Workforce planning practice

‘The right people, with the right skills, in the right roles,
at the right time and the right cost’

www.humanikaconsulting.com
‘In many organisations the habitual approach to
workforce planning is just a short-term budget and
headcount exercise. Attempting to be this granular
and precise is not useful when looking longer term,
especially when the environment is uncertain.’

Julia Howes, Principal, Mercer

Menu
• Introduction
• An overview of workforce
planning
• Understanding the organisation
and its environment Analyse your
current and potential workforce
• Determine future workforce
needs
• Identifying workforce gaps against
future needs
• Actions to address shortages,
surpluses or skill mismatches
• Monitoring progress and
evaluation
• Conclusion
• References and useful resources
Introduction
Introduction
• World economics, technology, demography and changing social
attitudes are constantly influencing how we resource our
organisations.
• The need for the right people, with the right skills, in the right roles,
at the right time and at the right cost rings true now more than
ever.
• With concerns over skills shortages, and increasing competition to
attract ‘talent’ to our organisations, considered workforce planning
is an imperative that will keep businesses ahead of the curve.
• Workforce planning is a business process to align changing
organisation needs and people strategy.
• It doesn’t need to be complicated and any necessary complexity can
be adjusted to suit the size and maturity of your organisation.
• Workforce planning will often be triggered by a specific event
and/or a change to the structure of an organisation, such as through
a merger, acquisition or a transformational change project.
However, a focus on broader workforce planning will be important
to your organisation at any given time.
Some Factors Contributing To The Need
For Workforce Planning
How to achieve

• Reducing labour costs in favour of workforce

deployment and flexibility
• Responding to the needs of their customer base
• Identifying skills gaps and areas of succession risk
• Relevant strategies for talent management and
people development
• Targeting specific and identified inefficiencies
• Employee retention initiatives
• Improving the quality of outputs
• Improving work–life balance
• Recruitment and training responses to changes in
the education system.
An Overview
Of Workforce
Planning
Strategic vs Operational Workforce
Planning
• Strategic • Operational
• Strategic workforce planning guarantees an
alignment to an organisation’s business • Operational workforce
strategy. It is a holistic approach to planning has a shorter
assessing and analysing the internal
business drivers and goals, and external forecast horizon, typically
environment developments impacting upon three to twelve months.
your business.
• It primarily focuses on identifying critical • The focus is more on
job roles and families and the strategic identifying skill gaps, numbers
capabilities required to meet future goals.
of people required to satisfy
• It typically has a three- to five-year forecast
horizon. Effective and timely quantitative more immediate needs and
and qualitative data capture will inform mechanical processes such as
potential future risks by predicting possible
alternative futures. recruitment or training spend.
• Actions can then be taken today to mitigate • It is a tool to manage business
against future workforce risks.
as usual.
Different Time Frames of Change
 Workforce
planning process

Workforce planning is a
process of analysing the
current workforce,
determining future
workforce needs,
identifying the gap
between the workforce
you will have available and
your future needs, and
implementing solutions so
that an organisation can
accomplish its mission,
goals, and strategic plan.
Developing the
capability for
workforce planning
As we embark on the workforce planning
process, it’s important to understand first
how to organise workforce planning, what
skills are required, and what type of data
needs to be collected in order to allocate
responsibilities accordingly.
A. How is workforce planning organised
and who does it?
B. What skills are needed to undertake
workforce planning?
C. Workforce planning mindset
D. Developing relevant data and access
How Is Workforce
Planning Organised
And Who Does It?
• At senior levels, both HR directors and board members
should drive the strategic end of the process and set
the agenda for workforce change.
• Workforce planning needs strong links across an
organisation’s functions and into strategic planning and
finance in particular.
• Involving some of these other stakeholders in the
design of a workforce planning approach will not only
be informative but will help with implementation
down the line.
• Longer-term planning and planning for key groups –
such as senior managers – who are treated as a
corporate resource tend to take place centrally. The
majority of workforce planning, however, takes place in
the main business entities – divisions or regions of
larger organisations.
What Skills Are
Needed To Undertake
Workforce Planning?

