Demystifying Workforce Planning: The Orchestration of People, Place, and Timing

By Kevin Maze

As a business, how do you ensure you have the right workforce in place to execute your strategy? Do you have enough people? Do they have the right skills?? Are they in place at the right time?? Workforce planning addresses these questions.? As a former Workforce Planning Leader at Meta, I’m often asked “What is workforce planning?” and “What should go into a workforce plan?”

The most common response you’ll hear is something along the lines of “‘right people, right place, right time’ as a way to simply define workforce planning.? But is it really that simple?? Yes and no.

Join me in this two-part series where I’ll provide my perspective and seek feedback on what else should be considered in the complex but exciting world of workforce planning.

Part 1 will focus on some of the key inputs that should be considered as part of workforce planning.? Note that this will not go deep into workforce analytics.? I’ll save that for another day when I’ll draw upon much smarter and more experienced people in that space.? Part 2 will focus on techniques for identifying gaps in workforce plans and interventions to close the gaps.??

Part 1: The importance of the word “right.”?

Workforce planning is about people, place, and time, but the complexity comes with using the word “right.”? Having the right people in the right place at the right time is where workforce planning isn’t one plan at all - it is a culmination of many plans and other inputs orchestrated beautifully together.

The culmination of what plans?? What are some of the key plans and other inputs that go into a workforce plan???

Let’s start breaking this down.?

Our first key concept is that most workforce planning starts with finance.? Finance is typically responsible for both long- and short-range planning, including forecasted headcount growth (or reduction) targets.? For the sake of this discussion and the examples provided below, we’ll say that the financial headcount targets (budget) are equal to the number of heads the business wants to grow by.??

This brings us to our second key concept: workforce planning is supply and demand.

Supply and demand is well understood by organizations that provide products or services.? Supply is the amount of a specific good or service that's available in the market. Demand is the amount of goods or services customers want to buy.?

So why is this important in workforce planning?

Let’s think of the business itself (e.g., sales, engineering) as the customers.? Through this lens, demand from the business equates to the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to execute the business strategy.? Using an engineering example, a leader may indicate they need 100 Senior Machine Learning Engineers to execute their product roadmap in Q1 2024.? That’s great, right?? We just need recruiting to hire 100 Senior Machine Learning Engineers - done!? Not quite.??

To get the full demand story, other factors need to be considered, such as:

• Carryover: How many Senior Machine Learning Engineering headcount won’t be filled by the end of 2023?? We’ll use 10 for this example.
• Attrition: How many Senior Machine Learning Engineers will exit the company (or leave their position) and need to be backfilled?? Let’s assume 20 for this example.

Using a simple formula where carryover and attrition add to the demand, and internal promotion and mobility subtract from the demand, you get to a more accurate demand number.

Great!? So recruiting just needs to hire 130 Senior Machine Learning Engineers, right??

Again, not quite.?

While recruiting is a key area of the “supply-side” story to fill the business demand, there are others that must be considered, including:?

• Level progression/promotion: How many employees are expected to progress or be promoted into Senior Machine Learning Engineers?? We’ll assume 10 for this example.??
• Learning & career mobility: How many engineers will complete specialized Machine Learning education and move into these Senior roles (Side note: doing so will create a backfill of their current role, which will add role demand elsewhere!).? We’ll use 5 for this example.

If you subtract this supply from the accurate business demand number above, you get a more accurate recruiting number.

Okay, so we have our demand and supply channels somewhat figured out.? If this was Workforce Planning 101, Workforce Planning 102 is where things get more interesting.??

Going back to an earlier point, we described workforce planning as “a culmination of many plans and other inputs orchestrated beautifully together.”?

We already addressed a few plans and inputs, including financial budget and what comes through supply and demand channels.? What other plans and inputs may be considered, and what do we mean by “orchestrated”?

We can build on this further by adding two other key plans and inputs.??

• Location strategy & plan: This may include several key inputs, including locations required to execute the business strategy and total addressable market (TAM) data from recruiting.? After all, if recruiting needs to hire 115 Senior Machine Learning Engineers, the business needs to operate where that talent exists.? This is why having a defined flexible work strategy as part of the location strategy is important.? Remote and/or hybrid work situations may open different channels and markets for recruiting, increasing the amount of potential supply.?
• Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) strategy & plan: A good DEI strategy is about more than just traditional demographics. It should be a multi-faceted strategy based on what must be done internally and externally to be more diverse and inclusive in its workforce and what it delivers to customers.? For now, however, let’s have basic demographics (e.g., gender, ethnicity) be the key input in the workforce plan.??

Using these two additional key inputs, workforce planning gets more complicated and requires orchestration and trade-offs.? The best way to describe this is to use the hypothetical scenario below:?

An organization had a supply and demand problem.? Recruiting (supply) was unable to meet business demand for talent with the right skillset (Senior roles) in the locations (where the majority of people currently worked). In addition, the company was struggling to achieve its DEI strategic goals with its current location strategy.? To fill all the roles necessary for business execution and achieve its DEI goals, some trade-offs needed to be made.? Bringing together stakeholders from the business, finance, recruiting, facilities (location strategy), and HR, the trade-offs and orchestration commenced.

In no particular order:

? Recruiting indicated that they would be able to bring in additional supply if a) remote work was an option and b) if they could hire a higher percentage of university graduates vs. more senior/experienced talent.??

? Facilities weighed in that remote and flex work was part of their strategy which was already aligned with business leaders.?

? HR also weighed in to indicate that not only will remote workers and more university graduate hires help fill the demand, but it will also help achieve the DEI goals (data indicated that the percentage of underrepresented minorities in these groups was significantly higher than the experienced worker segments in the current company locations).??

While this all checked many boxes, it left gaps in fully meeting the business demand.?

The business had to make trade-offs by accepting a slightly different workforce (seniority and location) distribution to still achieve the growth targets and meet other strategic priorities related to location strategy, flex work, and DEI.??

Though these tradeoffs meant having some less experienced talent and more work for an already strained manager population, the business leaders agreed it was the right approach.?

This agreement allowed the workforce plan to be finalized, providing:

• A before and after view of the organization after executing the growth and hiring plans including headcount by talent profile, level, and location, key DEI demographic projections, average spans, and layers (I told you I won’t go deep into the analytics but there is an incredible amount of data and analytics that goes into these plans)
• Recruiting with the number of roles they needed to fill, by talent profile, level, and location
• Finance with a budget they could continue to monitor, manage, and govern
• Facilities with an agreed-upon headcount plan by location
• HR with actions for how to close experience/skill gaps associated with the workforce distribution and address additional strain on managers (not to mention a laundry list of to-dos associated with things like location strategy changes)

And there you have it.? While oversimplified in some places, this hopefully demystifies and provides real-life examples of what goes into developing a workforce plan.??

What did I miss?? What is your company doing to develop the workforce plan??

Stay tuned for Part 2, which will delve more into the last bullet point above.??? How HR (and other stakeholders) can measure and address workforce planning gaps!

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