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Workforce Planning: Now Is the Time to Upgrade Your Plan
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Most of us have read about upcoming workforce trends like decreasing employee loyalty, differing generational expectations, and the impending retirement of the baby boom generation, but surprisingly few organizational leaders are fully aware of how those issues will impact them.
Several of the organizations I have worked with in recent years have discovered aspects of their business that could lose more than 70% of their workforce in the next three years alone.
The time to read about trends is over. Now is the time to act, to develop, or to update your workforce plan to ensure that it accurately forecasts and triggers appropriate action. Nothing could be more strategic than looking at the big picture and developing action plans that prepare your organization for the future.
I challenge you to find a single recruiting report that doesn’t report “history” (what happened last year). Telling managers how many people they hired last year, their time to fill, or their cost per hire might be interesting, but they cannot do anything about the past. Instead, talent management needs to focus efforts on the future, where preventive action could make a significant difference in recruiting and retention results.
Most recruiting functions are so busy handling day-to-day activities and emergencies that they forget to spend the necessary time preventing the fires from occurring in the first place.
Allocate a portion of your resources toward forecasting and developing a strategic workforce planning effort. Organizational leaders need to understand that the recruiting function must be funded adequately, even in times when requisition loads are small, to allow the function to plan, design, and develop programs to support projected levels of recruiting in good times.
Over 90% of the workforce plans that I come across are merely mundane statistics. Many of these plans end up gathering dust on shelves because they don’t drive action. Do not stop when you develop workforce forecasts; instead, put together a workforce action plan. A workforce action plan is different in that it drives managers and recruiters to “act differently” and identifies how to respond to changes in the business environment. Plans that don’t drive actions are a waste of effort and unfortunately, that’s what invariably happens.
It’s an unforgiving world for those who don’t plan. In the rapidly changing world of business and technology, a failure to plan and anticipate can spell disaster. Business managers and recruiters no longer live in a world of isolated companies and markets.
In a global economy, when a major player stumbles, there is always another ready to instantly move in and seize the opportunity. Whenever an organization comes out with an innovative product or service, it’s copied so fast that it’s hard to make a profit over a long period time off of any new innovation. In past decades, companies could make errors and later catch up. In the 21st century, there isn’t time to catch-up.
There are many outputs that result from excellent workforce action planning. Some of the most significant ones include:
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that the world of business is changing and that anticipating what types of events may occur is essential. Some of the events that recruiting needs to anticipate and have plans to handle appear in newspaper headlines almost everyday. They include:
In order to prevent upcoming problems, develop a specific action plan on how to handle each problem. I divide these potential actions into three different “action areas,” including:
Anticipating and developing action plans for events, rather than reacting to them, is difficult. But being strategic is, by definition, more difficult than being a tactical player. The rewards related to anticipating events are significantly higher than just reacting to them, so enduring a complicated or difficult process is worth it.
Remember, accurately predicting who and why a team will win (or lose) the Super Bowl or the World Cup will get a lot more attention than congratulating the winner the day after the game.
With the Internet age and huge meta-databases, there is an abundance of data and information that makes forecasting future events much easier. I recommend that top management work with the business strategic planning functions, as well as product development and budgeting, to get some help in identifying what events are likely to occur both within and outside of the organization.
Top management must then develop a compelling case for action and an “action plan” that makes it easy for managers to know exactly what steps they must take to prevent a problem or take advantage of a talent opportunity. There is no better time to begin than today.