Once you’ve sold your organization on why you should do workforce planning, the next step is to actually, well, do it.

Stumped as to where to begin?

Here are my top picks for conducting workforce planning:

Gain Support. Before you can even begin workforce planning you must involve the leaders of your organization to gain their support and commitment to identifying and growing the talent within the organization through planned analysis and developmental activities like mentoring, coaching, job rotation, educational programs and formalized feedback processes.

Consider new approaches to development such as  360-degree feedback, special assignments, cross functional teams and Web-based educational activities.  

Create company-wide, formal employee development plans that dovetail with your performance management cycles.

Formally identify and track high-potential employees’ performance through partnerships with executives and managers.

Analyze Supply and Demand.  The main focus of workforce planning is the supply and demand analysis, which focuses on identifying existing workforce talent and stability and projecting future workforce needs and availability.

Start by profiling your existing workforce to understand where you are right now. This includes reviewing:

• Number of employees vs. temporary or contracted workers
• Skills of current employees
• Workforce cost 
• Workforce diversity (age, gender, and race)
• Retirement eligibility statistics
 

Next review trend data. What I mean by this is consider things such as hiring patterns (time to fill, number of openings), retirement patterns and turnover statistics.

Trend information combined with the workforce profile is an essential building block for forecasting workforce supply.

That’s the supply end of the process.

The demand analysis portion of workforce planning identifies the workforce your organization needs to operate efficiently. In this step you should focus on function not people.

This step can offer some of the greatest benefits in workforce planning by offering you a chance to re-examine long-standing assumptions about the purpose and direction of your programs, departments and organization in light of what is taking place in the business world at large.

First, look at external trends and issues in the economic, social, technological, legal and political arenas while considering demographics, diversity, outsourcing, and growing or declining occupations.

Next, look at internal information such as strategic objectives, business functions, and technology.

Now, look at your workforce and their skill sets through on-the-job observation, employee surveys, or informal interviews and identify talent gaps and development needs.

Finally compare the workforce supply projection to the workforce demand forecast to see where you are likely to have gaps or surpluses in your workforce.

Develop a Strategy. The final step in the workforce planning phase involves the development of strategies to address future gaps and surpluses. Look at current policies and procedures for attracting and retaining employees and determine what changes you can implement to reduce the likelihood of gaps.

Consider outreach recruitment, utilizing contract or temporary workers, staff training and development, and succession planning.

All it takes is a little planning – workforce planning – to stay ahead of the recruiting curve.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 23rd, 2007 at 10:30 am and is filed under Workforce Planning. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.