New Approaches in Strategic Workforce Planning
Recruitment strategies
It may comprise of recruiting new staff with required
abilities and skills by strategically promoting the new
job openings among the suitable contenders.
Outsourcing
It stresses upon the use of
external organizations or
individuals to
complete
a
specific set of
tasks, which
does not requires
fulltime
work
option.
Fig.2. Scenario planning
Collaboration
It emphasizes
the collaboration between the organizations to better
deal with skills shortage.
Multi-Skilling Job Design-a new thinking!
Digressing away from the traditional departmental silos,
multi-skilling focuses upon defining a range of tasks and
responsibilities for an individual, which hence instigates
need for imparting multiple skill-sets to a single employee. On-the-job training and task rotations are some of the
practices to improve upon the multi-skill set of the workforce. Another not so famous approach is multi-employer
contract, in which a group of employers hire an employee, who is rotated among them. Frequent assessments of
the employees is necessary to see whether they are able
to maintain it or not. Now the question arises-Why
should an organization go for it? It can help to reduce the
direct labor costs significantly. Downtime can be reduced
and there is a positive change in performance of the employees. But putting it into reality demands overtime
rates, increase in basic pay, work-related health illness,
etc. So to cope with this, proper planning should be made
to assess the risk involved and to identify the narrow
spots.
Royal Dutch/ Shell Oil. Unlike the forecasts which are
based upon the assumption that tomorrow’s world will
be much like today’s, scenario planning involves a coherent and credible alternative stories about the future. Scenarios are generally built upon a dynamic sequence of
interacting
events, changes and conditions that are
ne cessary to
reach a particular outcome.
Exploring the
future
is
therefore
a
serious business
and
among
a
range of proven techniques, scenario planning is most widely accepted
because it comprises of rich stories of how future might
play based on the outcomes of the key variables of the
workforce environment. This can be followed by talent
management which can further decide as to how to develop and maintain the desired organizational capabilities.
Strategic workforce planning is the foundation for talent
management. It is the bridge which connects HR strategy
to business strategy. The business leaders need to adopt
workforce planning as a key contribution to the business
process and not just as an afterthought.
Scenario Planning- a sneak peek to the future
Scenario planning was first developed by Pierre Wack at
29
October 2014 |CONSILIUM