforce data to make more informed decisions. Leveraging data like employee turnover and demographics can help you identify trends and forecast future requirements. While data on resource utilization can signpost in-demand skills and roles. You can also look at external data - from assessing industry trends to benchmarking against competitors - to help shape your forecasts.
Aim for transparency and employee engagement in your workforce planning process. This can mitigate unnecessary anxiety and prevent rumors undermining morale. It can also support your strategic aims, by letting people know there are progression routes available and that you’re investing in their skills. Research shows employees are more engaged in businesses that have a clear vision for the future.
Resource management is about making the most of the workforce you have. It looks beyond simple headcount and considers how allocating resources can maximize productivity and profitability. But many businesses still haven’t realized the benefits of resource management - like reducing bottlenecks and burnout, and improving utilization and efficiency. We want to change that. Read our deep-dive guide on resource management.
There are lots of workforce planning tools that can help support your strategic workforce planning efforts. And who wouldn’t want that?
A resource management platform - for example - can provide all the information you need about your current workforce - their skills, capacity, and how in-demand they are. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Technology can also help you with:
*And all without having to touch a cumbersome spreadsheet or complicated pivot table!
Enjoy 14-days free access to Runn and explore:
