Work Workforce

Workforce Planning Information

The Right People at the Right Place at the Right Time!

What is Workforce Planning?

Workforce planning is a systematic process for identifying the human capital required to meet organizational/company goals and developing the strategies to meet these requirements.

An effective Workforce Plan must include:

• A systematic process that is integrated, methodical, and ongoing.
• Identification of the human capital required to meet organizational goals; this consists of determining the number and skills of needed workers and where and when they will be needed.
• Development of strategies to meet these requirements, which involves identifying actions that must be taken to attract (and retain) the number and types of workers the company needs.

In other words, effective workforce planning is a continuous process that ensures an organization/company has the right number of people in the right jobs at the right time

Why is Workforce Planning Important?

The number one challenge facing New Brunswick employers today is accessing and retaining appropriately skilled labour in a timely and cost effective manner.

This challenge is being driven by a number of factors:

•     Global competition for skilled labour and talent
•     An aging provincial workforce
•     Increased retirements; 2011 marks the year that the Baby Boomers will begin retiring and could result in a ‘brain drain’
•     A stagnant provincial natural population growth rate
•     Workers with changing workforce values and expectations

Given these circumstances, NB organizations/companies must be prepared face the challenge of attracting, developing, and retaining a workforce that will be equipped to address new objectives, new technology, and new business requirements. If done correctly, workforce planning allows agencies to build and shape a workforce prepared to achieve strategic objectives.

What are the Benefits of Workforce Planning?

• It allows for a more effective and efficient use of workers. This will become increasingly important as some companies find themselves having to do the same amount of work or more with fewer staff members.
• It helps ensure that replacements are available to fill important vacancies. Filling vacancies is especially critical as organizations face an increasing number of workers eligible for retirement, combined with labor market shortages and limited compensation levels.
• It provides realistic staffing projections for budget purposes. Realistic projections are very helpful when justifying budget requests.
• It provides a clear rationale for linking expenditures for training and retraining, development, career counseling, and recruiting efforts.
•  It helps maintain or improve a diversified workforce.
•  It helps an agency prepare for restructuring, reducing, or expanding its workforce.

How to Start Developing your Workforce Plan!

1. Build Support
Gaining and maintaining management and staff commitment to the workforce planning process is key to developing an effective workforce plan. Therefore, organizations should work hard to gain commitment at the beginning of, or very early in, the workforce planning process. Agencies can use the following techniques to build support for the workforce planning process:

•  Obtain support from senior leaders within the agency. It is important that the head of the agency and other top leaders understand the value of workforce planning-their commitment can determine its success or failure. Understanding the factors that affect the agency’s future operations and competition will help convince senior leaders of the need for workforce planning.
•  Communicate benefits and results of workforce planning to managers and workers. Management should be involved in understanding the link between workforce plans and the budget, and workers need to understand how workforce planning affects them and the agency.
•  Establish a workforce planning team consisting of dedicated and knowledgeable employees from different functional areas and organizational levels. Trust for the workforce plan can be achieved by involving employees in the planning process.
•  Automate the process so data can be easily stored and retrieved, thereby simplifying the process. The more simple the process is, the more participation and acceptance agencies will have from those who are participating in the process.
•  Develop and implement a plan to ensure accountability within each participating division of an agency. This will help ensure success of the strategies within the plan and hold those who are not meeting the goals accountable.
•  Solicit continuous feedback for improvements to the process. The workforce planning process should be continually reviewed and refined to ensure effectiveness and continuous improvement.

2. Take Some Important First Steps 
Workforce planning does not need to be a time consuming and cumbersome process. Nevertheless, regardless of how complex or simple an organization decides the workforce planning process should be, it will require a variety of input from cross-functional areas and levels within the organization. Before people assigned to participate in the workforce planning process conduct their analyses, they should:

• Clearly understand the purpose of workforce planning.
• Determine the timeframe.
• Identify the resources available.
• Adapt models, strategies, tools, and processes specific to the agency’s culture and needs.
• Identify planning outputs that are meaningful to the organization and that support agency objectives, budget requests, staffing requests, and strategic plans.

The Workforce Planning Model
Many organizations have developed models for workforce planning. Except for variations in terminology and the order of the processes, all models are very much alike. Workforce planning can be conducted in many ways depending on the requirements of an organization; therefore, the order and phases used may vary.

Workforce Planning Model - Example