Have you ever considered how workforce planning can help your business to grow, work better, or create clear career paths? If the answer’s no, you’ve probably never used it as a strategic tool. The benefits it brings to your business when you do are huge. You can be proactive about talent management, recruitment, and retention, as well as developing a workforce who’ll meet both your current and future needs.
Top 7 benefits of a workforce planning strategy
To help you understand more about workforce planning (and be able to convince your senior leadership team to do it properly), here are the top seven benefits you’ll experience:
1. Improved flexibility in your workforce
Workforce planning takes your current and future goals and maps them against the current and future skills you need in the organization. It allows you to spot gaps (or surpluses) and proactively upskill or cross-skill employees to achieve the right future mix for your goals.
This analysis helps you create agile teams, with broader skill sets, who can move on to new projects and products as the business changes. Employees can adopt their new responsibilities thanks to proactive development plans, and efficiently shift their focus without weeks of lost productivity.
2. Create more engaged teams
Most organizations have some measure of employee engagement, whether from an annual survey or regular engagement insights from your Human Success Platform. Introducing strategic HR planning positively drives those numbers.
How? Employees feel more valued, which is definitely one of the top benefits of workforce planning. Understanding what you need, both now and in the future, allows them to take advantage of development opportunities. You can easily define career paths using skills generation tools encouraging individuals to take responsibility for their own progression. They actively develop the skills they need for their next role and establish a stronger commitment to the business, which in turn helps you to grow.
3. Use workforce planning to drive better talent management
When you have a strategic HR plan, you look at your teams as a whole. You can identify gaps in succession plans, flag any retention risks for key technical experts, and understand the potential of your team. Decisions around development and progression become centered on data, not gut-feel, as you present a strong business case for investment in core programs.
The result is an ability to develop the skills and roles you really need, ready for when you need them. You’re driven by nurturing talent, not just managing it. Additionally, as you integrate key HR platforms, you’re able to demonstrate tangible benefit to the business and show the impacts your talent plans are having on productivity, profitability and engagement.
4. Drive greater diversity across your workforce
Lots of businesses are now focused on diversity, but they just use it as a metric. With effective workforce planning, you can use it for competitive advantage. Having more diverse teams is about having ideas, thoughts and experience which encourages collaboration and challenge. It enables people to develop new solutions based on a better understanding of customers’ needs.
You want to create a culture of inclusion and solutions-focus to ensure you can bring together the right mix of experience, knowledge and approach. So, you need tools to help you. Developing systems which integrate skills, career paths, development opportunities, and individual performance allows you to spot those people who might otherwise get missed.
5. Experience fewer retention issues and lower hiring costs
Attraction and retention are an issue for many organizations, especially when it comes to key talent. Either you struggle to recruit the right people, or it’s a challenge to keep them for long. Yet optimizing your workforce helps address that. Better recruitment and development opportunities increase your chance of retention, reducing agency costs for replacements and any indirect costs of keeping the wrong people long-term.
Your first step, then, is in recruitment. You get clearer on who you need to hire, looking for core values as well as skills. This ensures you get the right behaviors and people committed to the company vision. By setting clear objectives and key results (OKRs) you can drive delivery, another top benefit of workforce planning. And then sharing clear career paths allows people to map their own progression, and encourages them to share their knowledge as they develop their own skills.
6. Workforce planning creates stronger relationships with your teams
You can’t effectively map career paths and skills requirements, unless you understand the people you have. Strategic workforce planning involves knowing your team intimately. You need to be clear on their goals and aspirations, existing and latent skills as well as knowing the business needs.
When employees see their organization genuinely values their development, and takes time to recognize their unique contributions, they feel respected and motivated. This strengthens the connection between employees, their teams and the business overall. The result? A positive work culture where productivity is driven by a shared commitment to business goals.
7. Proactive management of your workforce
This is possibly the greatest advantage of workforce planning. Identifying skills gaps, recognizing development needs, and understanding your future business needs allows you to look to the future. All too often, companies are reactive as situations change and priorities shift. Strategic workforce planning puts you ahead of the curve.
You’re able to see what’s coming and take steps towards it. Right sizing your business, re-skilling where needed, and ensuring you have those key hires in advance. The secret is not to become complacent. As with any plan, circumstances change and priorities shift. Ensure you include a review process to adapt as you need to, otherwise you’ll undo all the great work you’ve put in.
Next steps for introducing workforce planning
Hopefully you can now see that workforce planning isn’t just a spreadsheet. It’s a strategic approach which aligns your talent strategy with long-term business goals. It drives flexibility, engagement, diversity and more, and provides you with a proactive framework to build an agile workforce ready for the future.
Free eBook download: The Ultimate Guide to Performance Management
So take the first step today. Understand more about skills planning and career paths, and how that will work in your business with our free eBook, “The Ultimate Guide to Performance Management.” This guide is packed with valuable strategies and insights designed to drive performance across your organization.
Here’s what you’ll discover inside:
- Proven frameworks for setting and tracking meaningful goals
- Techniques to foster accountability and engagement within your team
- Guidelines for effective feedback and development to support growth
- Workforce planning examples and case studies for real-world application
Take your performance management to the next level—download the free eBook below and empower your team for lasting success!