What does 'Workforce Planning' really mean?

If you are reading this you have probably have already heard the old adage that organisations need to manage their workforce so that they have, ‘the right number of people in place, with the right skills to deliver excellent products or services both now and in the future".

This is a commonly held view of people management described as ‘workforce planning’. But what does it in mean in practical terms?

Workforce planning is a systematic process for identifying the workforce capabilities required to meet an organisation’s strategic goals and for developing the plans to meet these requirements.

The alignment of people and resources with current and future objectives is also a fundamental part of ensuring that current and future plans are both realistic and robust. This approach should exist at all levels throughout the organisation, so that these aspects of corporate management work together rather than being viewed in isolation of each other:

Such a systematic approach aims to ensure that organisations continue to develop their people capacity in the right areas in their drive towards excellent performance across the board. It enables businesses over time to enable their workforce to cope with changes to external challenges and demands. By proactively addressing succession planning, training and development, recruitment and retention issues, an organisation will be less susceptible to factors that would have either a negative impact on the achievement of its objectives or would represent wasted opportunities to improve.

The above vision is all very well and good, but how can this be usefully reflected within services and teams?

The first point to be made is that workforce planning should be integrated with service/business planning and not seen as a bolt on. In its truest sense, it is the manager’s expression of how her/she will deliver stated objectives through their staff.

In doing so, it is best to keep the process as simple as possible, whilst still providing the insights to enable the organisation to pick up key messages across departments, services or teams. A useful approach that we have used with a number of clients is to ask managers to consider current and future workforce issues for three dimensions:

• Staffing levels – including numbers, recruitment & retention, turnover, sickness absence and vacancies
• Diversity – including age, gender, ethnicity and disability
• Knowledge, skills and competencies

Secondly, in establishing the current issues, it is important to relate these to the service/team objectives highlighted in the plan. The question is whether the service or the team has the capacity to deliver these aims. When establishing future issues, we would recommend that managers think about ‘demand’ and ‘supply’ factors. That is to say the:

• factors over the next few years that are either likely to affect the levels of demand for their products/services or the types of services being demanded; and
• supply of workers capable of delivering those products/services.

Managers may well already have a well developed view of future external and internal factors that will have an impact on the products and services that they deliver. However, they may find it useful to carry out environmental scanning with their teams to increase the probability that they will have identified the key issues likely to affect them.

Many different models of environmental scanning exist and we would not necessarily advocate one over the other. However, we recommend that colleagues at least consider the following key environmental factors within the context of the likely impact on demand for products or services and the supply of a workforce able to deliver them:

Thirdly, managers should also seek to identify any current or future solutions along with issues. This will help the organisation to identify examples of best practice that could be used in other services/teams or developed as a corporate approach. If no solution exists at the service or team level, the organisation can then take an informed decision about whether to implement a corporate approach to a workforce planning issue.

Workforce planning needs a consistent corporate approach alongside a service and/or team view. At the service/team level it is about managers integrating their view of workforce issues into their service/business planning processes. They should seek to discover whether staff have the wherewithal to deliver the service/team objectives both now and in the future. Managers should also identify any local solutions to addressing gaps to enable the organisation to identify and learn from examples of best practice.

For further support with workforce planning, please contact us.