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Taking the time to plan and make decisions as part of a broader strategy improves every aspect of your business, including your workforce. Despite the size or type of company, workforce planning is a valuable HR process that ensures you have the staff to execute your business strategy.

Learn what workforce planning is, how it helps with goals and produces positive outcomes, the benefits it can offer, five key steps in workforce planning, and what it looks like in practice.

  • What is workforce planning?
  • Primary workforce planning criteria
  • The goal of workforce planning
  • How workforce planning affects HR processes
  • The benefits of workforce planning
  • The five core workforce planning steps

What is Workforce Planning?

Workforce Planning is the process of analyzing existing employees and planning for future staffing requirements through talent gap assessment, developing employee management procedures, and setting recruitment strategies.

With effective workforce planning, your business is always staffed with the necessary talent, knowledge, and experience to produce positive business results.

Workforce Planning requires developing an appropriate and cost-effective strategy for retaining, recruiting, and training your workforce while also continually assessing employee performance.

A survey by the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) shows 89% of 236 organizations integrated workforce planning into their business operations.

The plan for your workforce, what it will look like moving forward, and how to strategize for specific goals are unique to your business and depend on many factors. Typical components that affect workforce planning include:

  • Talent availability
  • Business growth
  • Age of the existing workforce
  • Current knowledge/skill gaps
  • And much more

Strategic Workforce Planning

Strategic Workforce Planning is a proactive approach to managing staffing needs and aligns HR processes to business-wide goals. It guides future employee plans and decisions, ensuring they adhere to the company’s long-term vision.

Strategic workforce planning tends to take place at the senior leadership level and focuses on big picture goals such as:

  • Structural organization
  • Employee redeployment
  • Succession planning
  • Staffing budgets
  • Maintaining capacity
  • Reducing risk

Operational Workforce Planning

In contrast to strategic workforce planning, operational workforce planning focuses on the business’s immediate priorities. For example, which staff level can efficiently meet the current deadlines and objectives?

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Primary Workforce Planning Criteria

Criteria to consider when planning for your company’s future workforce include:

  • Employee numbers : getting the correct workforce size so the business is not overstaffed and inefficient but not too small to hinder growth and fail to match demand.
  • Skillset : having the right mix of skills, capabilities, knowledge, and experience to perform effectively and achieve your goals.
  • Budget : finding the optimal staffing expenditure to achieve a high return on investment from employees and maximize profits.
  • Flexibility : developing your workforce to be agile and adapt quickly when changes in the market occur.

The Goal of Workforce Planning

The primary goal of workforce planning is to create a strategy for your staffing needs that ensures you can meet strategic objectives both now and in the future.

To achieve this goal, workforce planning requires an in-depth understanding of your existing workforce, employee skills, experience, load capability, and potential talent gaps.

Through performance tracking and employee assessment, you can take a birds-eye view of your entire workforce and create actionable plans for the future.

Workforce planning allows companies to understand and design their workforce effectively and efficiently with long-term objectives in mind. It prevents problems from developing and allows management to spot issues early, creating plans to remedy them. Examples could include:

  • Identifying understaffed departments and potential bottlenecks
  • Staffing requirement to scale operations
  • Excess employees for redeployment or termination

How Workforce Planning affects HR Processes

Recruitment and employee development.

Workforce planning provides the game plan for your company’s recruitment and employee development .

With a clear understanding of your existing workforce and your future goals, you can profile the skills, experience, and knowledge required to meet your needs and develop hiring and training processes to match.

Companies are constantly competing for the same high-end talent. With appropriate workforce planning in place, you can better identify future top employees for your business and develop talent acquisition strategies to attract them to your company.

Plus, workforce planning analysis can help companies formulate proper training and employee development to fill talent gaps while also finding individuals capable of excelling with the correct professional development in place.

This leads us to succession planning and ensuring you maintain successful leadership across your company.

By recognizing the leadership positions currently open or soon to be available, companies can begin assessing existing employees for promotion or targeting outside hires with the right mix of skill and experience.

Workforce planning together with succession planning creates a smooth transition for the critical roles in your company so you can provide an uninterrupted, seamless service or product for your customers.

Performance management

A significant outcome of workforce planning is managing the performance of your employees to increase productivity and efficiency.

