How to Build Out a Strategic Workforce Plan

For the last several years, businesses globally continue to be challenged by workforce issues of crisis proportions, including things like high turnover, shortages of qualified staff, and even low morale. More pointedly, businesses had been in survival mode. Consequently, talent decisions have taken a backseat and often were made with little strategic thinking, planning, or even foresight for the future. Navigating this uncertainty successfully requires multiple insights that help inform businesses about the actions to take regarding their strategic direction.

From a business and HR perspective, strategic workforce planning will be (for the next few years), the greatest challenge faced by organizations today. Focused workforce planning can equip us to meet this challenge. As a tool workforce planning is one of the best strategies for improving organizations. Why? Because it forces us to think strategically about how to align people to our business, not so much as a one-time event, but as an iterative process tied overall to business strategy.

Now, for our purposes, although there are many ways to define workforce planning, at its core, we define workforce planning as the strategic alignment of an organization's human capital with its business direction. It is a methodical process of analyzing the current workforce, determining future workforce needs, identifying the gaps between the present and the future, and then implementing solutions so that the organization can accomplish its vision, missions, goals, and objectives.

You may have also heard some describe workforce planning as the process of ensuring that an organization can achieve a strategic objective by having the right people with the right skills in the right roles at the right time, and the right cost. That's actually pretty good, too.

What I'm going to share with you today is our six-step model and roadmap that we use for strategic workforce planning, and then the process that we use to build out a Strategic Workforce Plan.

I hope you enjoy this video and learn something that you can apply right away. If you did and want more, please subscribe to our channel. Be sure to check out our website for even more content, handouts, and free tools that will take you from where you are to where you want to be.

0:00 Intro
2:36 Six-Step model and roadmap
5:11 Strategy translation
8:47 Data collection
11:56 Forecasting and capability review
13:59 Risk identification
16:19 Gap closing talent strategies
18:33 Evaluation


Until next time.

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