| 15 July 2024
What is workforce planning and why do we need it?
Workforce planning (and the act of developing a workforce plan) is fundamentally about building and sustaining the workforce needed to deliver an effective service.
Effective workforce planning can help us to understand useful actions that will give the best chance of having the required workforce to meet the demands of customers, clients, or the public, both now and in the future.
The alignment of supply (recruitment, training, and retention of people) and demand (performance, outcomes, and outputs) can enable organisations to grow and thrive.
Given the value of workforce planning, it is important to address several common mistakes and illustrate how practitioners can avoid them.
Having worked with organisations across the four nations of the UK over the past two years, we’ve identified five areas that are commonly overlooked as issues or barriers to more effective workforce planning.
Five key areas of avoidable risk
Number one: Lack of clear aims
Consider these questions: What is the problem you are trying to solve? What do you think a workforce plan will achieve? What evidence is informing your assumptions?
It is common that an organisation may decide to set up a workforce plan because it something ‘useful’ or ‘one of things an organisation should have’ but may not recognise what they hope to achieve from having one. Not having a clear aim will result in a plan that fails to realise its potential benefits.
How to overcome: Set out clearly what your aims are for the workforce plan and make it clear what you hope to achieve from it (e.g., what measures will show it is succeeding or not, how will you monitor and evaluate outputs and outcomes). This will allow you to have something to work towards. You’ll be able to see and measure real success and improvement across the organisation from the plan if you have the aims and desired outcomes clearly defined from the outset.
Number two: Accountability
The first common error when starting a workforce plan is not clearly defining accountability and responsibilities. Often an organisation will decide that it needs a workforce plan (perhaps are required to do so, or to address a specific issue). However, a lack of clearly defined ownership can lead to an absence of transparency and visibility across the organisation. This compounds unclear responsibilities and ineffective delegation. Ultimately, creating a plan without clear governance and individuals responsible for driving its success will fail.
How to overcome: Don’t start or communicate a plan until everyone involved in its delivery is clear on their role. This will ensure there is a line of ownership and accountability from strategy to operational execution. Ensure everyone involved can access the plan and is given a sense of responsibility for its success. The strategic owner must see the value in a workforce plan and be prepared to sponsor and champion it long-term.
Number three: Analysis inertia
Over or under analysing your workforce can be counterproductive to a plan. Organisations are regularly sceptical about the quality and accuracy of their workforce data. This often results in a lack of confidence in the information presented in a workforce plan and a tendency to go deeper with data reconciliation or required analysis before deciding anything. This can result in a lack of action and inertia. Being too cautious to do anything is not conducive to improvement and momentum.
How to overcome: Decision makers ought to be encouraged to reach sensible and proportionate decisions based on the current evidence presented. They need to appreciate the concept of risk vs reward and developing a tolerance to what is ‘good enough’ to make some progress. Lay out what the risks are if they go with a decision based on the information and the risks of doing nothing. If an organisation suspects it has a lack of a required skill and is faced with a decision to invest in training or not, it is important to weigh up the validity of the evidence vs the risk of no action. In this case it would seem a logical decision to go with the data presented and invest in the required skill. Don’t get bogged down in inertia. Favour progress over perfection.
Number four: Plans are abstract
Workforce planning can often become a very abstract concept that few people truly understand, including what it might achieve. This can result in plans being difficult to implement, monitor and track benefits from. Often plans will be presented as an attempt to achieve the right people, with the right skills, at the right time – or variations on this theme. What does this mean in reality?
How to overcome: Document and be explicit with your aims and timeframes. Make a clear, concise outline of what your plan is and how you hope to bring about change. The Six Steps Methodology® is a great example of how to ‘frame’ this and make an abstract concept more tangible. This will allow you to stop becoming lost in conjecture and allow you to document strategy progress and, most importantly, see success. It is often helpful to structure a workforce plan around themes or domains relevant to the organisation. For example, recruitment, training, and retention are three broad areas common across most organisations and can be split into subcategories if useful.
Number five: Plans are disconnected
A workforce plan should not sit in isolation from other plans in the organisation. Often it can be isolated and disconnected with rest of the company business or financial plans. Are you writing a workforce plan in isolation to a business plan or existing strategy? Do they ‘talk’ to one another (i.e., is there consistency across plans)? To what extent has one influenced the other? If the answer to these questions is unclear, this disconnect can result in duplication and inefficient use of time and resources. Ultimately, a workforce plan sat on a shelf is useless.
How to overcome: Set out how the workforce planning implementation works in tandem with the rest of the organisation. This synergised approach will allow greater benefits such as sharing of ideas, knowledge, and experience. Commonly the workforce plan will start and end with colleagues in HR or the people function. Quite rightly, HR is a critical component of the workforce plan – but not in isolation. It’s particularly important to include operational and finance colleagues in workforce planning discussions, so it removes the risk of being developed without consideration of operational and financial impact.
Workforce planning can be difficult at times to implement and get right, but by starting with these fundamentals and trying to eradicate the common issues we’ve highlighted, your workforce plan will have the best chance of succeeding.
If you’d like to discuss how we can help with your workforce planning, book a free consultation with our sector experts today.