At the heart of a business’ project success lies effective workforce planning. It helps to ascertain if your company has the right workforce with the right skills suitable for each project that comes your way. It also assists in understanding when and where your business may have any staffing gaps.
What are the benefits of workforce planning?
According to the Institute for Corporate Productivity (I4CP), workforce planning can help your business by:
- Identifying areas with insufficient staff qualified for the task
- Identifying when to employ staff
- Pin pointing what roles are lacking within the workforce
- Working with the budgeting and planning processes implemented by management
What is workforce planning?
According to CIPD, workforce planning consists of the following areas
- Analysing the current staff a company has and its efficiency
- Determining what needs a workforce will have in the future
- Identifying any gaps between what is currently available and what will be required in the future
- Implementing the required solutions needed to help a company meet its goals and mission
While planning an effective workforce requires time and resources, the process is more cyclical than linear. Continual planning and strategy is required to continue to propel a company further ahead towards its mission and goals.
5 Steps to effective workforce planning
The following five steps to workforce planning are simple and can be adapted to your specific business style:
1 Formulate a plan
Decide which time frame you need to plan for. You may need to request your executive managers provide you with the company’s annual business plan. This will help you brainstorm a plan that caters for the company’s overall goals and vision.
Alongside this you’ll need to know the project deadlines, staffing requirements, necessity of new staff, and on-boarding goals.
2 Analyse your current workforce
Once your plan has been formulated, you’ll need to analyse your current workforce. The following two questions need to be answered.
What is the company’s future needs?
Do any gaps exist between what is currently available and what is required in the future?
Look at your current staff. Gather information regarding what they need to accomplish the project successfully. Assess the amount of staff the project will need and compare it against the staff you currently have. Decide if you need to employ more people and what level of expertise will you require.
Do you need staff in a specific role? Do you need to hire or create a new team with a completely different skillset to what you have available?
3 Create a plan of action
Here the focus is on eliminating any existing gaps. You may choose to implement online software systems to assist in time management, reporting, invoicing, etc. Outsourcing may also become a priority in order to free up quality staff to focus on their areas of expertise. Perhaps in-depth training is required or team restructuring.
Either way, a plan of action will act as a bridge between where your company currently sits and where you need it to go.
4 Implement your plan
Identify and work with the other departments in your company to assist you in implementing your plan of action. This may involve discussions with your accounting department regarding budgeting. Or IT department to assist with implementing new technologies or software to further streamline your workforce.
5 Revise and edit your plan
Monitor your plan to identify areas of success and weaknesses. This will help you to revise and edit your plan until you have it streamlined and effective.
Naturally, as your company grows, further workforce planning will be required. In which case, you’ll need to repeat the above steps. However, you’ll have an increase in confidence, knowing that your plans have succeeded and moved your company forward.
