Workforce planning can increase organizational agility, improve talent outcomes, save money, and improve business performance. Yet only half of organizations carry out workforce planning effectively.
To reap the full benefits of strategic workforce planning, consider adopting APQC’s 7-step framework. It provides the foundation for a well-defined and standardized process which is essential to successful workforce planning.
Why 7-Steps?
APQC’s 7-step workforce planning framework includes the key steps involved in identifying the capabilities that an organization needs and making plans for how to obtain them. The comprehensive framework guides HR, managers, and leaders to look broadly at trends, scenarios, risks, and opportunities related to the workforce. It has them consider how these might hinder or aid the business in carrying out its strategy. And it supports them in setting plans for mitigating workforce risks and securing the workforce needed to leverage business opportunities.
Workforce Planning: Step-by-Step
Determine whether workforce planning will focus on the enterprise and/or specific business areas. Align the workforce planning time horizon with the strategic planning timeframe used by the enterprise and/or specific business areas. Next, dive into these workforce planning steps.
- Specify business strategy and plans—Review/contribute to setting the current business strategy and business plans. Determine at a high level what will be required from a workforce perspective to carry out the strategy and plans.
- Determine talent demand—Identify the talent capabilities required to carry out the business strategy and plans.
- Assess talent supply—Assess the supply of needed talent capabilities, looking internally and externally.
- Conduct gap analysis—Reconcile the talent demand and supply, identifying gaps, surpluses, and risks.
- Develop workforce plan—Establish and document strategies and action plans for addressing gaps, surpluses, and risks.
- Implement workforce plan—Carry out the action plans.
- Monitor and update workforce plan—Monitor implementation of the action plans. Review your plan at regular intervals and when major business changes arise.
Dig deeper into key tasks involved in each step with APQC’s Workforce Planning Framework.
A Workforce Planning Toolkit to Help Along the Way
Workforce planning is one of the most powerful tools that an organization can use to ensure it has the talent it needs. In today’s fast changing business environment and competitive talent market, it’s important to have an arsenal of tools to prepare for any scenario. APQC recommends this Workforce Planning Toolkit for guidance, tools, and templates to help set up, benchmark, and/or improve workforce planning inside your organization.