For some employers, managing employees’ skills and career paths can fall into a category of employee experience and organisational admin. However, with VUCA (a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity), valuing human capital builds operational resilience, something we have all needed over the last few years especially. Strategic workforce planning is the best way to support your business transformations in 2022 and beyond.

Identify and analyse: preparing for the future

Workforce planning is not about predicting the future, but preparing the skills required to face it. In the short, medium and long term, this approach makes it possible to map the diverse talent in your company along with their soft skills. It also lists the processes and tools, from simple to complex, necessary to support the changes in your business strategy over time.

 

Workforce planning deeply affects the human dimension in companies, evoking new perspectives for talent management, modelling the process of making Human Resources and Talent Acquisition decisions and contributing to more fluid internal communication. The skills framework that it involves optimises several HR objectives including recruitment, internal mobility and up-skilling/re-skilling.

 

Workforce planning foresees the needs in technical skills, soft skills and cutting-edge technological tools. In short, this approach is a cross between a strategic business project and developing employee skills. It’s an ally to all HR leaders working ever more closely with the rest of the C-Suite.

Why talk about workforce planning in 2022?

Company transformations impacted by the pandemic have disrupted a multitude of sectors. Looking beyond uncertainty, companies are now anticipating skill requirements in order to reorganise their activity and resume recruitment in a challenging candidate market. In this context, workforce planning helps enrich human capital with the skills needed to achieve digital transformation in the post-Covid-19 era.

How does workforce planning work?

Workforce planning offers everyone, from team leaders and hiring managers to HR Directors, a single management tool for all levels of your organisation. By pooling a database into one platform, it invites all stakeholders to project themselves into the future together.

 

Contributing greatly to overall strategy, workforce planning urges you to make decisions based on a precise and relevant image of the evolution of sectors and professions. Artificial intelligence analyses the real history of your company, as well as external data, in order to provide forecasts devised by specially tailored algorithms. Allowing you to be better informed, your company can become more agile and at any time can fall back on this data to align strategic and HR decisions.

Skill frameworks are great aids to human resources, helping better support employees in their employability. This could take the form of creating work groups for the professions evolving the quickest, for example. This approach makes it possible to direct different employee profiles towards specific training in technical or soft skills to boost performance, or even towards internal mobility. It is also crucial to support employees with high potential, in addition to working on employability of those whose position is at risk of becoming obsolete. Workforce planning is a critical resource for aligning internal employability and business transformation.

What results can we expect from strategic workforce planning?

Workforce planning enriches HR decisions with quick and actionable answers. The skills framework optimises recruitment and internal mobility actions and generates savings in resources. For one thing, training needs are listed in one place after evaluating talent. On the other hand, internal mobility and development prospects are clear, contextualised and easily explained to employees. Having more fluid communication at all levels benefits the entire organisation.

 

Anticipating possible developments at different levels speeds up the deployment of organisational systems when needed. Its proper implementation equips HR and managers with the tools necessary to anticipate the challenges that your company’s human capital will have to respond to in an uncertain future.

 

Discover our latest Workforce Planning guide here.