Thinking strategically is a must for any business keen to flourish and grow – and, to this end, workforce planning is something that should not be ignored, helping you to analyse and manage the present and future needs of your teams, ensuring that the right number of people with the relevant skills are employed when you need them so your goals and ambitions are achieved.
What is workforce planning?
Ultimately, workforce planning needs to be linked to your business goals – so you need to have a firm idea of what these are and what you’d like to see happen in the future. This ensures that all decisions are made with end goals in sight.
Robust and relevant processes mean that your business goals will align fully with your employment strategy, helping you to drive down labour costs, respond in line with the evolving demands of your customers, find inefficiencies across the board and improve the work-life balance of your staff, boosting productivity and employee retention.
However, you’ll only be able to achieve all this if you implement your plans properly from the outset. As such, you will need to:
– Ensure collaboration from top to bottom so that everyone understands why certain actions are being taken
– Set out clear allocation of responsibilities so that everyone knows what they need to do and when
– Prioritise data capture and evaluation so you can make solid predictions about the future based on the outcomes of the decisions you’ve taken
– Focus on scenario planning so you can test out different contingencies and make sure that you’re prepared
How can workforce planning boost productivity?
Maintaining productivity at work means attracting and recruiting the top talent in your field – and with skill and labour shortages continuing to have an impact, these are just two of the biggest business risks facing companies at the moment.
With effective workforce planning strategies in place, you can make better and more informed staffing decisions, which allows you to prepare yourselves for future challenges, keeping potential disruption to a minimum.
Analysing your existing workforce, considering roles, skills, demographics and performance levels, will help you deepen your understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of your team.
This will allow you to develop targeted solutions, whether that’s external recruitment, upskilling and training current staff members or outsourcing various tasks, all of which will help give productivity a serious boost.
Workforce planning also ensures that you maintain a flexible approach to doing business, showing you what strategies you need to adopt and when, whether that’s part-time or remote working or posting temporary jobs to cope with sudden surges in demand, allowing you to scale up and down as appropriate.
How can staff management software help?
Workforce planning can reveal aspects of your business that could benefit from using new technology to replace manual processes… and staff management software can prove particularly beneficial if you’re looking to be more productive as a business now and into the future.
The AXLR8 applicant tracking system helps with everything from interview scheduling and job positions to assessment management, candidate tracking and other internal HR concerns. If you’d like to find out more, get in touch with the team today.