With human capital issues as one of the top priorities of top management today, ensuring that a robust workforce plan is in place is imperative to keeping turnover rates low and employee engagement levels high.
Coming up with a robust workforce plan does not simply mean a quick Google search for “quick tips”. After all, what works for one organisation might not work for another organisation. Instead, the trick to ensuring a robust workforce plan is to develop a strategic approach to attract and retain talent, while harnessing the potential of your existing employees as well. Most importantly, it should be something that is aligned with your organisation’s culture and values too.
While there is no “one size fits all” approach, here are some guidelines to come up with a strategic planning process to build a robust workforce plan for your organisation.
Formulate
Establishing goals and setting objectives - this is a crucial step in every strategic planning and forms the very core of your workforce plan. To determine the appropriate goals and objectives, the idea is to gather data and understand what works and what does not work for your organisation. What is the purpose of setting up this workforce plan? To reduce high turnover rates? To ensure a talented pool of employees? Identifying your goals and objectives will help to set the direction for the workforce plan.
Development
Once the goals and objectives are set in place, the next step is to plan out the steps and activities to execute the strategic plan. This is also where the part of the workforce planning comes into play as well. How will your organisation utilise existing talent within the organisation to attract more talent? What are the key features or benefits that retain talent with your organisation? Engaging your employees as part of the strategic workforce planning is strategic in itself and helps in employee engagement at the same time.
Implementation
This is the step plans turn into actions. In every implementation phase, there are bound to be difficulties and challenges. The key here is to constantly motivate everyone involved on the ultimate goal and also be flexible and open to ideas. You will never know if an activity will truly beneficial to the organisation unless it is being tested out. And this is the very stage to do so.
Evaluation
Finally, learning from mistakes is the only way to improve. The same goes for planning your workforce plan. Evaluate the steps and activities to ensure that they are still aligned with the goals and objectives laid out in the first step. Second, is to get everyone’s weigh-in and to confirm support. If there are disagreements, understand and find out why. Perhaps someone might have a suggestion that might be a great enhancement to the workforce plan.
Strategic planning is already something that is ingrained in all organisations, whereby strategic decisions and approaches are taken while crafting out business strategies. Essentially, the key is to incorporate these strategic methods into your workforce planning. That way, you will have a workforce plan that is both robust and in line with your business goals.
