In today’s knowledge economy, employees are considered “capital assets” and are inarguably the most vital assets for any organization. Despite its enormous importance, this asset is often not carefully planned, monitored, and optimized.
However, this is changing as many high-performing organizations are adopting and implementing the latest available tools, technologies, and methodologies for their workforce planning to hire the right people to hire the best talent, reduce the rate of churn and boost morale and workplace engagement in order to improve productivity, decrease operational costs and boost the organizational bottom line.
Before we delve into the benefits and tools for strategic workforce planning, let’s understand what Workforce Planning is: Simply stating it is to find the right number of people with the right skills at the right time for the right divisions. It includes operational and strategic workforce planning which are short-term and long-term planning respectively.
Strategic Workforce Planning uses data analytics and collaborative planning tools to analyze, forecast, and plan workforce within the different lines of businesses, departments, and teams, assess the gaps within the current strategy and make the right interventions in talent management.
Given the critical importance of human capital management strategy to the overall organization's success and growth, it is important to connect the workforce strategy to the overall corporate strategy.
Given the critical importance of strategic workforce planning and strategy to the overall organization's success and growth, it is important to connect the workforce strategy to the overall corporate strategy.
Does Your Strategic Workforce Planning Framework Answer The Following Questions?
A strategic workforce planning framework is done with the goal of ensuring that the organization has the right people in the right teams, departments and workflows to execute the organizational objectives and strategies. As such it needs a collaborative and a data-driven approach, with which organizations can arrive at answers to important questions such as:
- Which departments and geographies are especially vulnerable to turnovers and how this is going to impact your organization’s ability to deliver products and services
- Can workload be arranged differently to better facilitate workload coverage
- Are there anticipated changes in technology, policies, regulations, or customer base that would affect workload demand?
- Where we must consider the need for adjusting recruitment/other human capital strategies to support diversity & inclusion?
- What metrics/ratios will best help me monitor/identify workforce challenges/risks? What metrics/ratios should I use to diagnose workforce challenges?
- How should my organization's workforce strategy be refined? Are there changes in the workforce that would cause strategies to need revision?
Workforce gaps can limit the execution of business strategies. Strategic workforce planning seeks to address this. While business leaders and chief human resources executives routinely stress the importance of having data-driven decision making and human capital management frameworks in place, the lack of a consistent set of processes by which organizations can conduct the planning and predictive modeling often prevents the objective from getting realized.
By investing in the right set of models and tools, high-performing organizations can use strategic workforce planning to ensure that they have the right talents in key areas to drive the business objectives strategically and cost-effectively.
Perform activities like talent strategy management, workforce planning and compensation modeling in a connected planning approach
But for the strategy to be effective for the workforce planning process, organizations need to find the right level of granularity. Traditional planning frameworks tend to be poor at being sufficiently actionable, for example the standard aggregate-based models fail to help the organization identify and predict the exact individual at risk of turnover.
But this is no longer the case. An infusion of data analytics and advanced planning/ modelling technologies are available to enterprises today for the workforce planning process- providing them near-term actionable information on granular workforce supply risk and human capital management while helping them create demand-based workforce scenario planning.
How Can Polestar Help?
It is clear that strategic workforce and human capital management planning today needs to be dynamic, continuous and it should be connected to the organization’s strategic, financial and operational objectives and plannings.
For such a connected planning approach for building workforce readiness various divisions like Supply Chain, Operations, Finance etc. must be collaborating with the HR. Which needs newer technologies and tools, one such tool is Anaplan for Human Resource Planning.
Workforce Planning With Anaplan
Anaplan is a cloud-based enterprise planning software that enables organizations to extensively and easily model broadly varied scenarios and deliver rolling forecasts that are updated automatically with relevant, current information.
Calculate and predict Churn in your organization to prevent loss of talent pool and save capital and effort to improve ROI
With the advanced business modelling capabilities of the Anaplan platform, HR and business executives can identify which levers need to be fine-tuned in order to arrive at the desired outcomes for effective human capital management. HR executives can manage the three important aspects of human capital planning:
1. Talent Strategy
2. Workforce planning
3. Compensation modelling
These insights will arrive from identifying the downstream impact of the planning decisions, monitor the operational KPIs, control costs, predict the future overhead, and pass the information to the recruiting team for effective human capital management.
Anaplan makes it easy to do iterative scenario analysis - make changes to top-down budgetary settings and understand how the plan is going to impact the budget. Other useful features for human capital management include managing the compensation that will be handed out to each individual workforce, as well as tracking how he is going to be paid out.
In short, Anaplan’s powerful platform delivers core capabilities that provide very fast time to value on strategic workforce planning, workforce planning process and human capital management.
At Polestar Solutions, our team of Anaplan experts have the experience and expertise in consulting and implementing Anaplan for Fortune 500 clients, unicorns and small to medium enterprises globally.
Our team of Anaplan solution experts have built solutions for every domain of your business - from HR, Strategic Finance, Human Capital Management, Supply Chain, CapEx Planning, Sales and Operations Planning, Demand Planning, Sales Territory Planning, Sales Performance Planning, Workforce Capacity Planning, Succession Planning among others.
Get in touch with our representatives about how you can also leverage Anaplan’s powerful modelling capabilities to power your organizational success. Our subject matter experts and solution consultants will be more than happy to assist you in a free strategy consulting session