With workforce planning, you can understand and develop strategies that get the most out of your employees to increase output and get a higher return on investment from your staffing expenditure.

The Benefits of Workforce Planning

1. preparing for the future.

With workforce planning, you have a roadmap for your staffing requirements to prepare for the future.

This could mean increasing the number of employees to match growth forecasts or pivoting to a different business model and finding the staff you need to accomplish this.

2. Discovering workforce gaps

Understanding the gaps of your current workforce informs your future personnel strategy in terms of recruitment, redeployment, and training.

Read: Skills gap and skills gap analysis

3. Effective succession planning

By identifying and developing employees with the potential for future leadership roles, you can effectively plan for staff leaving with minimal disruption.

Succession planning can also have a positive effect on employee engagement. Surveys show that:

  • 62% of employees would be “significantly more engaged” if they had a succession plan at their company.
  • 94% of employers said having succession plans in place positively impacted employee engagement .

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4. Improved Retention strategies

Effective workforce planning gives you a clear understanding of employee skills and where they can be the most successful in the business.

So rather than terminating employees, you can retain valuable staff through well-planned redeployment.

5. Flexibility

A clear workforce plan with recruitment and training structures in place can make your business more agile, with the ability to efficiently anticipate and react to change.

You can reduce your overall staffing costs by developing plans to:

  • Increase your productivity and workforce ROI
  • Retain talent and reduce costs associated with employee turnover
  • Develop a flexible workforce that can meet customer demand in different circumstances

Labor costs can account for up 70% of total business costs . Workforce planning allows you to map talent to value and ensure you are getting the best results for the costs .

The 5 Core Workforce Planning Steps

Successfully implementing new workforce planning strategies is an extensive procedure. However, businesses can break down workforce planning into five core steps to simplify the process.

1. Deciding strategic direction and goals

Workforce planning is a top-down process requiring clear organizational direction and defined strategic goals to inform and guide future decisions.

  • What direction do you see your business going in?
  • What are you hoping to achieve through workforce planning?
  • What are the primary goals/milestones you are targeting?
  • Why does your business need new workforce planning structures?

These are vital questions to ask yourself before analyzing your workforce and implementing new employee management strategies.

It is also important to remember that every process in your business affects another. Therefore, your workforce planning must be an organization-wide endeavor and include effective communication between HR and other departments.

Your new workforce plan must be produced with a collaborative approach that generates a consensus amongst all invested parties. Without organizational buy-in and a rationale for new strategies, you cannot reap the benefits of workforce planning.

Consider this step setting the “soft” workforce planning framework that will define the overall strategy to assess future information rather than the plan’s specific details.

2. Analyze existing workforce

The next step is to properly assess your existing workforce.

Common strategies used in this step include:

  • Demand Planning – Determining the number of employees needed for each role required to reach your goal. Demand planning requires accurate business forecasts to determine your workforce’s future number, structure, and composition.
  • Internal Supply – Internal supply planning needs accurate talent evaluations, an understanding of the expected employee turnover rate (retirements, resignations, etc.), and the design of training and professional development programs.
  • Gap Analysis – Identifying the gaps in your workforce and making plans to close them through recruitment, redeployment, and training.

These strategies help to answer the following questions:

  • Do you have the right-sized workforce?
  • What skills, knowledge, and experience do your current employees have?
  • Do your employees need additional training?
  • What new resources can improve workforce performance?
  • Is your workforce correctly structured? (This includes organizational design, departments, communication channels, etc.)
  • What is your current employee turnover rate?

What you have now is the starting point for future workforce plans. You can begin developing workforce planning strategies when you know what you have (step 2) and where you want to be (step 1).

A common pitfall of workforce planning is ensuring it is based on high-quality information from within the organization and external sources. Workforce planning defined by inaccurate forecasts and undeliverable future goals cannot be successful.

3. Develop your plan

This is where companies must take their overall goal, input the assessment of their existing workforce and produce a concrete plan for the future.

Businesses must plan their workforce to reflect the value and revenue it produces. A simple example of workforce planning in action could be:

A company is manufacturing two models of cars. Model A is the business’ flagship car, selling the most and bringing in the most revenue. However, model B is showing significant growth, and the income from model A is beginning to stagnate.

The car company can produce a simple revenue table based on 2023 figures and 2024’s forecasts.

