Workforce Planning for HR - Made Easy

At Agentnoon, we define workforce planning as the strategic alignment of an organization’s human resources with strategic and operational goals. Planning the attraction, hiring, training, and retention of employees is essential to building a robust organization that can withstand market changes. 

With the importance of workforce planning in today’s business world, it’s no wonder it’s a staple in almost all organizations. However, just because you have to do something, doesn’t mean it’s easy to do so. 

That’s why we’ll make it as easy as possible for you to do workforce planning. We’ll cover its impact on HR functions, its benefits in the workplace, and which HR tools can help you implement it easily. But first, let’s see why it’s essential for HR. 

Why workforce planning is essential for HR?

Why workforce planning is essential for HR?

1. Managing risks and uncertainties: You don’t want the risk of overstaffing or understaffing in your organization. If you have too many people, your organization’s bottom line suffers because there’s not enough work available to justify everyone’s salary. If you lack people, you risk failing to deliver on essential projects, causing problems for your company. You eliminate both of these problems with workforce planning.

2. Strategic alignment with HR objectives: You want the right people at the right time, in the right places, for the right duration to ensure you meet your business goals. 

3. Org agility and performance support: Workforce planning helps you support your organizational performance and productivity through multiple activities, such as acquiring new training software and creating training and development programs.

   With that in mind, let’s see the step-by-step elements of the workplace planning process. 

HR-Centric workforce planning process

1. Gauge current HR status: Your starting point A matters. It determines where your workforce currently sits in the knowledge, skills, and attitude (KSA) department. To acquire this information, you need to assess your current workforce’s demographics, skills, current performance, etc. However, don’t try to do this manually; use HR analytics to gather this data and systematize it.

2. Set future HR objectives: Now that you have your starting point A, you need to determine your desired end point B. 

   To do so, you should align workforce planning with HR’s strategic objectives and include trends that can help you do so such as remote work, gig economy, and DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion).

3. Pinpoint discrepancies: This is the difference between your starting point A and your desired end point B. Both points matter—if you wanted to go from Miami (point A) to New York (point B), the road would be very different than if you wanted to go to the same place from London or Montreal.

   The gap is the road between point A and point B. Once you have both points, you identify the right path that will lead you to your desired future.

   In HR terms, this would mean analyzing the skills gap—the skills your employees have now vs. the skills your employees should have for your organization to implement future (more demanding) projects. 

   Once you create this path, it’s time to execute it. 

4. Deploy HR initiatives: You want to help your employees by making skill acquisition as easy as possible. You can do so by developing HR-specific strategies for recruitment, training, and retention. Implement any new HR policies and practices that can help you in this process.

   If you can afford it, take a plane from Miami to New York (the fastest option). If you have to take a car, at least make sure it’s mechanically fit to cover the distance.

5. Review and adjust plans: How will you know if you reached New York? Well, you’ll look around and see the Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State Building, or the Statue of Liberty (endpoint). If you don’t see any of it, you’re not there.

   To ensure that you don’t stray off the path, you’ll have checkpoints (key performance indicators) along the way. You know you’ll have to pass through cities like Jacksonville, Richmond, and Philadelphia to reach New York.

   How will you know if your HR policies are working? Well, you’ll have key performance indicators that you’ll track during the execution to ensure you meet your end point B.

   Adapt your HR strategies according to feedback, and remember to change anything your numbers tell you doesn’t work.

Impact of workforce planning on HR functions

1. Recruitment and talent acquisition: It will help you develop targeted recruitment strategies and hire people with future-ready skills. 

2. Employee development and training: By creating continuous learning opportunities and providing upskilling/reskilling programs, you will prepare your current employees for your business’s future needs.

3. Succession planning: You will identify essential roles in your organization and ensure you smoothly transition your future leaders into key HR roles.

4. Performance management: Your employees' output will increase because they will be more engaged at work and their productivity will improve. 

Benefits of effective workforce planning for HR

1. Skills Matching: You’ll have the right skills at your disposal when you need them.

2. Reduced costs: You’ll have reduced recruitment and hiring costs because you’ll only target your job ads to your ideal candidates. 

