Personnel planning is mention often but seldom explain. What is workforce planning, and how do you go about it? When used well, strategic workforce planning enables the HR department to plan the skills needed in the future.
This blog explains what workforce management planning is, how this planning works, gives a number to get you start when you need to plan your workforce. There are various workforce management software being developed to manage your employees more swiftly.
Workforce management planning
Also known as strategic workforce planning, workforce planning with workforce management software ensures that the right person is deploy in the right place at the right time. This means that neither too many employees are available via employee monitoring software.
(overstaffing) nor too few (understaffing). Personnel deployment planning thus solves personnel problems for today and the future.
Aspects of Workforce management Planning
Demographic change:
An ageing workforce poses a number of problems, including a lack of skills in demand, retraining challenges, and mass retirement.
Cost reduction:
Increasing global competition is forcing companies to work smarter. At the same time, the ageing workforce is more expensive but not necessarily more productive.
Talent Management:
Talented people are a competitive advantage for the company. It is critical to have people with the right drive and build a talent pipeline to replace the ageing group of executives and executives.
Flexibility:
Today’s competitive landscape requires faster and more disruptive innovations. The revenue generated from products that are less than a few years old has increased tremendously over the past few decades. At the same time, the tactics that got us here won’t get us where we need to go next.
There are four criteria for personnel planning.
The four criteria of strategic personnel planning
- The goal of size revolves around the number of employees and work tasks with employee activity monitoring software. Too large a workforce is overstaff and inefficient, while too small a workforce means the company is not producing what it could potentially produce. This can manifest itself over vacancies.
- The form aims to have the skills require today and tomorrow (in succession planning).
- The cost target is about achieving the optimum labor costs. Too much will ruin the company; too little will result in the job not getting done.
- The goal of agility is to have a lean and flexible workforce that can adapt to changing market requirements.
Workforce planning and HR analytics
On this platform, we mainly write about personnel analysis. You may be wondering: What is the difference between HR planning and HR analytics? This difference is not always easy to define – and may have more methodological reasons than anything else.
However, while human resources analytics mainly focuses on analyzing the relationships between the drivers of employees and business results, strategic human resource planning is much more long-term and strategic and is primarily concerned with employee education. This is also the main distinction between the two.
The process of workforce planning
How does the workforce management software work now? There are different approaches to workforce planning, but the process is usually similar. However, before we get into the process, we should consider a few fundamental principles first.
Strategic personnel planning is determined by corporate strategy. If an organization needs to double its sales in the next two years, it will influence the workforce. However, you can calculate how many sales reps you will need to make this growth possible with current data. This helps in planning your recruiting efforts.
One example is a large European airline. This company’s SWP team estimates the number of pilots it needs to recruit by tracking key metrics.
The number of aircraft purchased. These are long-term contracts that are planned for years. These orders are placed after a careful analysis of future needs. Therefore, the number of pilots required in the company depends on the number of aircraft.
Age distribution of the pilot workforce for calculating the retirement rate. Retired pilots will need to be replaced.
Using this data, the airline can predict the number of pilots that will need to be hired (due to the expansion of the aircraft fleet and retirement) up to 10 years in advance. Therefore, this will help them plan their hiring activities. Preparing the pilots only takes about 2 years. In this way, the organization can expect the developing deficiency of pilots by setting particular choosing goals that will help plan engaging projects.
Income matrix for workforce planning
A revenue matrix that will allow you to create a workforce plan for the next year (2019)
We don’t know the exact staff cost (we can easily calculate it and add it to the model), but if the staff cost is the same between departments, product line B is more effective than product line C. Sales per employee in B is 1.6 million Dollars divided by 8 people for $ 200,000 in revenue per employee. At C, it’s $ 113,000 per employee.
- You can use the growth percentage to estimate the growth in staff per department. Exact numbers are difficult to determine. However, assuming there are no sudden selling and maintenance productivity improvements, you will require to hire between 12 and 18 people for Department B.
- Base on this information, you also know that Product Line C is unlikely to grow. The superfluous employees in product line C could move to department B – provided they have the right skills and experience. If not, you can either retrain them or fire them.
- As you can see, future HR challenges can be determine through strategic HR planning. With this information, you can begin retraining some of the Department C employees to work for Product Line B.
Quality of workforce
Workforce quality is about current performance and future potential. We all know the terms high performer and high potential. Although, these are either doing very well today or expect to do very well in the (near) future. You can easily do monitoring computer activities now.
However, the evaluation of the quality of the workforce forms the basis for effective talent management. Talent management is about reaching the full potential of employees. To achieve this, companies spend time and money empowering their employees to perform well.
Employees are assess base on their current performance and future potential.
An excellent part of this is the 9-box grid. It helps to map the workforce. This card is helpful as it enables the HR department to manage talent effectively.
Number of workers
In the next step, the workforce is determine with the help of a personnel flow matrix. This matrix includes new hires, employee turnover and internal promotions.
- Personnel planning model that shows changes in the workforce
- A complicate model – but a workforce requirements matrix can show changes in the workforce if you know how to read the model.
- This model shows risk factors in the company. In this case, the turnover in top management is dangerously high. It also offers internal and external mobility and gives an overview of the most significant changes in the organization.
This model is pretty simple. Therefore, additional information can be add (e.g. the total number of internal replacements), the categories can be divide into different departments, employees with other characteristics or skills can filter the data. For example, you can get a good overview of the diversity of internal mobility by comparing this overview for both sexes.
Conclusion
The goal of personnel planning is to deploy the right people in the right places at the right time. This is done by knowing the current personnel capacities, planning future scenarios, determining the desire workforce, and taking measures to bring the future workforce into harmony with this desire workforce.
Personnel planning is not something that can be quickly done in the office on a rainy afternoon. It’s a complex task that requires careful data collection and planning. However, when done well, workforce management software is a fantastic and precious tool that can give your business a competitive advantage.