The revenue per employee for model A is $250,000, and the revenue per employee for model B is $300,000.

Based on growth forecasts, you can estimate that staff working on model B will need to increase by 57 to match increased demand. This process assumes the forecasts are accurate and there are no sudden changes in sales or production. At the same time, model A will likely begin to have a surplus of staff in 2024 and need a reduction of 8 employees.

With workforce planning structures in place, you can develop plans to retrain and redeploy staff from Model A to Model B during 2023. This kind of planning minimizes disruption and reduces employee turnover.

Of course, this is just a plan based on forecasts and does not mean you should immediately move eight employees from model A to model B and hire 49 more. Instead, the business should put redeployment, hiring, and training plans in place to execute when key revenue indicators are met and take a gradual approach that matches the shift in focus of their business.

4. Implement workforce planning

Successfully implementing workforce planning requires:

  • HR personnel to clearly understand their new roles and responsibilities.
  • Strategies and processes for recording all relevant data and information.
  • Effective communication channels between all invested parties to support the plan.
  • Defined measurement and evaluation criteria to assess the plan’s success.

While the future HR plans for managing your workforce are specific to your business, they will involve some or all of the following:

  • Recruitment
  • Redeployment
  • Outsourcing
  • Deploying new technology

With many new processes to implement, workforce planning does not transform your company overnight. Instead, it is a gradual endeavor that optimizes each procedure for the given circumstances to get your business closer to your long-term goals.

5. Monitor results

It is crucial to remember workforce planning is an iterative process whereby progress is monitored and measured against specific milestones and long-term goals.

Post-implementation, your workforce planning processes may need adjusting due to unexpected factors within your business or to meet new realities of your industry.

Start from Skills Gap Analysis

Download the Skills Gap Analysis Guide, map your employees’ skills and determine the current capabilities of your workforce, identify their future needs, and develop a strategy

how to do strategic workforce planning

Ivan Andreev

Demand Generation & Capture Strategist

Ivan is a dedicated and versatile professional with over 12 years of experience in online marketing and a proven track record of turning challenges into opportunities. Ivan works diligently to improve internal processes and explore new possibilities for the company.

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Blog · Leadership

October 8, 2020

10 Steps for Effective Strategic Workforce Planning

Strategic workforce planning can help sustain organizational growth in challenging times. We've put together 10 steps to help you kick off the process.

Sophie Smith-Watkins

by Sophie Smith-Watkins

10 Steps for Effective Strategic Workforce Planning

Sustaining organizational growth in challenging times

Business leaders are currently facing some serious challenges in regard to their future talent acquisition and human capital strategy . The unprecedented impact of the pandemic and ensuing recession means that a fundamental rethink of business strategy is needed. The way people work, where they work and who they work for is rapidly changing, and business leaders need to plan ahead in order to maintain growth. Strategic workforce planning could be the answer to sustaining organizational growth in difficult times.

63% of CEOs are concerned about availability of key skills

One of the biggest concerns for leaders at the moment is the shortage of skilled talent and the ageing workforce. CEOs are increasingly worried about finding talent with the right skills. 79% of CEOs perceive retaining existing talent as the top management challenge, while another 67% cited attracting qualified talent as the top concern.

Many leaders are well aware of the exceptional challenges that lie ahead, but many seem less certain about how they are going to tackle them. Read on to find out how to implement an effective workforce planning strategy in 10 steps.

strategic workforce planning CEO quotation

What is strategic workforce planning?

Strategic workforce planning is the systematic identification and analysis of an organization's future talent needs associated with its long-term goals and objectives , establishing a clear strategy that ensures that it will achieve these goals.

Workforce planning aims to align an organization's people strategy with its evolving needs . It is a continual process due to the constantly evolving nature of organizational change.

It is essential that HR leaders develop a strategic workforce plan that will help their organization to meet its strategic goals by identifying critical talent needs, assessing potential talent risks and developing strategies to mitigate those risks.

What is the goal of workforce planning?

The main goal of workforce planning is having the right talent in the right roles at the right time . The organization will never be over or understaffed, and will be ready to react quickly to changes in the business landscape.

Effective strategic planning will shape the future of HR, enabling People teams to demonstrate their capabilities and influence in managing people processes and in driving overall business success.

