Are your people planning and business planning at cross purposes? If who you’re hiring and what they are supposed to achieve aren’t syncing up, it’s time to implement strategic workforce planning. Workforce planning aligns your employees and their tasks with your organization’s goals for heightened efficiency and increased revenues.
Workforce Planning Maximizes Worker Productivity
Without workforce planning, employees can never reach peak efficiency. Modernizing and digitizing workflows is only part of the equation. Effective planning starts at hiring people who fill skills and knowledge gaps, not empty seats.
More than two-thirds of HR executives recognize that there is a need for workforce transformation. Barely a third feel very confident about their ability to move forward with transformative actions. Buy-in and follow-through are crucial to your organization’s success, while inclusion, diversity, and culture change are key at all levels.
Highlighting Talent Needs Clarifies Recruitment Actions
By breaking down every department in your organization and examining all roles and tasks to reveal misalignments, you can identify your most pressing talent needs. These can provide a roadmap for recruitment. Instead of hiring for a job title or a list of responsibilities, hire for knowledge and skills.
Stay cognizant of the fact that 40 percent of companies are already reporting talent shortages. To adapt and innovate, you’ll need to have additional options for raw recruitment, including upskilling, reskilling, and cross-skilling. You can delve into existing employees’ hidden talents to fill in gaps.
Redesigning Job Roles Reduces Talent Dependencies
You can also handle a dearth of available talent by going back to the table to redesign jobs. According to SHRM, nine out of ten from the Standard & Poor’s 100 are actively recruiting for the same three dozen job roles.
Mitigate skill imbalances by redeploying staff so your teams get the full benefits of their knowledge. Seek out and extract specific competencies from job roles, and look for candidates that might have different mixes to surface new ways of dealing with the same old problems. Don’t let new technologies make things more complicated. Instead, leverage these tools to reduce talent dependencies by taking over repetitive tasks and giving your employees time to learn new skills.
Implementing Talent Data Analysis Drives Decision Making
Once you have data about your existing talent and any gaps that must be filled, use that data to inform your business and recruitment decisions. Gartner research reveals that only 12% of organizations use talent data effectively.
Should you build or buy? Hire or reskill? Automate or outsource? Finding the right blend of solutions can transform your company and help you implement workforce planning that supports your overarching goals.
Internal Recruiting Decreases Employee Flight
All the workforce planning in the world can be unfruitful if you keep losing employees. Use internal recruiting to surface underrecognized talent and create loyal employees who will stay on board. Good employees stay for job security; great employees stay for what you can offer them over the competition.
More than nine out of ten HR and hiring professionals say that improved retention was the number one benefit of internal recruiting and that retention for high-value talent increases when employees advance. Companies with internal hiring practices tend to keep employees 41% longer than companies that don’t hire internally.
How Censia Can Help You Build The Workforce You Really Need
Instituting strategic workforce planning requires top talent. Censia can help build Ideal Candidate Models, create Complete Talent Profiles for your existing employees, and help you find diamonds in the rough inside your own organization.
Concentrate on bringing together the right information with the right people to dramatically improve your organization’s ability to develop and implement strategic business opportunities. By creating a diverse, highly fluid team, you improve your chances of business success and lay the groundwork for a workforce plan that will positively impact productivity and employee satisfaction.
