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Strategic Staffing is a process for defining and addressing staffing impli- cations of strategic and operational plans. Staffing, in this context, includes all managed movement into, around, and out of an organization (e.g., recruitment, hiring, promotion, transfer, redeployment, attrition, retention, etc.).

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Strategic Staffing is a process for defining and addressing staffing impli- cations of strategic and operational plans. Staffing, in this context, includes all managed movement into, around, and out of an organization (e.g., recruitment, hiring, promotion, transfer, redeployment, attrition, retention, etc.).

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PeoplePulse™ - Online Survey Software | Australian Survey Software

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Do you have statistically valid evidence of the current skill sets of your workforce?

Are you easily able to identify the gaps between your current skill availability, and the future skills your organisation needs in order to meet its 5 year strategic plan?

The Challenge:
Imagine you work in a company that has been operating for 23 years and has 300 employees. Using your internal HRIS system mixed with the results of your last company-wide survey you are very aware of the key demographic statistics of your workforce (age breakdown, gender, number of staff in each department, etc)

However, you realise there's a big gap in your knowledge; over 20% of your workforce joined your organisation more than 10 years ago, and there is no central record of the resumes of these employees. Furthermore, of the current employees whose resumes you do have access to, most of the 'skill' data listed is in various Word, Excel and PDF formats and typically the information is no longer up to date. And even if this information was up to date, there is no easy way for you to combine skill set information in a unified, reportable format.

You are aware that Senior Management plan to expand the workforce in 2 key locations, and open a new operating division to tap into a new emerging market segment within the next 2 years. The lack of quantifiable staff skill data is ensuring that badly needed workforce planning initiatives are proving difficult to conduct. How can your organisation effectively plan for tomorrow, it its unsure of what skills it has onboard today?

Does this scenario sound familiar to you?
Enter the Staff Skills Audit:
A staff skills audit can be used to identify the skills an organisation currently has, and where the skill gaps lie in order for an organisation to meet its strategic objectives. Each person who works in an organisation has a dynamic and unique skill base. Not only is it important for the organisation to know what each persons skill set and skill levels are, but it is also important to know how these skills are utilised as part of his/her work role.

The outcome is a workforce plan that aligns with the organisations strategic plan, identifies where training is needed, and highlights areas where new talent is required.

A skills audit is typically used to:

Help determine how well resourced the organisation is to achieve its strategic plan.

Identify specific knowledge gaps in areas the organisation cannot afford to do without.

Identify the strengths and weaknesses of individual staff or teams.

Enable training and development expenditure to be better directed.

Help staff members recognise the skills (both used and latent) they need to develop.

Better define future recruiting needs to help an organisation appoint the right people.

Identify the employees who have a desire to move within the organisation.

Ultimately, the process of running a staff skills audit encourages the organisation to focus on identifying skills and bolster resources in the areas of key strategic importance to the business.

Ideally at the conclusion of the audit process you will be able to summarise your findings and identify:

A profile of the skills currently available within your workforce.

The skills base your organisation needs now.

The future skills your organisation is likely to need (based on trends,future strategic plans, and taking into account the difficulties in attracting and retaining staff in each key area).

Major skill gaps.

A prioritised action plan.

When completed, the results of a skills audit should be aggregated to obtain a statistical view of existing skills and knowledge. This information can also be used to support the process of restructuring, deployment or internal promotion, and help to conduct effective succession planning.

Be sure to repeat this process at least twice a year so you continue to effectively manage your training spend, offer employees relevant training and career opportunities and respond effectively to a changing economy by ensuring you have the relevant skill sets available to you.

Want to have a look at an example of how a skills audit works?
Contact PeoplePulse today on ph +61 2 9232 0172,

Or request a demo of our Online Survey software.
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Do you have statistically valid evidence of the current skill sets of your workforce? Are you easily able to identify the gaps between your current skill availability, and the future skills your organisation needs in order to meet its 5 year strategic plan?

