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Workforce Strategy through Strategic Workforce Planning

The competition for talent, rapid technological change and the continuing urgency to create more innovative products and services are factors that create the perfect storm in organisations today. How organisations respond to these challenges will determine whether they prosper or decline. Companies do not have the luxury of investing unlimited time and resources into the entire talent pool and must leverage their resources into the right person, at the right time, in the right position.

Workforce planning is a tool that assists organisations and managers plan for the future, anticipate change, manage the workforce and meet business goals. It provides a framework for making workforce decisions that align with meeting the strategic goals of the organisation. The workforce plan identifies how future staffing and skill requirements will be met through staff development, internal deployment, recruitment and succession planning. This ensures that planning is proactive and talent surpluses and shortages are avoided, where possible.

Are you sure you have the right workforce to
deliver on the results you are promising?

The major workforce risks that occur due to low capability in strategic workforce planning are:

  • Business objectives not being met because of gaps in essential skills and capabilities.
  • An increase in business risk from;
  • Demographics such as an ageing workforce
  • Skill shortages from a lack of available talent
  • Lack of requisite leadership and performance
  • Lack of critical roles (foregone revenue / increased OH&S risk / decreased market share).
  • Low employee engagement due to uncertainty about possible career paths.
  • Not matching employees to areas of need, resulting in an excessive wages bill.
  • Not matching the right workforce to right place, creating additional costs and turnover of critical employees

The primary method employed is a customised Workforce Insight framework, based on the integration of the Operating Model Canvas (as developed by Andrew Campbell) with strategic workforce planning systems, tools, and analytics (based on the ISO 30409:2016 standard). This results in both a quantification of workforce shifts in project as well as integrated reporting dataset for ongoing support of the workforce strategy process.

  • Commission data early to scan, collect, organise and analyse work and workforce information, for the insights you haven’t seen
  • Connect Board and Executive requirements with internal and external workforce trends, so people and strategy are aligned
  • Review and assess opportunities to improve strategic workforce planning capability
  • Create and analyse workforce data models that drive cost and performance improvement
  • Advise and support HR, Finance and Operations validate issues and findings, and embed new approaches to strategic workforce management
  • Integrate these findings, and the review of the strategic workforce planning capability into future workforce considerations
  • Bring together actions, tools and platforms to sustain improvement, so organisations can take ownership of their own journey via a repeatable system.

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