The 4 key elements of workforce planning

All workforce strategic planning processes should consider the following essential components:

  • Key business priorities must be translated into talent strategy
  • HR initiatives must be prioritized based on both current capabilities and projected needs
  • Strategic plans must be communicated to key business stakeholders to get leadership buy-in and investment
  • Plans must be able to evolve to reflect ongoing changes in business conditions

key elements of strategic workforce planning

Common barriers to strategic workforce planning

According to a recent study , only 8% of senior HR leaders believe they are getting a suitable return on investment from strategic workforce planning and talent management. So before you kick off your planning efforts, it is useful to be aware of some of the obstacles that organizations face when they are focusing on workforce planning.

common barriers to strategic workforce planning

Common barriers that organizations face during workforce planning:

  • Lack of the necessary tools and resources
  • Failure to align planning with wider businesses goals
  • Little to no support from leadership
  • Lack of collaboration during the planning process
  • Talent and skill gaps not identified correctly
  • No reliance on employee data

Although there are some barriers, being aware of the challenges going forward will help you to implement a roadblock free planning process.

Benefits of strategic workforce planning

Effective strategic workforce planning improves HR’s strategic contribution to the organization by 13% and, in turn, drives talent outcomes and revenue.

Investing time and resources in your workforce planning process will set up your organization for success. If you are still on the fence, the following benefits will convince you that it is worth your time.

key benefits of strategic workforce planning

Benefits of strategic workforce planning:

  • Reduce labor costs
  • Identify future customer needs
  • Devise appropriate strategies for people development
  • Identify and improve target areas
  • Improve employee retention
  • Boost productivity
  • Improve work-life balance
  • Improve KPIs

Where to begin with your workforce planning strategy

There is no set way to implement a strategic workforce plan. Whilst that might seem contradictory given the title of this article, it actually reflects the unique nature and culture of every organization. The important thing is that each plan must be designed with your organization's specific workforce in mind in order to identify gaps and anticipate future needs. Strategic workforce planning is no mean feat, but when executed correctly it will have a positive impact on your businesses bottom-line.

10 steps for effective strategic workforce planning

10 steps for effective strategic workforce planning

1. Keep in mind the organization's long term objectives

Strategic workforce planning is about making sure people within your organization are able to deliver the wider business goals. It would therefore be logical to start with those key business goals. Think about where the company is headed in the short and long term, what does it want to achieve, and what human capital can do to help it achieve it. By aligning talent management strategy with the organization's business strategy, you will start to see real benefits to the organization as a whole.

2. Engage key stakeholders from the outset

It is really important to get leadership and key stakeholders on board before you begin with strategic workforce planning if you want to see real results. You will need to buy-in not only from the HR department, but also from finance, operations and the C-suite.

3. Create a dedicated team

High-performing organizations might already have a dedicated workforce planning team in place, but if your business cannot accommodate this there are ways around it. Establish a project team, where members are able to continue in their normal role and can also join the new workforce planning team. Build your team wisely, with input from senior leadership, finance and HR stakeholders. Establish clear communication channels and segment specific roles within the team.

4. Analyze the current workforce

In this stage of workforce planning, your organization needs to evaluate its gaps and work out what actions it can take to close them. It is essential to carry out some analysis of the current state of the workforce.

What does your workforce look like at the moment? What skills shortage is already apparent? What could be improved on to increase efficiency and enhance employee employee experience?

Reviewing your current talent situation and recognizing the gaps is the first step to better understanding the changes that need to be made to drive improvement. Once the gaps have been identified, create appropriate action plans.

5. Use people analytics

People analytics are a very useful way to get insights about the workforce. What are the current capabilities, skills and size? Collect data on workforce demographics and leverage this information to make smarter , data-driven decisions regarding your workforce.

6. Collaborate

One of the biggest barriers that organizations face during workforce planning is the failure to communicate across the company and gather internal feedback before decision making. It is essential to collaborate with department leaders and managers, as they work closely with employees and will therefore have a better understanding of areas that need improvement.

7. Use innovative technology

An effective planning process requires continual interaction, something that can be improved by using a strategic workforce planning tool. Cloud-based, data driven workforce planning tools encourage collaboration and flexibility, and turn planning into a more agile, collaborative and data-driven process. Using planning technology will allow you to free up budget, model different scenarios, create better alignment between finance and HR and better track workforce plans.

