Strategic workforce planning: the right people in three years
Strategic workforce planning looks years ahead: which people and skills will the organization need later, and what do you do today to get there? Here is how to approach it, in four steps.
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1. Map what you have today
Start with the current headcount: how many people, in which roles, on which contracts and with which skills. Look beneath the surface too: who retires in the next few years, where turnover is high, and which knowledge sits in only one person's head.
- Headcount per role and per department
- Contract types and contracted hours
- Vulnerable spots: knowledge held by one person
2. Decide what you need in a few years
Translate the direction of the organization into people. Are you growing, opening a new site, automating part of the work, or is your market changing? Each of these changes how many people you need and with which skills.
- Strategy as the starting point, not today's headcount
- Scenarios side by side: growth, shrinkage, change
- New roles that do not exist yet
3. Find the gap between now and later
Lay the future need next to the current headcount. Where will you have too few people, where too many, and which skills are missing? That gap is the real result of strategic workforce planning, because it shows where to step in before it turns into a problem.
- Quantitative: too many or too few people
- Qualitative: the wrong or missing skills
- Per role and per period
4. Choose what to do, and keep track
You close the gap by hiring, training, moving people internally, using other contract types or organizing the work differently. Give each action an owner and check at least once a year whether the plans still match what is actually happening. A workforce plan that disappears into a drawer is out of date within a year.
- Hire, train or move people internally
- One owner per action
- Look back every year at what actually happened
Strategic and operational planning
Strategic workforce planning spans years and asks which people you need. Operational planning spans days and weeks: who works which shift next week? They need each other, because a strategic plan that ignores how the work actually runs today stays on paper. Celtucom is a tool for the operational side: schedules, time tracking and leave. It does not build a headcount plan for you, but it does provide reports on attendance, staffing and leave, which is exactly the reality step 1 asks for. Read more on employee scheduling, and for the bigger picture of planning through to communication in one system, see workforce management.
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