It’s that time of year again for most companies which operate on a calendar year. Budgets are being finalized, annual performance appraisals are underway, sales is busy closing the quarter and wrapping up the year and thinking ahead to an even better New Year, and HR is thinking ahead to how it will meet the organization’s needs in the coming year. Ah, the holidays! What I’ve just described is an exercise that companies go through every year. No surprise there! But many organizations have departments or work groups that conduct workforce planning in a vacuum. Where the vacuum exists strong departmental silos may also be found. The results of silo planning could be the high risk of misaligned business plans and budgets, the risks of overshooting or undershooting goals, the danger of missed deliverables, and more. This can be remedied with a very important tool in the workforce planning process--the HR department. However, if the HR department and executive team is not in synch when it comes to workforce planning, or if HR was never invited to the discussion in the first place, then your company may find itself singing, “Well, how did I get here?” --Like David Byrne and the Talking Heads in Once in a Lifetime.
So if your company finds itself just “letting the days go by,” then engage leadership and HR leadership to help them visualize and understand the connection points within the strategic planning process. Then, be sure to leverage the HR department to assess and to advise on the current and future talent landscape for the company.
The following five points and visual models can be used to help you get started and ensure that workforce planning is an inclusive, strategic process.
1. There must be a communicated company vision and strategy (the vision helps set the strategy).
2. The company must learn to effectively forecast future sales and product/service delivery schedules.
3. The organization must be able to analyze past and current workload levels, assess its current talent levels and knowledge, and understand the current and future gaps based on company strategy, performance history, and forecasts.
4. HR and management should partner to identify options and strategy for addressing future workforce needs. In other words, what resources will HR need to fill the talent gaps? Will they use outside recruitment, can they re-deploy personnel, acquire talent through M&A, hire directly through internal corporate recruitment, or develop talent from within through individual talent gap analysis, creating talent profiles and individual development plans, plans for development of critical skills, and overall succession planning.
5. Lastly the overall plan should be documented, monitored at least quarterly by each stakeholder, and monitored at a high level by the executive team, revised or make course corrections where needed in order to achieve company goals, execute the overall business strategy, and realize the company vision for its employees and shareholders.
David Anderson is Global Human Resources Manager for Double-Take Software. Dave is a regular blogger on leadership best practices at www.doubletakespoon.wordpress.com and on HR Topics as they relate to generational studies and observations, specifically on Generation X at www.MyGenX.wordpress.com David's focus in Human Resources is attracting top global talent and retaining that talent through continual organizational improvement, succession planning, and employee development initiatives. He is also an Organic Farmer with a small CSA Farm that he operates with his children as a business, learning incubator for them.
photo of Talking Heads courtesy of James S Warwick
