Best Practices for Conquering Your Workforce Planning Challenges

Workforce planning is a necessary but often overlooked element of your HR strategy. If you want your organization to succeed, workforce planning must be a high priority. Unfortunately, there's no one-size-fits-all approach to effective workforce planning; it's something that must be customized for each company's unique circumstances and challenges. In this post, we'll explore four key best practices for conquering your workforce planning challenges so you can put together an actionable plan that improves employee engagement and performance while reducing turnover costs:

Identify your challenges.

Before you begin to implement your workforce planning strategy and make any major changes, it's important to first identify the problems you're trying to solve.

When looking at your workforce planning challenges, ask yourself:

• What are my goals for the next 3-6 months? Are they in line with what I should be doing? If not, why not?
• How do these goals align with my long-term vision? How are they improving my organization or team's performance/outcomes in a measurable way (for example, having more people on board)

I highly recommend setting ambitious but realistic short term goals that can be measured within a few months. For example: “In 6 months from now I want all of our employees to have access to their schedules through our mobile app."

Define your objectives.

Defining your objectives is the first step of any workforce planning project, and it’s also one of the most important. You need to understand what you want to change or improve before you can begin planning. This will help ensure that your workforce planning efforts are focused on achieving real results that matter to your organization.

The following questions will help you define your objectives:

• What do you want to achieve? Establishing specific goals for a project allows you to gauge how well it is performing at any point in time. For example: “We plan on reducing turnover rates by 10% by December 2020” or “We plan on reducing turnover rates by 10% within two years."
• How will we know if we're successful? Having metrics in place ensures that there's accountability for meeting stated objectives and expectations—and allows organizations with multiple stakeholders (employees) share information more easily when determining how they can improve together as part of an overarching strategy with measurable outcomes such as cost savings/savings per employee ratio/a decrease in annual turnover rate over time (i.e., decrease from 15% at start date - 12% today).

Make sure you have the right data.

In order to have the right data, you need to know what you're looking for and how it will be used. If your organization lacks this information, invest in getting it by talking with stakeholders and other stakeholders' leaders.

The best way to determine whether or not your workforce planning needs are being met is through regular internal audits of the program. Audits can uncover issues that may have been overlooked or ignored previously.

Identify and resolve internal obstacles.

• Identify and resolve internal obstacles.
• Find qualified external support.

While this may sound like a no-brainer, it is important to note that the most successful workforce planning initiatives are those in which management understands how to get past these hurdles. Take the time to look at your organization’s data and identify any issues that might be preventing you from moving forward with workforce planning as quickly as possible. Is there a lack of information? Are there internal obstacles that need to be overcome? Do you need help from outside sources who can assist in resolving these problems?

Find qualified external support.

• Find a consultant with the right expertise and experience. Whether you’re looking to expand your workforce, manage talent turnover, or otherwise improve your workforce management processes, there are consultants who specialize in these areas. Find one whose services align with your specific challenges and needs.
• Look for someone who is familiar with your industry. Some consulting firms specialize in working with companies from particular industries: technology, healthcare or finance come to mind as examples of broad categories that have many different sub-industries (e.g., cybersecurity or health insurance). If you operate within one of these sectors, find an expert who can help you navigate its unique set of issues before choosing a consultant for the job at hand.
• Consider whether the candidate has worked with companies like yours before. A consultant should not only know what questions will be asked during an interview but also have some idea about how to answer them—or at least where additional information might be found—in order to make sure that he or she isn't caught off guard by any tough questions (or simple but important ones). This is particularly important if they don't have previous experience dealing directly with candidates on behalf of clients; foreign language skills may also come into play depending on whom they're interviewing!

Measure progress on an ongoing basis.

Measure progress on an ongoing basis.

Measuring the effectiveness of your workforce planning efforts is essential for ensuring you’re working toward your goals and staying on track. Consider measuring two key areas: employee turnover and development.

First, it’s important to measure how many employees are leaving the company each month—and why they are leaving (or if they have been laid off). By keeping track of this information over time, you can identify trends in turnover rates and determine whether certain positions or departments tend to be more prone to voluntary or involuntary departures than others. If a large number of employees are leaving one department or group within your organization, that may indicate that there is a problem with company culture or management style in that area. You should also monitor voluntary turnover rates across all divisions within your organization so that you can make sure there aren't any significant differences between groups.

Secondwards, consider developing an assessment toolkit for managers who oversee employees in their respective departments; this will help ensure consistent standards across all teams while providing guidelines for what constitutes effective training programs across various roles within an organization

Workforce planning can be intimidating, but with the right approach, it can be accomplished successfully.

Workforce planning is a complex process that requires a lot of data, time and resources. It’s not something you can do alone.

• Understand the business problem behind workforce planning: What are your key objectives? How does your organization measure success? Who are you trying to satisfy with your solution?
• Choose a solution that fits your business needs: The right workforce planning tool will help you meet those objectives by providing visibility into all phases of the employee lifecycle from recruitment through onboarding, managing active records across multiple systems and providing analytics capabilities for analysis.