Content area
Full text
Most organizations that conduct strategic workforce planning follow a similar set of steps:
understand the business strategy;
conduct a supply and demand gap analysis;
develop a workforce plan that addresses gaps and surpluses;
execute the talent strategies outlined in the workforce plan; and
monitor and adapt the workforce plan and its talent strategies.
However, APQC’s strategic workforce planning survey research found that this framework yields substantially more value for some organizations than others. To understand why, we isolated the best workforce planners from all other organizations in our survey. We gave the “best-in-class” designation to 46 survey respondents that are highly effective at strategic workforce planning overall and highly effective at:
understanding the capabilities they currently possess and those needed in three years;
understanding capabilities in the external labor market;
detecting changes in internal and external capabilities; and
identifying gaps with enough lead time to use any gap-closing option.
Comparing the two groups of survey responses revealed that the best workforce planners are doing more than closing skills gaps and reducing skills surpluses. They are optimizing talent. Leveraging technology, varied work arrangements and employee development (Figure 1), they assemble the optimal mix of talent for achieving business goals.
Tactics including knowledge transfer, reskilling, upskilling, cross skilling, job task analysis and skill adjacency identification allow the best-in-class to use talent more flexibility. Ultimately, they are able to find the right mix of talent and technology, realize workforce cost savings and mitigate the displacement of people (Figure 2).
Looking at the survey results more closely shows a number of differentiating workforce planning practices that enable the best-in-class to optimize talent. Organized under four themes – process, technology, people and time – these practices can be a guide for organizations seeking greater returns from strategic workforce planning.
Process
Process standardization and integration are two practices that the best-in-class leverage in ways that position them to optimize talent and yield greater value from strategic workforce planning.
Standardization
A standardized workforce planning process is one in which all areas of the organization use the same sub-processes, methods, technology and training to support and carry out workforce planning. Enterprise-wide standardization has many advantages as follows:
it boosts efficiency and effectiveness as workforce planning best practices, technologies and training can be leveraged...