The Future of Workforce Planning

Workforce planning is no longer simple like it was earlier. A number of complex factors characterize the workforce of today— a global talent pool, diverse nature of workers, high expectations and demands and so on. On the other hand, the war for talent is getting even more cut-throat and organizations are innovating in every HR space to be able to hold on to top talent. Meeting these employee needs at one end, and fuelling the organizational agenda at the other end, is a difficult balancing task that HR must achieve. Workforce planning is a holistic process that takes inputs from other HR processes–recruitment, learning and development, employee engagement, career pathing, succession planning, compensation and benefits, making it all the more complex. To master the workforce planning process, organizations must therefore turn to technology, and at the same time understand their employees better. Here we look at the latest norms in HR. 

Gone are the days when employee movements, allocations and terminations were captured and managed on an excel sheet. Today, a range of workforce planning technology and process improvements have hit the market, and are being lapped up by organizations to plan their resourcing more efficiently and effectively. These tools help look at the entire employee lifecycle, treating each employee as an individual with unique needs, and unique potential. There is a calculated quantitative element of who to place in what role, for optimum productivity. At the same time, there is the softer angle of looking at employees as people and not mere resources i.e. whether an employee is the right cultural fit, sees a movement as just and fair, and will be engaged in the new role. An effective workforce planning process takes both these views—people and organization—into consideration, thereby minimizing the possibility that either has a disconnect. Modern workforce management tools do just that. They harness the power of data—employee details such as employee attributes are used to see who fits best where, from both the above perspectives. It also helps managers arrive at high-level business repercussions of such decisions such as impact on bottom line and impact on retention. As much as workforce management tools help managers determine what is important, they filter out that which is not impactful. 

Most importantly, a workforce management tool is able to look at workforce planning in its entirety and not as pocketed people decisions. It helps translate workforce initiatives to strategic objectives such as customer satisfaction and order placement. This is possible because decisions can now be made based on real data, emerging from a relevant context. A contextual view of employees is a boon for making the right people-cum-business decisions for talent planning. 

Effective workforce planning can act as the panacea for most employee problems such as turnover, low productivity, low engagement, misfits, low potential realization etc. It is up to organizations to remove this process from the clutches of manual spreadsheets and calculations, and make it tech-enabled for the right purposes. 
 
The ultimate objective of a workforce planning function is to determine how to best recruit, grow, deploy, optimize, and retain employees.