Addressing the Hurdles of an Effective Workforce Plan

Workforce Planning is a complex process with many obstacles for a quality result let alone an effective implementation.
 
A 10/3/14 article by Peter Louch in Society for Human Resource Management  titled ”Workforce Planning is Essential to High Performing Organizations”  makes a case of some key obstacles including :

1. Time Frame(Often too short)
   
2. Data Integrity
3. Control of data (stakeholders want to use intuition)
4. Detail(broad categories of role types or specific job titles)?
5. Forecasting

 
Peter Louch confirms that there are a few trends addressing these gaps. First, acceptance of data analytics for understanding the current situation.  The tools capturing information, i.e. titles, skillsets, and capabilities are much more robust these days.   Intuition based decision making is getting replaced by data driven decision making. This is great news but places exceptional importance on accurate data.

The second trend is the improved predictive analytics and modeling capabilities.  Analytics are becoming critical in making more effective decisions related to workforce planning and recruitment, risk management, compensation, development programs, and deploying critical talent.  The analytics tool will need to be tailored a bit to your business, industry and employee composition. Your modeling should include the following categories:

• External Economic Conditions
  

                  i.e. Local job market, stock market, competitors vying for skill sets

• Employer Actions/Workplace conditions
  

                  Promotions and Raises, Work environment, Salary inequality, Manager ratio

• Employee Demographics
  

                 Age, tenure, gender, job type, salary range, commute
 
The larger and more complex the organization, the more time/investment should be made developing this predictive modeling tool to narrow the margin of error of totally inaccurate forecasts. For small organizations, it need not be as complex but you want to be sure to incorporate the factors into your assessment on future resource needs over the next 6, 12, 18 months and beyond.
 

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