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Strategic workforce planning is an essential part of workforce management. This is why organizations are making the most of workforce planning tools to build an agile workforce, identify performance shortages, close workforce gaps, and make smarter business decisions to achieve business goals.

Before we dig into what you need for your workforce planning efforts, let's explore the topic at a high level. Starting with:

The Importance of Workforce Planning Tools

Workforce planning tools are vital for organizations to organize their human resources activities more efficiently. This means proactively planning and predicting workforce needs to prevent future layoffs and panic hires. It incorporates all the elements of talent management and problem-solving functions. Strategic workforce planning usually covers a forecast period of around 3-5 years. The aim is to improve current business practices by problem-solving and predicting issues before they arise.

While most organizations understand the need for strategic workforce planning, many experience barriers that make it difficult for HR departments to successfully implement it. However, using the right set of workforce planning tools can help organizations perform strategic workforce planning much easier. We've prepared a list of 5 strategic workforce planning tools and techniques HR need to start using immediately.

1. Define Your Business Objectives

Organizations first need to identify business objectives, namely their vision, mission, goals, and motives. Subsequently, HR professionals need to develop a strategic plan to align with these objectives. They need to determine the core competencies and skill requirements that will drive business forward.

When creating a strategic workforce plan, HR professionals usually come across two main challenges - linking financial planning and human resources to the workforce plan. HR professionals may find it hard setting a budget without reliable data about human resources, such as turnover rates, talent demand, and talent supply. To overcome these challenges, it's important to leverage HR analytics. Insight into HR analytics helps calculate costs and develop the following strategic workforce planning processes:

Talent development - How will the organization attract, develop, motivate, engage and retain talent to attain short, medium and long-term business goals?

Talent acquisition - How will the organization find, assess and hire talent that meet the business goals of the organization?

Workforce gaps and risks - How will the organization address and mitigate skill shortage and turnover rates?

Other variable elements such as location, mode, quality, and quantity of work may influence a change of direction in the workforce plan. So a sound ability to forecast business trends is a great asset for HR professionals to possess. Once a strategic workforce plan is ready, it should be communicated across internal sectors.

Therefore, defining business objectives is a key workforce planning tool that HR professionals should use. It's not enough that HR professionals are familiar with the organization's business direction. Communication should be clear and organization-wide. Everyone within in the company who contributes to the execution of these objectives should be aware of the organization's short term and long term goals. This includes managers, supervisors, and even lower ranking employees.

2. Model Current Workforce

Understanding the current workforce in terms of characteristics, capabilities, and distribution allows HR professionals to develop effective gap-closing strategies. Collecting HR analytics on employees is the perfect method to create a workforce profile. To do so, HR professionals should create a database with the following information:

Employee data - Gathering information including demographics, age, gender, earnings, employment type, employee retention and distribution.

Turnover and recruitment data - Analyzing vacancy lengths, recruitment rates and number of applicants during recruitment process.

Internal influence - Identifying any company changes that may influence business processes such as a change in business direction, budget cuts and market pressures.

Current competencies - Distinguishing skills and competencies of current workforce and looking for ways to improve them.

Rewards scheme - Generating data about how employees are being recognized and rewarded for their work.

Competitor analysis - Looking at competitors and comparing their workforce management strategy.

Organizations should include all employees when modeling their current workforce:

Permanent employees - Employees who are on the organization's payroll, have regular hours and full benefit entitlements.

Supplemental direct-hire employees - Employees who are on the organization's payroll, but don't have regular work hours or full benefit entitlements.

Contract workers - Employees are found via a staffing agency and work for a specific time frame and generally without any employee benefits.

Collecting and using this data is an effective workforce planning tool that results in better workforce management.

3. Establish Direction for Future Workforce

Another effective workforce planning tool is establishing clear workforce requirements for future talent. One of the most efficient ways to identify future talent needs is for organizations to continuously analyze internal and external factors influencing business processes. Workforce planning tools like forecasting and following market trends can help to determine necessary changes in the current workforce management strategy to attain future business goals.

