Overcome the Talent Shortage with Strategic Workforce Planning

A Company can be successful only if it has a workforce that is well capable of implementing all of its strategies. That means a company’s long term goal accomplishment mostly depends on the ability of its HR department to recruit, motivate, utilize and retain the right kind of people in the right roles in the organization. But, a number of forces such as economic rescissions, globalization, a shift in the available number of talented workers by generation and technological advancement have created growing Talent Storage that is posing a real threat to sustainable organizational success.

To overcome Talent Shortage and accomplish organizational objectives, business leaders and HR managers need to engage in Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP) that directly relates organization’s Talent Management Strategy (TMS) to its corporate strategies.

Overcome Talent Shortage with SWP (Image Reference)

Talent-focused Strategic Workforce Planning

As part of organizational talent management strategy, HR managers need to follow a talent-focused step by step strategic planning process as described below:

Step 1 – Create Strategic Alignment

At the very outset, executive leadership and HR managers need to sit together to create long-term organizational talent management strategy that directly supports organizational objectives, expectations and broader strategic plans. This may include a number of strategic decisions such as re-organization, launching new business venture, international expansion, planned market reductions and exits etc based on expected changes in competitive environments and technologies. Thus, the very first step in a talent-focused strategic workforce planning is to set the long term intent of the business such as developing mission and vision statements. This must be conducted in a partnership between business leaders and HR managers.

Step 2 – Evaluate the Current Workforce

The second step is to evaluate the ability of the organization’s current workforce to achieve organizational strategies that are created in the first step by collecting demographics and various employment characteristics of current workforce.

Step 3 – Forecast Future Workforce Needs

Then, HR managers need to forecast future workforce needs based on expected organizational growth. They need to look for reduction of counter-productive practices or redundancies to increase operational efficiencies in the organizational talent management process. The goal of this step is to find out critical success factors, risks and unknowns relative to the organization’s future workforce.

Step 4 – Analyze Gaps

Next, HR managers need to identify gaps between the capabilities of current workforce and the capabilities that would be required by the future workforce.

Step 5 – Develop an Action Plan

This step is the core of the Strategic Workforce Planning. HR managers need develop an action plan by identifying specific techniques, practices and initiatives that will ensure availability of required talents in future thereby eliminate the gaps identified in step 4. Main aspects of the action plan should be logically broken down into a progressive series of convenient phases.

Step 6 – Execute, Monitor, and Adapt

Planning without proper execution, monitoring and adaptation to changing needs adds no value to the organization. Thus, HR managers must give utmost importance in this final step to successfully manage talent shortage.