Ideally those responsible for the process will have specific

technical expertise in workforce planning and labour market
analysis, but if not, the following skills should be collated:
• Mastery of internal information sources and knowledge of the
external environment and labour market
• Good understanding of the business and its strategy
• General analytical skills including data collection (often both
quantitative and qualitative), analysis and evaluation
• General advisory/consulting skills including problem diagnosis,
problem-solving, communication and project management
• Ability to build relationships with leaders and colleagues in HR
(including subject experts and business partners)
Workforce
planning mindset
• Workforce planning should not be viewed
merely as a process; it is also a mindset,
involving habits of thinking and analysis. In this
sense, understanding workforce planning and
practising even its simplest techniques can help
all HR professionals and line managers tackle
resourcing issues more effectively.
• Line managers, often working with HR, should
be the main players in local, functional or
divisional workforce planning. Therefore HR’s
challenge in some cases is to open managers’
minds and behaviours to a range of possibilities
in what the organisation will have to confront
in future forecasting.
Developing Relevant Data And
Access

• HR analytics enable HR teams and their

major stakeholders to measure and
report key workforce concepts, such as
performance, well-being, productivity,
innovation and alignment.
• This in turn enables more effective
evidence-based decisions by strategic
business functions.
• HR analytics can provide a
demonstration of the impact that HR
policies and processes have on
workforce and organisational
performance, and can be used to
demonstrate return on investment.
Some Recommendations For
Developing Relevant Data Include
• HR working closely with the planning and finance
functions to develop consistent data
• Sets data is kept over time so that snapshots of
workforce composition at the same date each
year, for example, can be easily extracted –
workforce data relies on keeping information on
joiners, leavers and movers in each year
• Data errors are automatically checked for, so they
can be corrected
• Fields used should be clearly defined, especially
the fields that locate workforce groups (for
example by combining function or job family
fields with grade or level)
• Business and workforce information systems are
constructed in such a way that additional fields
can easily be added and data from several fields
can be extracted and cross-tabulated with ease.
Understanding The Organisation
And Its Environment
 Understanding
the external
environment
A PESTLE analysis is one of the most effective
frameworks for understanding the ‘big picture’ in
which an organization operates. It looks at six key
factors – political, economic, sociological,
technological, legal and environmental.
A PESTLE analysis allows HR and senior managers
to assess any risks specific to their industry and
organisation, and use that knowledge to inform
their decisions.
 • A labour market refers both to what the people who might join
your organisation to do a certain type of work are currently doing
and the geographical area from which they are likely to come.
Understanding • This will include considering key questions about particular
your labour workforce groups, especially for critical roles and those where you
feel you may have difficulty recruiting.
markets • For some workforce groups you may only need to understand a
very local labour market. For others, the market can be regional,
national or international.
Questions To • Where do current staff live who are already doing this work?
How far are they travelling? Are there other areas people may
Consider be willing to travel from?
About Your • When have you filled jobs recently? What were people doing
before and where did they come from?
Internal • When people have left you, where have they gone? That is, to
Labour Market which kinds of employers in which locations?
 Questions To
Consider About The
External Market
• What are the characteristics of the working population in the relevant labour
market area, for example, its age profile, employment patterns (occupational
and sectoral) and educational characteristics?
• Who do you compete with for the relevant workforce group? Remember you
may not only compete for labour with employers in your own business sector.
• Are important changes occurring to your labour competitors, for example, is
the growth of financial services companies in your labour market increasing
demand for high-quality office staff?
• Do your labour competitors offer better terms and conditions of employment
than you do? Do you actually lose people to them?
• Is the available population from which you might recruit changing, for example,
is it in a profession group that is facing a high volume of retirements nationally
over the next few years?
• Are important changes occurring to the education and training system or to
numbers of trainees, for example, is this a group which has seen a marked drop
in numbers entering training?
• Are there general reports of labour shortages or skills gaps in this labour
market? Are they getting worse or better over time?
 Understanding
your operating
model

