We have seen strategic workforce planning generate great value for organisations from approximately 400 FTE upwards, to the extent where they would invest in a small capability and undertake as a continuous cycle in collaboration with HR, finance and strategic planning. This has been a consistent theme across finance, government, infrastructure, large projects, taxation, local councils and services. When this capability isn’t present, organisations will typically see increased delivery risk, increased skill shortages, longer vacancies, more energy spent competing internally for resources and reduced HR effectiveness.

From 400 FTE and below, we’ve seen great value being generated from combined workforce planning, organisation management and strategic sourcing roles (so a hybrid), which then partner with a HR analytics capability.

Over 750 FTE, we see it as a mandated requirement. The structure of the labour market in Australia means that there are structural issues with the demand and supply for many occupations (trades, care, professions, engineering, healthcare); no matter how effective your HR function is at managing the employee life cycle, keeping up with skill shortages is uneconomical without some data driven workforce forecasting and prediction to stay ahead of the game.

Framing strategic workforce planning as the means to improve organisational effectiveness and productivity, linking finance and HR together for better strategic outcomes, is a winning argument for workforce planning.

• As a result of the strategy, where are the changes likely to be in the work (new projects or new technologies), who will do the work (alternative talent) and where will the work get done (structure, functions, sites)?
• Are there new growth requirements that mean some roles are likely to grow, while others are going to decrease? Do we struggle already with getting enough people to fill these roles?
• To implement the strategy, will we need to transform our operating model? Does this mean we will have to change where we invest in our workforce? Will some capabilities become critical, that are not critical today? Do we think we will need new competencies in our workforce (skills, knowledge, experience, cultural fit?
• How good are we at the moment at forecasting future demand and supply? Do we use succession planning? Do we regularly report on the health of our talent supply chain?
• Do we use workforce data regularly to inform our HR programs, or do we go with ‘instinct? Would we consider our HR function good with numbers?
• Has the Board or executive group previously identified capability pressure points? Have we responded to this with customised plans? Is there a designated executive leader to address these capability risks?

• Early definition of organisation drivers, operating model shifts and key strategy milestones; then linking these to the implications for strategic workforce requirements.
• Solve the critical few issues, using whole enterprise data.
• Looking for issues that extend beyond this year’s budgeting cycle, have an enterprise impact, have the attention of the Board and Executive Group and likely represent a discrete choice.
• Consulting with Executive, Sites, Functions and a broad set of key stakeholders; then synthesising their feedback and presenting the tensions.
• Commissioning, collating, organising and analysing the best available workforce data to establish workforce gaps and surpluses (by developing a gap analysis model). We’ve learnt the hard way that SWP projects without a representative dataset do not generate the business value to make it worth running again.
• Build a system that can be run multiple times by the enterprise; the value from strategic workforce planning comes from multiple runs of a similar system against complex problems.