“A company’s employees are its greatest asset and your
people are your product”
-Sir Richard Branson, CEO and Founder, Virgin Group
Introduction
Strategic workforce planning-a collation of strategy and
HR! Is it so? On a rough note, yes but more specifically, it
is the integration of workforce demand and supply into
the strategic planning cycle to ensure that ‘5 rights’ are
there in the organization –“the right number of people,
with the right skills, at the right level, in the right place
and at the right cost”. For organizations, a major chunk of
their total cost is contributed by the direct people cost
and nearly half of their employees are involved in
knowledge intensive roles. This reiterates the importance
of strategic workforce planning which can be leveraged
to manage the availability, productivity and capability of
the organizational workforce.
Fig.1. Strategic Workforce Planning-Overview
which are quite complex and costly, hence mostly suited
for large organizations. While, qualitative approach tends
to use the experts to predict future need and hence commonly used by SMEs. Some common methods in this context may be Delphi Technique, National Group technique,
etc.
Labor supply can be arranged within the organization or
outside it. To gauge the internal sources of supply, human resource audit (HRA) is a promising option. HRA is an
organizational chart with all the positions indicated and
“promotability” of each role incumbent is keyed to the
corresponding positions. The next step involves identification of present number and skills of staffs and then
comparing it with the future abilities required for the
business.
To create a balance, if an organization is falling short in
workforce, it should consider effective recruitment strategies along with job design, flexible work options, career
development and remuneration. In contrast, if the workforce is brimming out of the required limit, effective
strategies to manage redundancies, retirements and dismissals need to be created.
HR strategy-A spark for workforce planning
HR strategy cannot be thought of as a secluded plan of
action. It should be aligned with the business core strategy to exploit its full potential. Jointly they can assist in
effectively planning the workforce .
It helps to identify, assess, develop and sustain workforce
skills to attain business goals while maintaining a proper
balance between expectations and needs of the employees.
Labor demand and supply – a balance
Based upon its future requirements, it is important for
the business to determine its size of workforce, skills and
the time to do so. Labor demand forecasting, can adopt
two approaches-quantitative or qualitative. Quantitative
uses a mix of mathematical and statistical approaches,
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While developing a HR strategy, a company must analyze
the current industry, competitive advantage, key processes and key resources. On a broad scale, it can be grouped
into five categories, which covers various aspects of
workforce planning:
Restructuring
It may cover the areas like reducing staffs by attrition
or termination, regrouping tasks as a part of designing
efficient jobs, reorganizing business units, etc.
Training and development strategies
This part of the HR strategy governs the area of
providing training and development opportunities for
the new jobs and roles as well as existing ones..
October 2014 |CONSILIUM