3. Efficiency: You will be able to do more with less (HR resources).

4. Improved Retention: When you hire people who really want to work in your organization, you’ll have a higher engagement rate in your company. On top of that, the happier the employees are, the longer they stay with the company. 

5. Data-driven decisions: Making difficult decisions will be easier because you will have relevant data in front of you. You’ll know how many people you need to hire, how you need to train them, and where you need to allocate them. 

6. Agile: With all the data in place, you’ll be able to move fast in the market and fill any gaps with ease. This will make your company agile and prepared for any market hiccups. 

Choosing the right tools for workforce planning

You must pick the right HR tools for workforce planning. You want tools that will make your job easier, not tools that will give you a headache. Also, you need to have a combination of the following four HR tools if you want to do workforce planning the right way: 

1. HR analytics platforms: HR analytics tools are software that helps HR teams gather, evaluate, and create insights from data collected on their employees. This business data helps HR teams solve company inefficiencies, improve employee engagement, increase productivity, and retain more people.  

   So choose an HR analytics platform with a good reporting system, a user-friendly interface, and a tight security system that will safely store employees’ sensitive data. 

2. Talent management systems: A talent management system is robust, helping HR teams with processes such as recruitment, onboarding, training and development, succession planning, and compensation management.

   When choosing a talent management system, pay attention to several factors, such as the possibility of customization, ease of usage, level of support during software onboarding, integration with other tools, and scalability with organizational growth. 

3. Learning Management Systems(LMS): Learning management systems are platforms that help your HR teams teach your employees new skills (reskilling), deepen their expertise in a certain field (upskilling), and train your employees for new hard and soft skills. Learning management systems will determine how effective your learning and development programs are. 

   When choosing your learning management system, pay attention to the content/information library of the system (do they have enough of the desired content on the platform), how easy it use the system, and can you modify any section of it (customization). 

4. HR dashboards: An HR dashboard is a visualization tool that helps HR teams track, analyze, and report on HR metrics and KPIs. These tools make it easy to combine data and gain new insights that can help with recruiting, onboarding, and employee performance.

   When choosing an HR dashboard, make sure that they have real-time data updates, that you can (easily) customize them to your company's needs, and that they have benchmarking and comparative analysis options. 

Hub dashboard

Overcoming challenges in HR workforce planning

When you start doing workforce planning, you’ll face some obstacles along the way— that’s a normal thing.

So here are the most common challenges that you’ll face and how to solve them.

1. Data quality and integration: One of the first challenges you’ll encounter is the quality of data and integration of data into the system. The first thing is to ensure that you have the correct (up-to-date) information in your system. Then, if something’s missing, acquire that additional data from your employees. You need to ensure that you have accurate and comprehensive HR data because that’s the only way workforce planning software will make sense for your organization. 

   For integration, ensure your HR analytics tools can pull this data from multiple HR systems you used to store data. 

2. Managing change: Getting the info was the easy part; implementing it was the hard part. You need to have a change management plan in place and communicate any changes you want to make with your HR staff and other stakeholders. Training your employees will help to overcome resistance and create buy-in. 

3. Adapting to uncertainties: Planning is essential, but plans are worthless. Make sure that you always plan for flexibility because things that you didn’t plan for will happen and you’ll have to change. Economies go up and down and industries get disrupted overnight. These are not the things you can predict, but you can plan to stay flexible enough to adapt to these changes. 

Conclusion

Workforce planning is essential in today’s fast-moving global economy. It helps you manage risk, increase employee productivity, and align employees with your business goals. To implement workforce planning, you’ll have to assess, analyze, identify, execute, and monitor your HR plan. Tools such as HR analytics platforms, talent management systems, learning management systems, and HR dashboards will help you implement it correctly. And after the right implementation, you’ll enjoy benefits such as improved retention and reduced recruitment costs.

The best time to start workforce planning was twenty years ago; the second best time is today. Agentnoon merges your planning, forecasting, and analysis into simple software that you can use to match your workforce strategy with organizational goals.

So book a demo to see how Agentnoon can support your HR workforce planning.