• An operating model is the

combination of roles, skills,
structures, processes, assets
and technologies that enable
any organisation to provide
its service or product
promises.
• The operating model of an
organisation can be split into
five categories.
• A clear understanding of the
contributions and needs of
each of these will be key to a
fit-for purpose workforce
planning process.
Know your
organisational
strategy
• Knowledge of the organisation’s strategy for the future will also
be essential to undertake workforce planning. The workforce
implications of strategic plans may be explicit, but often need
teasing out. Alongside the numerical impact of strategic plans,
you should not neglect changes to the skills and competencies
of the workforce, and implications for culture and leadership.
• Strategic plans also influence the timeframe for workforce
planning. In some organisations there are long product cycles
while others operate over much shorter periods – some
companies will have a mix of timeframes in different divisions,
functions or locations.
• So changes to organisational direction can affect not only the
number and kinds of people needed but how far ahead the
organisation needs to plan.
• In linking the environment to workforce plans, we need to ask
about the likely or possible effects of such factors on workforce
numbers, skill requirements, geographical locations, work
patterns and contracts of employment.
Questions to consider
to understand
organisation strategy
• What are the overall organisation growth or contraction and
budgetary constraints?
• What are the planned major introductions or withdrawals of
products/ services or moves into different markets?
• What are the planning timeframes, from the longer term (for
product lifecycle and highly skilled people who can take many years
to develop) to short term (for example in scheduling shifts), or for
the annual planning horizon often linked to budgets?
• What does the organisational structure look like now and what do
we want the structure to look like in future?
• What are the upcoming plans to increase productivity, including
changes to organisation structure and processes?
• Are there plans to introduce, update or invest in new technology,
remembering people remain at the heart of work?
• Are there changes in quality standards and regulatory
requirements?
• Will some activities be outsourced or delivered in partnership?
Analyse Your Current And
Potential Workforce
Workforce
segmentation
• Having analysed the internal environment of
your organisation, you can then use
workforce segmentation techniques and
processes to identify the knowledge, skills,
abilities and other factors required for
current and future workforce roles.
• There are two approaches to workforce
segmentation. The first identifies different
types of job families, functions, roles and
competencies within the organisation.
• The second segments roles by value or type
of work performed to focus on the most
critical roles. This will vary upon the size,
sector and industry of your organisation.
 Workforce
segmentation
• A good place to start is to group different
job functions into job families where people
in these roles share a similar level of
competence such as skills, knowledge and
capabilities.
• The benefits include:
• streamlining of your job and pay
bands
• improvement to talent management
by defining potential measures
• quick evaluation of jobs
• determination of pay structures
• identification of training needs
• clear explanation of roles and
responsibilities
 Workforce
analytics

• In a fast-paced business environment, innovation, agility and

resilience are essential for organisations to retain their
competitive advantage. Collecting and analysing workforce
data can provide organisations with the information they
need to increase or develop capability in these areas.

• Workforce analytics is not only about understanding

individual measures, but also how factors operate together.
For example, how does labour turnover move with your
changing age profile, gender mix or use of part-time workers?
Analytics are also essential to understanding how productivity
may be boosted. For instance, is there correlation between
skills investment and improvement in levels of output or
quality?

• Succession planning also feeds into your understanding of

available people supply. If you have succession cover and
strong talent pipelines, you can make assumptions about
developing these people to meet future needs. If your
internal talent pipelines are weak, you are more likely to have
to fill key roles externally
Employees In
Post

• Individual employee demographic data – gender, age, ethnicity, and other characteristics relevant to
inclusivity goals (for example on disability) or regulatory issues (for example on nationality and right
to work).
• People in relation to type of work (function, role, occupation), level (grade, pay level or equivalent),
length of service (with organisation), length of service in job and/or grade, organisational work
location (division, unit), geographical location (region, country, site or home oce – travel-to-work
distances and patterns), salary cost.
• Types of contract – full-/part-time, nature of contract (permanent, fixed-term, temporary, agency sta
or contractors, zero-hours sta), working pattern if relevant (actual hours, term-time only, days, shifts).
• Current gaps between agreed demand and supply – scale and pattern of unfilled vacancies and
employee absences, individuals on secondment and shared parental leave – how such temporary
gaps are covered (including cost).
Employee
movements
• External recruitment (numbers, types of contract,
sources) by job group and entry type (for example
trainees).
• Leavers – voluntary leavers, retirements (and early
retirements if special terms oered), voluntary and
compulsory redundancies, dismissals.
• Destinations and reasons for leaving.
• Patterns of internal movement – a matrix of
people moving from each job group into other job
groups, or internal moves split between
promotions and lateral transfers at the same level,
inter-functional/business-unit transfers separately
identified.
Skills, Capability And Attitudes

• Factual data on qualifications (usually

only highest), licences to practise and
other relevant skills (for example
languages in international organisations
and fluency level).
• Subjective data on skills, performance
(for example ratings), potential (links
with succession planning), training
needs (from internal studies or personal
development plans).
• Employee sentiment and attiudinal data
towards work issues such as job
security, satisfaction and potentially
intention to leave (for example
engagement or sta survey items as well
as overall scores)
 • Identify the critical roles by function, skill, knowledge
• Identification of high performers, low performers
Talent profile
• promotions, identification of development required by
individuals and group
 • Data on geographical, sectoral and occupational labour markets

External Labour
relevant to where start come from or might come from in future, for
instance, size and demography of potential workforce, employment
levels, educational qualifications and flows into work from the
education system, attitudinal data on sectors/occupation

Market • Consider competitors for labour: do they other better terms and
conditions than you; do you actually lose people to them?

