Creating an Effective Workforce Planning Model: Using Technology to Ensure You Have the Right People in the Right Seats

In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, having a strategic workforce planning model is crucial to maintaining a competitive edge. Having an effective model enables organizations to ensure they have the right people in the right roles and quickly identify gaps that could affect productivity and growth. Effective workforce planning goes beyond simply filling positions—it requires a data-driven approach that anticipates future needs, minimizes risks, and supports organizational goals.

By incorporating technology and the right tools, businesses can create a more accurate, agile, and proactive workforce planning model. Below, we outline how to create an effective model and the tools that can help bring it to life.

1. Define Strategic Business Goals

The first step in building an effective workforce planning model is aligning it with your company's strategic business goals. This ensures that your talent management strategy supports the organization's mission and long-term objectives.

Tools to Consider:

• OKR Software (Objectives and Key Results) like Weekdone or Perdoo can help you track and align your workforce planning efforts with broader company goals. These platforms make it easier to see how team objectives contribute to strategic business outcomes.

2. Analyze Current Workforce Capacity

Once your business goals are clear, the next step is to assess your current workforce's capabilities. This involves gathering data on your employees’ skills, performance, and capacity to meet current and future business needs.

Tools for Workforce Analysis:

• Skills Inventory Platforms: Tools like Skills Base and Workday help you maintain an up-to-date inventory of employee skills and competencies. These platforms allow HR teams to capture, track, and map employee skills across the organization, which is critical for identifying both strengths and gaps in your current workforce.
• Performance Management Systems: Platforms like 15Five, BambooHR, and Lattice allow HR and managers to assess employee performance, gather feedback, and track key performance indicators (KPIs). Performance data is essential for determining which employees are excelling and where development is needed.

3. Forecast Future Workforce Needs

Workforce planning also requires you to anticipate future talent requirements based on market trends, business expansion, technological changes, and employee turnover. A good workforce plan helps you predict staffing needs, from project growth to new skill requirements.

Technology to Leverage:

• Predictive Analytics Tools: Tools like Visier or ADP Workforce Now can help you forecast workforce needs by using historical data to predict future trends in talent demand, potential turnover, and emerging skills gaps. These tools enable data-driven workforce forecasting to ensure you're prepared for upcoming challenges.
• Scenario Planning Software: Board International and Anaplan provide scenario modeling capabilities that allow you to simulate different workforce planning scenarios based on business forecasts, helping you understand potential impacts and staffing requirements under various conditions.

4. Identify Gaps and Surpluses

A critical part of workforce planning is identifying where your current talent pool falls short of future needs. This could include skills shortages, understaffing in critical areas, or employees nearing retirement. Conversely, you may find that some departments are overstaffed or have overlapping roles.

Tools for Identifying Gaps:

• HR Analytics Platforms: Software like Workforce Analytics by SAP SuccessFactors or Tableau enables HR teams to track key metrics like headcount, turnover, time to hire, and employee productivity. These metrics help you quickly spot where there are gaps or surpluses in talent, making it easier to make strategic adjustments.
• Competency Mapping Tools: Tools like TalentGuard and Degreed provide competency mapping features that allow you to evaluate whether your workforce has the required skills and expertise for current and future roles. This helps identify any gaps in knowledge or abilities that need to be addressed.

5. Develop an Action Plan

With the gaps identified, it’s time to develop an actionable plan to close them. This may involve hiring new talent, upskilling existing employees, or restructuring your workforce. Your plan should include specific timelines, responsibilities, and resources required to ensure that your workforce is equipped to meet your business’s evolving needs.

Recruitment and Development Tools:

• Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS): Make sure to capitalize on the reporting capabilities offered by your ATS. Regularly reviewing metrics like time-to-hire, quality of hire, and candidate conversion ratios can provide insights into where your recruiting efforts need adjustment and where your organization might face talent shortages in the near future. By leveraging an ATS not just as a recruitment tool but as a core component of your workforce planning model, you can make smarter, data-driven decisions about your hiring processes and ensure that your organization has the right people in the right seats—now and in the future.
• Learning and Development Platforms: Use platforms like LinkedIn Learning, Coursera for Business, or Udemy for Business to offer training programs that help your employees upskill or reskill based on future workforce needs. These tools enable you to build tailored learning plans for individuals or teams to address skill shortages.

6. Monitor and Adjust Regularly

Workforce planning is a dynamic process that requires regular monitoring and adaptation. As your business evolves, so too should your workforce plan. It’s important to continually assess the effectiveness of your strategy and adjust as needed based on changes in the business environment or workforce performance.

Tools for Ongoing Monitoring:

• Real-Time Workforce Analytics: Platforms like ChartHop and Peakon (now part of Workday) provide real-time analytics on employee engagement, satisfaction, turnover, and productivity. These insights allow you to adjust your workforce plan based on current trends and workforce feedback.
• HR Dashboards: Tools like Power BI or Zoho People enable HR teams to create customized dashboards that visualize key workforce metrics, such as employee turnover, skill gaps, and headcount. These dashboards can help you stay on top of workforce changes and make data-driven decisions on a continuous basis.

7. Leverage AI and Automation

Automation and artificial intelligence are transforming workforce planning by offering deeper insights and reducing manual effort. From recruitment automation to predictive analytics, AI-driven tools can help optimize talent management processes.

AI-Driven Tools:

• AI Recruitment Tools: Tools like HireVue and Pymetrics use AI to assess candidate interviews and predict future performance. These tools can help you identify the best-fit candidates for your organization based on both skills and cultural fit.
• AI-Enabled Talent Management: Platforms like Cornerstone OnDemand and Oracle HCM Cloud incorporate AI to help businesses manage employee development, succession planning, and workforce readiness. These tools use machine learning to predict workforce trends and make proactive recommendations for closing gaps.

Building an Agile Workforce Planning Model

Creating an effective workforce planning model requires a combination of strategic foresight, data-driven analysis, and the right tools to ensure you have the right people in place to meet business needs. By leveraging technologies like AI, predictive analytics, and workforce management platforms, you can continuously monitor, adjust, and optimize your workforce to meet both current and future demands.

By incorporating these tools and regular reviews into your workforce planning process, you’ll be well-positioned to maintain agility and build a resilient workforce that can adapt to whatever challenges the future holds.

Sources:

• Gartner: Workforce Planning Best Practices
• Harvard Business Review: Workforce Planning in the New Era
• SHRM: Building an Effective Workforce Plan