Here are some key questions to help HR professionals identify current workforce shortages and predict future workforce necessities:

How can current skill shortages be filled?

How can current turnover rates be lowered?

Which skills and competencies will the organization need to meet business objectives?

What are some of the biggest challenges currently blocking business objectives?

What are the ideal types of employment?

Will they be full-time, part-time, permanent or temporary?

What will the rewards scheme look like?

Where will the workforce be located?

What is the ideal earning profile?

How will the organization rank with competitors?

Answering these questions will assist HR professionals in effective workforce planning.

4. Address Workforce Gaps

Once an organization has analyzed its current workforce and understood its future workforce plan, it's time for a gap-closing strategy to eliminate inconsistency between one and the other. Workforce gaps are the areas in an organization that need to be changed in order to reach business goals. For instance, the main workforce gaps are skill shortages, position design, turnover rates, employee profiles, recruitments processes, and business objectives.

5. Develop and Implement a Gap-Closing Strategy

In order to close workforce gaps, HR professionals should develop a gap-closing strategy that will close workforce gaps. An effective gap-closing strategy will increase the capability, capacity, and productivity of employees. Once again, HR professionals will need to look at their gathered analytics to see which areas need to be improved and how. Developing the right gap-closing strategy is an important workforce planning tool that addresses business deficiencies.

A gap-closing strategy can fall into different categories that address different business processes, some of which include:

Talent retention

Talent recruitment

Employee development

Staff reduction

Salary projections

HR professionals should address the category that best suits their workforce management goals.

Conclusion

To get the most out of these five workforce planning tools, it's important for experienced HR professionals to take care of all aspects of the strategic workforce planning process. From defining business objectives to identifying workforce deficiencies, leave it to HR professionals who know what they're doing. Take a look at this workforce planning template to find out more.

Start using these workforce planning tools and techniques now to meet your business objectives. If you're unsure about how to implement these workforce planning tools, we'd love to show you how we can help.

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The 5 Workforce Planning Tools HR Needs to Start Using Now

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Strategic workforce planning is an essential part of workforce management. This is why organizations are making the most of workforce planning tools to build an agile workforce, identify performance shortages, close workforce gaps, and make smarter business decisions to achieve business goals.

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Reading time: about 7 min

4 steps to strategic human resources planning

It's easy to understand the importance of the human resource management planning process-the process by which organizations determine how to properly staff to meet business needs and customer demands. But despite its obvious importance, many organizations do not have a strategic human resource planning process in place, with many HR professionals reporting their departments need to improve strategic alignment.

If you've considered developing an HR planning process, you're in the right place. This article will explain what human resource planning entails and how to document your strategic plan. With this knowledge under your belt, you'll be filling positions and growing as a company in no time.

4 Steps to Strategic Human Resource Planning (Click on image to view in Lucidchart)

Introduction to strategic human resource planning

In order to improve the strategic alignment of staff and other resources, it's essential to understand how to create a strategic HR planning process. At its most basic level, strategic human resource planning ensures adequate staffing to meet your organization's operational goals, matching the right people with the right skills at the right time.

It's important to ask where your organization stands currently and where it is going for your plan to remain flexible. Each company's plan will look slightly different depending on its current and future needs, but there is a basic structure that you can follow to ensure you're on the right track.

The strategic human resource planning process begins with an assessment of your current staff, evaluating whether it fits the organization's needs. After that, you can move on to forecasting future staffing needs based on business goals. From there, you'll need to align your organization's strategy with employment planning and implement a plan to not only to hire new employees but also to retain and properly train the new hires-and your current employees-based on business changes.

Read on to understand human resource planning in more detail.

1. Assess current HR capacity

The first step in the human resource planning process is to assess your current staff. Before making any moves to hire new employees for your organization, it's important to understand the talent you already have at your disposal. Develop a skills inventory for each of your current employees.

You can do this in a number of ways, such as asking employees to self-evaluate with a questionnaire, looking over past performance reviews, or using an approach that combines the two. Use the template below to visualize that data.