Information • Is the available population from which you might recruit changing, for
example, is it in a professional group that is facing a high volume of
technological change nationally over the next few years?
• Data should be collected for each geographical location
Determine Future
Workforce Needs
Key dimensions of
the ‘right’ principle
• If workforce planning is about
getting ‘the right people, with the
right skills, in the right roles, at the
right time and at the right cost’,
what does this look like in practice?
• The ‘right’ principle can be applied
when translating organisational
strategies into what is required from
the future workforce.
• Companies can adapt the principle
by examining the five ‘rights’ of
workforce planning.
‘You plan to ensure that you have the
right human resources to deliver on the
business plan and also to avoid
redundancies. If you don’t address these
two challenges, you cost the organisation
money, constrain business development
and cause individuals unnecessary
hardship.’
- Andrew Mayo, Professor of Human Capital
Management, Middlesex University
 Considering The
‘Right’ Questions
Skills Size
• Do you have the leadership in place to • Is state workload significantly increasing or
deliver your strategy? decreasing?
• What are the critical capabilities and • Are technologies driving changes to your
competencies? structure or productivity? This can
dramatically impact the number of people
• Can you accurately map requisite skills and you need.
capabilities to job families and critical roles?
This will help identify specific skills gaps. • Have you identified roles critical to achieving
organisational objectives and are there any
• What skills are required to deliver on future challenges in filling these?
strategy?
• What is the impact of digitisation on
processes, data storage, people
development, recruitment? This can cause
decline in some roles and demand for
different skills in others.
 Considering The ‘Right’
Questions
Cost Location
• What are your people • Are people in different job
costs? families in the right
• Are people costs likely to locations?
rise in line with expected • If considering relocation,
revenues? will current employees
• What are the costs of relocate? Are there
hiring? sufficient people in that
surrounding area to fill any
• What are the costs of gaps?
developing capability?
 • Are your core capabilities strong enough?
• Is distribution across job grades in line with requirements?
• Does the workforce have the right demographic structure and
Shape diversity?
• Is there an appropriate balance of operations, innovation,
project, development and managerial positions?
• Are the lines of business structured effectively?
Methods for estimating workforce
requirements
There are a wide range of methods for
estimating workforce requirements and the
approaches used will very much depend on
the size and nature of your organisation:
• Asking: simply asking managers and
department heads what they think
will be needed and when is always a
sensible starting point.
• Budget-based: using cost per
employee to work out how many
people you can afford to employ if
the budget for an area of work has
already been set. Easy to use for
annual planning in support functions,
for example, but it does not
challenge how resources are being
allocated or link to levels of activity
 • Ratios: proportion of employees to • Workflow analysis: based on a detailed
activity levels or of one group of analysis of the activities taken for each
employees to another. Works well in task. This activity is useful if your
stable circumstances, where organisation is undergoing
employee demand moves in line with transformational change where the roles,
activity levels. responsibilities and capability
Methods for • Benchmarking: looks at ratios or
requirements of individuals/job families
are likely to change.
costs in other organisations or
estimating between parts of the same
organisation. It can stimulate
• Defining job families: employees working
in positions belonging to the same job
workforce questions but does not necessarily
represent good practice or take
family require little training to perform
one another’s jobs. Therefore, job
requirements •
account of different work contexts.
Extrapolating trends: for example,
functions within the same job family
require similar competencies, such as
knowledge, skills and capabilities (see
forecasting based on past increases in workforce segmentation).
productivity, assuming these trends
continue into the future. A good • Zero-base demand estimation: estimates
method to use for longer the workforce you might ideally need
product/service cycles and where rather than based on what you have now,
technology is not changing too informed by a mix of the methods above.
rapidly. Organisations are often so blinkered by
their historical job design, staffing
• Forecasting: based on more patterns and numbers that they avoid the
sophisticated models, taking into need to change these assumptions. Zero-
