The Right Choices for Successful Workforce Planning

Staff turnover can be costly, not only in terms of the hiring and training process, but also as you transition between employees. That gap slows down your productivity and can harm your team’s morale. So it’s important that you prepare for an eventual turnover by forecasting your future needs and establishing models that will allow you to minimize that transition period.

Again with competencies?

Well, yes. Competencies play a key role in workforce planning efforts. They are the measurable and observable knowledge, skills and behaviors that are critical to successful job performance.

Competencies go hand-in-hand with workforce planning, allowing you, the employer, to:

• Plan your organizational structure and deploy your workforce
• Determine which job classes best fit your business needs
• Recruit and select the best employees
• Design training budgets, development and individual performance plans
• Develop your staff to fill future vacancies (a demand forecast)

So, what exactly is workforce planning?

Workforce planning is a “coordination” process of identifying gaps between your workforce of today and your human capital need for tomorrow.

Organizational success depends on having the right employees with the right competencies at the right time. Workforce planning provides you with a strategic basis for making human resource decisions promptly and accurately, thus allowing you and your HR staff to anticipate change, rather than being surprised by it!

“How to” make it work

Many HR professionals like the idea of workforce planning, but few really understand how to get a grasp the ‘how to do’ part. Here are three basic steps:

• Review the competencies/employees presently available, along with their probability of staying in that role (whether they are striving to access other positions within your company or may be prone to looking elsewhere)
• Access what competencies/employees will be required in the future, based on your company’s growth as well as on your turnover forecast
• Review the gaps (the sum of comparing current and future supply), and establish a contingency plan

While basic, these steps are not easy to take if you are starting from scratch or are not sure how to forecast accurately. To learn more on how to create innovative applications of competencies in workforce planning, review our Advanced Competency Modeling Workshop.

To learn more about our products and services, and how competencies and competency models can help your organization, call 800-870-9490, email info@workitect.com
or use the contact form at  Workitect.

©️2019, Workitect, Inc.