Skills Inventory by Department (Click on image to modify online)

2. Forecast HR requirements

Once you have a full inventory of the resources you already have at your disposal, it's time to begin forecasting future needs. Will your company need to grow its human resources in number? Will you need to stick to your current staff but improve their productivity through efficiency or new skills training? Are there potential employees available in the marketplace?

It is important to assess both your company's demand for qualified employees and the supply of those employees either within the organization or outside of it. You'll need to carefully manage that supply and demand.

Demand forecasting

Demand forecasting is the detailed process of determining future human resources needs in terms of quantity-the number of employees needed-and quality-the caliber of talent required to meet the company's current and future needs.

Supply forecasting

Supply forecasting determines the current resources available to meet the demands. With your previous skills inventory, you'll know which employees in your organization are available to meet your current demand. You'll also want to look outside of the organization for potential hires that can meet the needs not fulfilled by employees already present in the organization.

Matching demand and supply

Matching the demand and supply is where the hiring process gets tricky-and where the rest of the human resources management planning process comes into place. You'll develop a plan to link your organization's demand for quality staff with the supply available in the market. You can achieve this by training current employees, hiring new employees, or combining the two approaches.

Skills Supply and Demand Chart (Click on image to modify online)

3. Develop talent strategies

After determining your company's staffing needs by assessing your current HR capacity and forecasting supply and demand, it's time to begin the process of developing and adding talent. Talent development is a crucial part of the strategic human resources management process.

Overview of the Talent Development Process (Click on image to view in Lucidchart)

Recruitment

In the recruitment phase of the talent development process, you begin the search for applicants that match the skills your company needs. This phase can involve posting on job websites, searching social networks like LinkedIn for qualified potential employees, and encouraging current employees to recommend people they know who might be a good fit.

Selection

Once you have connected with a pool of qualified applicants, conduct interviews and skills evaluations to determine the best fit for your organization. If you have properly forecasted supply and demand, you should have no trouble finding the right people for the right roles.

Hiring

Decide the final candidates for the open positions and extend offers.

Training and development

After hiring your new employees, it's time to bring them on board. Organize training to get them up to speed on your company's procedures. Encourage them to continue to develop their skills to fit your company's needs as they change. Find more ideas on how to develop your own employee onboarding process, and then get started with this onboarding timeline template.

Timeline for Onboarding (Click on image to modify online)

Employee remuneration and benefits administration

Keep your current employees and new hires happy by offering competitive salary and benefit packages and by properly rewarding employees who go above and beyond. Retaining good employees will save your company a lot of time and money in the long run.

Performance management

Institute regular performance reviews for all employees. Identify successes and areas of improvement. Keep employees performing well with incentives for good performance.

Employee relations

A strong company culture is integral in attracting top talent. Beyond that, make sure your company is maintaining a safe work environment for all, focusing on employee health, safety, and quality of work life.

4. Review and evaluate

Once your human resource process plan has been in place for a set amount of time, you can evaluate whether the plan has helped the company to achieve its goals in factors like production, profit, employee retention, and employee satisfaction. If everything is running smoothly, continue with the plan, but if there are roadblocks along the way, you can always change up different aspects to better suit your company's needs.

Why document your strategic HR plan

Now that you know the steps to strategic human resource planning, it's time to adapt those steps to your own organization and determine how to execute.

There are a number of reasons to document your strategic human resources plan, particularly in a visual format like a flowchart. Through documentation, you standardize the process, enabling repeated success. Documentation also allows for better evaluation, so you know what parts of your plan need work. In addition, a properly documented plan allows you to better communicate the plan throughout the organization, including how everyone, from the top down, can contribute to make sure the plan works.

Document every step of the process, from beginning to end, and find room for improvement in your human resources process along the way.

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4 Steps to Strategic Human Resource Planning

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Reading time: about 7 min 4 steps to strategic human resources planning It's easy to understand the importance of the human resource management planning process-the process by which organizations determine how to properly staff to meet business needs and customer demands.