account a range of factors including base approaches can help to unlock new
variations in demand across the year. thinking about work design, productivity
This is helpful for broad-brush and flexibility.
planning, but is only as good as the
assumptions put into the model. • Scenario planning: tackles uncertainty
directly by looking further ahead at
alternative views of the future. It is useful
in assessing the risks of different
organisation futures, but cannot predict
what will happen. We look at scenario
planning in more detail below.
 A. Scenario planning
‘We tend to extrapolate forecasts from recent trends. In times of uncertainty, things
become more chaotic. So you have to dig deep into every assumption, try to identify any
scenarios and risks that can be foreseen, and decide on the principles that will help you
navigate your way through.’
Paul Sparrow, Professor, Lancaster University
A. Scenario planning
• The frequency, scale and unpredictability of • Managers are not forced to choose between
organisational change has led many organisations to scenarios, but rather prompted to identify the
abandon longer-term workforce planning because it differences between them, including in their
appears too inflexible and too conservative in its implications for workforce requirements and the
assumptions about the future. When faced with very ease with which those requirements can be met.
uncertain environments, some large corporations –
Business plans, including workforce plans, can be
notably Shell operating in the very turbulent
petrochemical sector – developed scenario-based tested against different scenarios, to establish
business planning as a way of addressing high levels of where workforce decisions would need to diverge
uncertainty head on. The ideas behind scenario depending on what happens.
planning can be used in workforce planning to show
how different futures may affect sourcing of people • The understanding gained from scenario planning
requirements to needs. can support the kind of contingency and adaptive
workforce planning actions. To get the best from
• The factors (or drivers) of the future are used to scenario planning, it is important to look at
construct a series of internally consistent pictures of fundamentally different views of the future, not
alternative futures – these are called scenarios. just a plus or minus 10% variation in business
External commentaries and experts often inform views targets.
about the external environment; factors are explored
in terms of their importance to the business and the
degree of uncertainty attached to them.
 ‘How do we deal with an uncertain future other than by
hiding our heads in the sand or putting the future in the too
A. Scenario dicult tray? We can use scenarios to avoid surprises and to
get a handle of the implications of what we can’t be sure of.’
planning Andrew Mayo, Professor of Human Capital Management,
Middlesex University
B. Contingency
Planning
• One practical way of planning for the risks
highlighted in various scenarios is to
estimate the possible seriousness of a risk
and its likelihood.
• This analysis helps to identify which risks
to plan for and which can be given lesser
priority.
• For instance, a marketing or advertising
business is likely to consider: what if we
lose our largest client and consequently a
big revenue stream? Can we afford to keep
our existing workforce? Can we redeploy
the affected workforce to another project
to replace lost revenue stream?
C. Adaptive planning
• Planning can be designed to adapt to
changing circumstances, but it must be
built into how plans are used from the
outset.
• It combines the discipline of planning with
the reality of ‘feeling your way forward’.
Organisations make selected changes that
they can implement quickly, accepting the
risk that not all will prove successful.
• For example, if a retail business
experiences a drop in sales, an adaptive IT
system can automatically adapt the staff
roster to suit the dip in sales and request
additional staff when business picks up.
‘There are dangers in only looking at the short term and hoping
to react to change. But there are also dangers with long-term
planning that can get us into analysis paralysis. We need adaptive
approaches to planning that can help us close the gap between
long-term scenarios and practical actions we need to be taking
now.’
Linda Holbeche, Director, The Holbeche Partnership
Qualitative
assessment
When assessing the skills or capability of the
workforce to get to the five ‘rights’, we are moving
from numbers into judgements. It is useful to think
about whether a particular skill or skill change is
about:
• Generic skills, knowledge or behaviours relevant to
all employees
• Technical, professional or job-specific
requirements, applying only to some job groups
• Changing skill or behaviour needs particular to
those in managerial roles
• Technology taking over or changing the
requirements of a role.
Feedback for Productivity

