How to thrive as a workforce planning leader
AUTHOR
Lock in your strategy now to drive workforce planning success in the new year with these actionable insights from your peers.
Workforce planning. Every organization does it. Well, kind of. And every organization wants and needs to get better at it. By every organization, we don’t just mean every company. We mean every line of business, function, and team. It is top of mind across all industries, including banking, insurance, retail, consumer goods, telcos, high-tech, healthcare, travel and hospitality, mining, energy and utilities, and more.
According to Gartner® “among organizations that conduct workforce planning, 52% assign the ownership of workforce planning to the HR function and another 46% assign it to business unit leaders.[1]
You have your demand drivers, strategy and plans, and budgets for what needs to get done to grow your business. Determining what it takes to do the work and if you have the right workforce capacity are critical to executing on your strategies and plans. Your workforce plans and decisions around if, how, and where you can get skilled resources — interlocked with finance to know what you can afford — are essential nuggets that can force your leaders to revisit business decisions and refine their strategies and execution plans.
Workforce planning helps you prepare for different scenarios, and preparedness brings workforce and hence business agility. It’s a journey, and you must be intentional about it to make it successful. Below are some of the top workforce planning insights we heard from some of our industry-leading customers at Anaplan Connect events in 2023:
Workforce planning begins with transparency into your workforce headcount, capabilities, and costs. Discover how a major CPG organization has embraced global connected planning to create standards in organizational governance as a foundation to drive more meaningful business outcomes.
Collaboration with finance is imperative to your workforce planning. Hear from a public-sector organization about how they improved the alignment between their finance and HR teams to drive forecast accuracy in headcount and attrition numbers.
Align your people, processes, and tech to make long-term, strategic workforce planning a growth engine. Progress depends on having the right technology to underpin the process and gathering cross-functional teams to build and run strategic workforce planning. Learn from a leading global technology company how to build the case for change and convince senior leaders to commit.
Ensure your customer care team is always on and ever ready. According to Microsoft 2019 State of Global Customer Service survey, 90% of respondents indicated that customer service is important to their choice of and loyalty to a brand. Contact centers are at the forefront of customer services across many different industries. Check out how a major UK retail bank ensures they can support their customers when they are victims of a fraud or scam with appropriate levels of staffing in their contact centers.
Gain more industry-specific guidance for workforce planning success:
- Explore the complexities of workforce planning for academic staff within higher education and gain fresh ideas to transform your own approach to planning.
- Discover how a large insurer is using data-lead decision making to support their people strategy around retaining and promoting talent in their contact center environment.
- Learn how a large healthcare provider consolidates planning processes to connect and align their demand forecasts to workforce capacity and improve forecast accuracy, to close gaps across their front- and back-office operations.
As showcased throughout these stories, workforce planning is not a one-size-fits-all process, but it is an organizational exercise with the goal of mitigating the workforce risk in achieving your near- and long-term business objectives. It can be strategically geared, operational, or finance-budget led.
In large enterprise, the drivers for workforce planning are nearly always coming from outside HR, but HR is inevitably pulled into the conversation. By modelling your workforce capacity and demand, you can readily identify your headcount and skills gaps, and help drive better talent decisions to accelerate toward your goals.