The phrase “workforce planning” is used to describe many things — metrics, competency modeling, and even headcount budgeting — but these activities don’t support an organization’s strategic business objectives. True Strategic Workforce Planning is a long-term process. It encompasses internal and external supply and demand influences on the workforce, enables scenario and action planning, and allows progress checks along the way to ensure that you reach your goal. With the right resource plan you can transform data about employees into strategic insight about future workforce capability, and provide your organization with the confidence that workforce strategy and operations are expertly aligned.

Software for workforce planning has the capability to see further into the future and create specific models of your workforce’s supply and demand. It also incorporates influences such as demographics, business strategies and employee preference changes. On the other hand, an application that’s used for scheduling is designed to match specific resources to individual requirements, usually based on a short-term time frame.

Headcounts are simply about quantity, but they don’t take enough factors into account. With a strategic plan you can incorporate external labor market trends, skill requirements, a complete description of the talent you need, and how your firm might appeal to future workers.

Very few employers apply strategic workforce planning techniques to a company’s true resource—talent. Yes, you do need a headcount budget, but it should be generated next to a long-term strategic workforce plan, not instead of one.

Strategic Workforce Planning is designed to achieve exactly this.

The prioritization processes and techniques in our Strategic Workforce Planning framework enable you to make informed choices about which programs and services are the most critical and most effective in delivering your strategy, enabling you to target your spending to the right offerings.

Moving towards Workforce Planning can be viewed as a journey. You’ll be taking realistic, achievable steps leading you closer to greater progress, while understanding you won’t implement the perfect system on the first day. Your first step could be introducing environment scanning, creating the right metrics, or building a forecast of your future workforce.

There is no “one size fits all” process for Strategic Workforce Planning — think of it as a menu, not a prescription! The Aruspex framework is flexible and adaptable to suit this, and allows you to build on activities and capabilities you already have in place — evolution not revolulution.

The first step on any journey depends on where you are starting from! If you are starting from scratch, there are two things you need to do: build your own skills and knowledge, and prepare your organization. You can get a lot of hints on your own skills from our “Becoming a Great Workforce Planner” paper, and prepare the organization using our part one of our “Real World Approach” paper.

Like all people, leaders are not interested in solutions to problems they don’t see or understand — so the first step is usually to show leaders that there are challenges and risks which need to be addressed. We call this creating the burning platform, and there is a whole section dedicated to it in our white paper

Absolutely not! While the two processes are related in some ways (see our paper on Strategic vs. Operational Workforce Planning), one is not a foundation for the other — and often they are created and managed by entirely different groups. However, your operational workforce plan will make a lot more sense (and be a lot easier to produce) if it is in the context of a strategic plan.

Ideally Strategic Workforce Planning is placed in HR Strategy, in a separate department reporting directly to the head of human resources, or in another group which has visibility to the whole range of HR — but there are many successful projects which are in individual parts of the HR organization such as organizational development or staffing. When you put workforce planning in a single focused group like staffing, there is a danger that the "answer" to all of the issues is a staffing answer, and the same is true for any niche areas of HR. Of course the right individual can overcome this as they can overcome most obstacles and challenges, but it does add an extra layer of challenge. Operational workforce planning usually exists in staffing or in data analysis, but Strategic Workforce Planning benefits from access to a bigger picture view.

Spending time on workforce planning helps prevent big issues from becoming out of control issues. When you start to focus on Workforce Planning, you’ll avoid having to constantly fight fires, and you’ll be able to proactively anticipate and prevent problems before they get out of hand.

Workforce Planning ensures that your organization has the right workforce in place to respond to financial and marketing plans. This valuable return on investment can be calculated easily and seen as a great benefit.

Organizations must look beyond today. Gaining a competitive edge doesn’t happen by accident. Companies should do everything in their power so they won’t fall prey to trends and events that are foreseeable, but don’t yet exist (such as the future wave of baby boomer retirements). Predicting the future can be done through a variety of disciplines (including finance and marketing) that do so with varying degrees of accuracy. Uncertainty isn’t a good reason for ignoring the future.

Starting with a basic impact matrix is a useful exercise in prioritizing all the workforce factors you need to include in your Workforce Plan. Consider several key economic and technological trends, how they’ll impact your organization, the likelihood they may happen, and rate the combination of these two measures to find out how much you should consider this information. Prioritizing and selecting these factors is a skill that grows with workforce planning. Read our whitepaper for more information on environment scanning and prioritizing.

Our approach to workforce planning is the result of years of experience and practice. It has been developed over time, and it effectively connects the disciplines of art and science to workforce planning. We offer a proven, tangible framework, and a comprehensive software tool that meets every type of organization’s needs. Aruspex helps you build your internal capabilities, so you don’t need external consultants to build workforce plans for you. For us, and for our clients, the essential differences are our experience and our passion for workforce planning.