• One of the most reliable indicators of the current

capability of a workforce group can be external
feedback from customers and suppliers, internal data
on quality, and managers’ views on whether the
employees they have (and the kinds of people they
have been recruiting) can do the job effectively.
Performance data can sometimes be informative, but
performance ratings are not necessarily reliable
indicators of skill levels.
• Changes in workforce productivity should be
considered alongside the people capability required
by the organisation, reflected in how work will be
organised and the skills, knowledge and experience
needed by groups in the organisation.
• For instance in knowledge-based industries,
productivity measures and return on investment may
be longer term and connected to ongoing learning
and developmental opportunities. This will need to be
factored into the workforce plan
Identifying
Workforce
Gaps
Against
Future
Needs
 • Gaps where the likely availability of people is lower than the
needs, so more staff need to be brought in or developed
• Negative gaps where there are more people in certain groups
The than needed, so you may need to consider retrenchment or
redeployment

information • Gaps in skills but not in numbers. Training or re-skilling might be

able to address these kinds of gaps, but you may also need to
you have shift the kind of workforce you are employing over time.

obtained on
your current
and
available
workforce
Kind Of Gap Analysis Can Then
Help To Identify Action Areas
• ‘Business-as-usual’ action areas where • Change in the business strategy could lead
recruitment, staff development and redeployment to radical change in people and skills needs.
will be needed to keep additional needs in line Strategy change may be the result of
with emerging changes in business requirements.
It is helpful here to make a note of changes to competitive pressures, a new approach to
skills needs which influence the more bottom–up product manufacturing or marketing,
process of individual development planning. It is caused by emerging technology or the
also important to take account of estimates of desire to reduce costs (as in offshoring).
likely losses when assessing likely gaps between
available workforce and future needs • • In extreme cases, resourcing difficulties
may challenge the overall business strategy
• Workforce groups where recruitment, retention or
both present resourcing challenges and
or prompt major areas of work for
alternative resourcing options may therefore need relocation or outsourcing. A combination of
to be considered. These gaps may cover all jobs in skills shortages, together with labour costs
a particular group or they may apply especially to and different rates of market growth, may
some locations or teams. also drive companies to rebalance their
• • Workforce groups and/or parts of the business global footprint towards different markets.
where workforce reductions may be necessary
and which must be well managed.
Summarising gaps
and action areas

Pull together the work

from these planning
processes into a list of
gaps and potential
actions. Doing this for
each main workforce
group will reveal
differences as well as
similarities. This, in effect,
is the workforce plan.
Actions To
Address
Shortages,
Surpluses Or
Skill
Mismatches
Steps For An Action Plan

• Having identified the needs

gaps and action areas, the next
stage is to determine the
specific actions needed to
close those gaps and to design
structured ways to carry out
the relevant activities.
• This will form your action plan.
There are three key steps:
• Select the most critical
gaps.
• Identify potential actions.
• Prioritise actions
A. Critical gaps – • Functional flexibility across a range of tasks can be increased
through recruitment, training, job design, deployment and
planning for reward mechanisms, for example through multiskilling and job
rotation.

flexibility • Numerical flexibility is provided by contracts of employment

that flex the numbers employed, for example temporary,
seasonal, ‘gig economy’ employment, agency or outsourced
Gap analysis can uncover staffing. It is important to ensure people are employed on the
right type of contract so your organisation has the flexibility it
different actions relevant to needs but also as there will be pay and benefit obligations,
different scenarios or varying employment law and taxation implications to consider.
paces of change. You may also • Temporal flexibility is flexibility in regards to working time, its
organisation or duration, for example part-time, overtime,
need to plan for greater shift work, annual hours.
flexibility, especially to help in • Talent flexibility can come via alternative educational
responding to uncertainty pathways to provide varied sources of talent supply with
different characteristics. Encourage continuous professional
development throughout the organisation and create
opportunities for skills and knowledge development via
secondments, projects, sprints, deployment, and so on.
• Adaptive flexibility or increasing change-readiness in the
workforce entails having managers who pay attention to the
development of the individuals in their teams. Involving
employees in change management keeps them in touch with
changing business needs, so when they are asked to adjust
this does not come as a surprise and they understand why
change is being made.
B. Identify potential
actions
• In the context of workforce planning, recruitment
and training will often be front of mind. Methods
may be based on what has been done before, or
they may include trialling alternative sources of
talent supply.
• What is also needed are better ways of designing
work or organisational structures so that people
and their skills are used more effectively.
• Sometimes actions will be about more radical
changes in how work is delivered, for example
through contracting out or working with partner
organisations either for business reasons (cost or
quality) or for reasons of inability to secure the
necessary skills.
 Build,
buy,
borrow
Management guru David Ulrich’s ‘build versus buy versus
borrow’ resourcing approach is about whether an strategy
organisation prefers to develop skills internally (‘build’)
and fill jobs by movement within the workforce, or via
recruitment from outside the organisation (‘buy’) or from
mix
a contingent labour supply (‘borrow’). The choice depends
in part on the internal and external supply of the skills
needed, but is also affected by whether the organisation
has the capacity and commitment to train people
internally.
 • When an employee leaves, there is frequently a reaction to either replace like for
like or to redistribute work among existing staff.

