In today's candidate market, acquiring real talent can be a challenge, but retaining them can be even more difficult. In fact, according to our Q3 Employment Monitor, employers are recognising that the power now lies in the hands of the job-seeker.
That's why if you don't support your organisation's talent strategy and culture through methodical workforce planning, you may lose out due to the inability to hire, maintain and empower top talent when needed most, as well as on key projects and increased costs across the business.
With Strategic Workforce Planning, you will have the intelligence to predict the skills and employees you'll need in the future and define plans to balance business demand and the supply of key talent over time.
Successful Strategic Workforce Planning can have significant positive effects on your business. Here are 7 of the top benefits.
1. Anticipate and plan for change
With Strategic Workforce Planning, you can establish key metric benchmarks that will inform executives about workforce issues and equip them with tools to identify talent risk before it impacts business objectives.
For example, are labour costs expected to grow over time as the business grows? Are there employees that are planning to retire soon, and how will that affect the operations of the business? What's the average churn rate by department and how can you put a process in place to maintain levels for workflow?
This information will help you improve business planning and financial forecasts by quantifying talent requirements to meet short and long-term organisational goals.
2. Decrease hiring costs
Getting a detailed overview of the headcount your organisation needs and the productivity levels required for the business to run and grow will ensure that you're making the most of the talent you have.
This will decrease recruitment costs and help the business operations run more effectively, which will have positive effects throughout the business (employee morale, productivity, revenue).
3. Improve recruitment processes
Using analytics, Strategic Workforce Planning can help you outline the characteristics and traits of the high performers in each department and inform your hiring criteria to find candidates that are most likely to suit the business goals and culture.
This will improve your employee retention rate, interview-to-hire rate, save time in your recruitment process and decrease recruitment costs.
4. Align HR with business strategy
Align your business's HR programs and policies with the business strategy for Strategic Workforce Planning, such as:
data protection
employee assistance
employee benefits
wellness programmes
career development programmes
learning and development
This will ensure that those goals are supported in the best way possible and strengthen the organisation's culture. As a result, employee retention rate will be better, which will positively affect the company's growth.
5. Drive allocation of talent investments
Strategic Workforce Planning will help you determine which groups of employees deliver the highest ROI for the business and warrant greater investment in their training and development. By the same token, it'll outline what areas need extra resources to reach its full potential and contribute more to the business.
Furthermore, this will inform what roles are important for the growth of the business, so you can implement steps to protect that and minimise risk.
6. Identify gaps in your talent chain
If your workforce strategy and business goals are aligned, you can easily identify what hires you will need to make in the future when the company reaches a critical point for expansion.
You can also easily identify any existing gaps your workforce could benefit from.
7. Implement informed retention tactics
Without proper tools, HR and managers can misuse raises, bonuses and/or promotions put in place to prevent resignations. Strategic Workforce Planning will help you leverage predictive analytics to correctly identify top performers and people in key roles, who are at risk of leaving. From here, you can implement a retention strategy to minimise risk and move forward.
Need advice for your Strategic Workforce Plan?
Cpl is a global provider of people to start-up companies, massive multinationals and SMEs in every sector. We can help you define a set of procedures for workforce planning to avoid or diminish people problems, take advantage of talent opportunities and improve your 'talent pipeline.'
Strategic Workforce Planning can encompass all the aspects of an organisation including; retention, recruitment, learning and development, and compensation and benefits. Taking an integrated approach enables you to determine which talent segments deliver high returns and therefore need higher investment.
If you have any questions or would like some advice, please get in touch with a member of our team and request a free consultation and we'd be happy to help.