Workforce Planning: Tackling The Great Resignation

Last Updated : 23-April-2024

If you spend any amount of time surfing the internet or staying updated on news, the term ‘Great Resignation’ isn’t foreign to you. The common phrase is exactly what it sounds like - the trend of employees resigning from their jobs and looking for a more dynamic and rewarding work opportunity.

With advanced technologies emerging rapidly, the need for organizational skills has also changed. In order to beat the odds and win the industry competition, companies need to plan ahead and optimize their workforce planning and analytics strategy to better manage the changing market scenarios.

Before we move any further, it is important to understand workforce planning in simple terms. Through a workforce planning model, an organization assesses workforce content and composition issues to determine what actions must be taken to respond to future business objectives & needs.

The actions to be taken may depend on skill availability, age of the workforce, and other considerable factors that help determine whether there is a need for recruiting, training, or outsourcing the work. Whether handled as a part of the business plan or by outsourcing, workforce planning involves various challenges.

Workforce Planning is one of the most crucial ways for an organization to accomplish its globalization objectives within an increasingly competitive landscape. Due to the lack of an integrated approach and advanced technology, organizations often fall behind in recruiting & retaining top talent.

Let’s take a look at common challenges faced by organizations:

Difficult to make predictions: A lot of organizations are struggling with their recruitment planning processes. It is a big challenge to forecast future skill needs properly. And with the onset of the pandemic, it became even more difficult to predict than before.

Reacting instead of anticipating: Most often, organizations focus mainly on short-term benefits of effective workforce planning and analytics instead of laying emphasis on long-term initiatives. As a result, business leaders do not get further than reacting instead of proactively building the workforce to cater to meet future needs.

Improper coordination: Another challenge is the lack of coordination among multiple business departments. The well-known silos are intact in the area of workforce planning. As a result, it results in unfair decisions about headcount needs & recruiting goals, compensation, and other aspects of talent management.

Workforce planning benefits especially shine through when dedicated models are built on specialised platforms - software such as Anaplan can turn tables around for an organization. Anaplan for Workforce Planning enables a connected platform where business leaders can gain a comprehensive view of their organization’s workforce, workload, and costs organized in an accurate way. This allows a very dynamic and collaborative environment for organizations to respond to market & talent-supply changes in real-time, effectively manage the workforce, and deliver on your business performance goals.

With Anaplan, it is easier to figure out talent shortages that hinder business success, evaluate financial impact, model ‘what-if’ scenarios to close gaps, and drive long-term decisions for your talent programs. You can align your manpower to cater to organizational objectives while minimizing cost and generating business results.

In addition, you can determine the right number of employees they need, with the right skill set, at the right time and in a cost-effective manner. Determining ways to manage existing talent & discovering which roles drive revenue generation can lead to streamlined operations. Let’s read in detail how a strategic workforce planning model on Anaplan strikes a fine balance between company growth and cost control:

• Forecast business demand and objectives with a resource need accurately

• Identify critical business roles, top talent, skill gaps, and assess workforce capabilities

• Optimize workforce, capability plans, and headcount capacity

• Collaborate financial HC projections and business plans

• Assess ROI of training costs vs. new recruiting strategies and discover & design suitable strategies

• Align top-bottom workforce plan across all business units

• Bring operational plans and strategic workforce plans together

• Track, analyze, and forecast organizational health metrics

• Identify risk areas and analyze its impact on business

Workforce planning, when done right, enables business leaders to design a dynamic blueprint of their company by identifying vital talent & skill sets, establishing proper headcount, and staying ahead of the industry competition. Below are the three elements that make an effective process to help HR and business leaders lay out their success plans through a well-designed & dynamic workforce blueprint.

Aggregate: Access & integrate data sources from the company & third-party systems and consider data sources as a single & unified source of truth.

Build: Collate data from different sources, develop it into scenarios, evaluate the results, and generate insights from these results to prioritize the tasks that matter the most.

Connect: Collaboration throughout the workforce planning process among recruiters, business unit leaders, external talent sources, and executives is one of the key drivers of decisions that impact business actions & outcomes.

• Ensures transparency into headcount, skills and capabilities, and workforce costs across all business units

• Designs future-oriented talent strategies aligned to business goals and budget

• Provides real-time insights to talent acquisition & management teams about budget & timing for in-demand skills & roles

• Enables agility to build & pivoting workforce plans for your business needs

Interested to learn more about Anaplan-powered workforce planning?

If you are curious about all the possibilities that Anaplan can offer to ensure effective workforce planning, book a session with our Anaplan Experts at Polestar Solutions.