To Back-fill Or • Whether your organisation is in a state of growth or contraction would of course

influence that reaction.

Not To Back- • However, if the workforce is changing significantly, this will likely need a bigger
rethink. Where technological change is also a factor, skill requirements will

fill? •
invariably change as well.
It may be necessary to have people to do different work with different skills, to look
for talent in different places, replace for example a full-time role with a part-time
one, or to undertake a significant retraining of your workforce.
 • Interest in increasing workforce diversity can influence
planning choices and now extends to beyond the well-
Diversity and established demographics of gender, race and disability.

Inclusion • Organisations facing uncertain times may be more likely to

succeed if they vary their workforce by age, gender, social and
educational background and previous experience.
Sample Actions Applicable To One
Or More Workforce Groups
• Adjust organisation and job design to make better use • Widen workforce supply, such as by appealing to
of people or reduce cost, for example, by shifting ‘skill different demographic groups including the older
mix’ of higher-skilled to lowerskilled people within the workforce, maternity leave returners, people living in
same kind of work, using technology to replace some different locations (including different countries).
labour activity, multi-skilling and more flexible
deployment. • Build or strengthen internal talent pipelines through
upskilling, talent management and succession
• Change contractual arrangements to find different planning, career structures and advice for employees,
people or increase flexibility, for example, fixed-term internal development programmes for those with
contracts, temporary or zero-hours working, agency potential and interest in progression, mapping career
working/outsourcing. paths, including employees in under-represented
groups.
• Reduce the need for recruitment by improving
retention, such as through better management, • Increase movement across the organisation from
rewards, career structure, engagement. surplus to shortage areas by redeployment, often
accompanied by retraining.
• Reduce employee numbers if demand is falling, for
example, voluntary severance and outplacement. • Build or strengthen alternative routes into work
through apprenticeships, graduate recruitment,
• Shift the mix between ‘buy’, ‘build’ and ‘borrow’ initiatives with schools to increase longer-term supply
resourcing. of skills.
• Revise existing recruitment processes, repositioning • Invest in new technology, or explore introduction of
the employer brand and improving its employee value automated functions
proposition.
C. Prioritise actions

• In this crucial step, the analysis

should be summarised to help
determine priority action areas,
before embarking on specific
resourcing and development
activities. These link back to
offsetting risk – effort being most
needed where the business risk
of inappropriate resourcing is
greatest.
• It may be necessary to revisit
assumptions about your
buy/build/borrow strategies once
it becomes clear that meeting
people resourcing goals could be
challenging. Table 2 shows a
simple way of how workforce
requirements for different groups
can be set out.
Monitoring A checklist could include:
progress and
❑Have we done what we said we would
evaluation do?
Workforce planning and its ❑Are the planned actions still relevant in
application should be followed the changing business and labour
up with monitoring and market context?
evaluation, to ensure actions are
being taken and gauging if those ❑What has been happening to the size,
actions are having the desired shape and composition of the
effect. workforce?
❑How is this connecting to regular
reporting of workforce data?
❑Is checking (automated or manual) built
into data capture to ensure accuracy and
data quality?
❑What has been the impact of our
investment in specific interventions, for
example, workforce development?
 Critical issues to monitor and report on include:
Responding to • Staff in post and costs (salary plus additional
payments) by workforce group – remember to include
change temporary and agency staff, and the costs of these, as
well as permanent employees.
Workforce plans should be reviewed by • Whether actual staffing is on track against
management teams on a regular basis – requirements. Unfilled vacancies and/or time to fill
certainly more than once a year. Some vacancies are useful indicators of the supply/demand
organisations include a people review
component in regular business reviews, balance.
often at divisional or unit/function level.
These reviews are partly there to see if the • Changes in employee composition, especially if
planned actions are taking place, but also to increasing diversity is part of the business agenda.
check that the plans themselves are still
relevant. Many organisations have turned to • Workforce flows – starters/leavers (especially
using people analytic dashboards to display
key targets visually. voluntary employee turnover) compared with the
same period in previous years for each main
The HR function, often through HR business workforce group. Intelligence from exit interviews or
partners, needs to stay in touch regularly employee surveys on why people leave. Changing
with local management teams to check
progress and respond to any important retirement patterns may be important to understand
changes, whether internal or external. too.
Managers will appreciate and benefit from
briefing on the possible impact and risks
associated with external changes in
• Upcoming workforce risks not previously identified
employment law, tax regimes and so on. (for example, succession concerns following a surprise
resignation, areas of concern from employee attitude
or engagement surveys).
Consider The Psychological
Contract
• The outcomes of workforce planning can also affect
the psychological contract with employees (what the
organisation offers the workforce and expects from
them and vice versa), as well as how you attract,
communicate with and deploy your workforce.
• The specifics of the psychological contract might vary
over time and with different people.
• For instance, job security may no longer be the main
offer – and indeed some individuals may not desire it
– so organisations might offer and leverage the
employability of their workforce instead.
• In practice, the employer brand can be seen as an
attempt to define the psychological contract with
individuals so as to help in recruiting and retaining
talent by clearly defining how people are valued.
Conclusion
 Evolving Your Own
Approach
• As with so many aspects of business management and HR activity, it is better
to make a start than endlessly defer or become trapped in analysis paralysis.
• Begin simple workforce planning by talking to managers about where the
organisation is going and their resourcing concerns.
• Help them investigate what is going on and what might work better. If things
feel very uncertain, work with managers to develop some simple scenarios to
find out where actions may need to be contingent on unfolding events.
• Remember, workforce planning is not a prescriptive process nor intended as
an exact science.
• It’s about improving business performance and reducing organisational risk
by narrowing the gap between a business having the people it really needs
and who it actually has. ‘People are a business’s most important asset’ is a
well-worn catchphrase, but one that is nonetheless true.
• ‘The right people, with the right skills, in the right roles, at the right time
and the right cost’ is what will ultimately deliver the right results for an
organisation.
• By taking a proactive, methodical approach to workforce planning, HR
practitioners play a critical role in helping businesses understand where the
risks and opportunities are going to come from and how they can ensure they
have the resources they need to respond successfully to whatever scenario
lies ahead.
Top Tips For Workforce Planning
• Start with the organisation strategy and the external factors that • Plan for workforce requirement and availability in terms of skills as well as
might affect the organisation; use scenario planning to explore numbers, so you can identify and address current and upcoming skills gaps.
possible futures and identify risks. • Plan for a stronger emphasis on growing skills internally and increasing the
flexibility and resilience of existing employees; this mitigates the risk of not being
• Organise workforce planning to suit your organisation, for able to find skills externally.
example: what is best done centrally and what needs to be done
locally, what by HR and what by managers and leaders at different • Remember to look at how you will replace leavers from a job group (including
those who move to other jobs internally), not only to fill new roles. Planning for
levels? Clearly communicate responsibilities for workforce necessary workforce reductions is as important as planning for growth.
planning.
• Consider planning on varied timeframes for different purposes – not just the
• Ensure that whoever is tasked with workforce planning has the normal annual cycle but short-term workforce deployment and longer-term
know-how they need. Asking the right kinds of questions is a very strategic workforce planning. Workforce plans can also run alongside specific
organisation change programmes.
good start. Access is also needed to relevant data, people in the
organisation who understand the issues, and decision-makers • Use analysis to turn data into useful management information and insights,
who are the customers for workforce planning. addressing real business problems and informing decisions.

• Develop simple but reliable and relevant data about organisation • Use it to help managers surface and share their assumptions and understanding,
activity and the workforce, with data fields classified and reported to identify options and agree on actions that better align the workforce with
organisation needs. A workforce planning mindset creates the habit of challenging
in a consistent manner. assumptions and looking for relevant information to inform employment
decisions.
• Focus workforce planning activities on the real resourcing risks.
These tend to arise in workforce groups that are key to • Ensure workforce plans link to practical action in the recruitment, development
organisational performance – such as critical roles and roles that and deployment of people, and where appropriate in work design, reward and so
on.
are hard to recruit for or take a long time to train for.
References
and Useful
Resources
 • BALARAM, B., WARDEN, J. and WALLACE- • CHARTERED INSTITUTE OF PERSONNEL AND

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