8. Outsource an expert

The complexity of creating an effective workforce planning strategy must not be understated. Don't be afraid to seek external help. Experts are able to provide your organization with invaluable help and support to make the process more effective. Bringing in some external help will save your organization both time and resources, and will represent a significant return on investment.

9. Anticipate the future

To be ready for the future, you need to have some idea of what is on the horizon. Whilst no one can predict the future, what you can do is create potential future scenarios and plan accordingly. These can be used to create action plans in advance. Then when something unexpected happens, there will already be some contingency measures in place.

10. Evaluate, revise and modify

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, workforce planning needs to be adapted in line with the evolving needs of an organization. It is important to continuously track the progress of your workforce planning strategy in order to identify its strengths and weaknesses, and modify it accordingly. The process needs to incorporate a regular review process in order to gather feedback needed to evaluate the process. The current business environment is constantly changing and evolving, and your workforce planning should too.

Whilst there is no one size fits all solution for today's talent management issues, strategic workforce planning is an excellent place to start. If your organization hires hundreds of roles a year, it is particularly important to think strategically about how your future workforce can achieve maximum productivity at any given moment.

A clear plan will help to reduce employee turnover, prepare for demographic change and create a long-term talent management strategy that will undoubtably improve your bottom-line.

Check out our top tips for effective workforce planning here .

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Further Reading

Related articles from our blog, read on

10 Steps for Effective Strategic Workforce Planning

Strategic workforce planning is a complex process, but when executed effectively it can help sustain organizational growth in challenging times. We've put together 10 easy to follow steps to help you kickstart the process.

Sophie Smith-Watkins

SMART Goals for Managers and Leaders

SMART Goals for Managers and Leaders

Setting SMART goals for managers and for your team is an easy exercise to promote strategic alignment and motivation.

Kylie Strickland

Kylie Strickland

Boost Employee Motivation: Five Activities To Focus On

Boost Employee Motivation: Five Activities To Focus On

Engaged employees are more aligned with strategic objectives. We have put together five engagement activities to help increase employee motivation.

Nikolaos Lygkonis

Nikolaos Lygkonis

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What Is Workforce Planning?

how to do strategic workforce planning

Workforce planning is critical for the health and growth of any organization. As an HR professional, you know how much of an undertaking it is to hire the right people with the right skill set at the right time. Then add on the responsibilities of budgeting for new hires and internal promotions, keeping current employees engaged and retention rates high, all while growing a business — it's overwhelming. 

To help you keep calm and workforce plan on, we created a brief guide that covers the basics of workforce planning. Feel free to click on the links below to jump ahead.

Use our template to seamlessly calculate your own employee retention rate.

Table of Contents

What is Workforce Planning?

Benefits of strategic workforce planning, stages of strategic workforce planning.

workforce-planning

Workforce planning is the process of auditing, predicting and managing the employment needs of your company in relation to its greater strategic business goals.

Think about it this way, your product team is constantly evaluating the product —  what customers like and want more of — while at the same time predicting what’s going to be the next big thing. Similarly, your company needs to continuously evaluate its people — what they like and don’t like in their roles — as well as how the company is projected to grow and who will need to be hired, promoted or reorganized to meet those needs.

When it comes down to it, the goal of workforce planning is to help your workforce meet  the following criteria as closely as possible:

workforce-planning-analytics-in-hr

Workforce planning is a massive undertaking, especially the first time you do it. It can be difficult to know where and how to start as well as what resources are required to build a strategic workforce plan. Before we delve into the details, check out a few benefits of creating a workforce plan that make the effort worthwhile.

Help teams justify additional hires

Save time and money by anticipating growth and change 

Prepare for organizational changes proactively

Support finance team in budgeting for future workforce needs

Collaborate with the strategic business planning process

Recognize gaps in the workforce that need filling

Identify critical roles and teams to expand for growth

Balance business goals alongside hiring

Prioritize employee retention and engagement to reduce hiring needs

workforce-planning

Analyze Strategic Direction

In order to plan for future workforce needs, you first need to analyze the current state of your workforce. Start by answering these questions:

What departments are running lean and could use additional support?

What is the manager-to-direct report ratio?

What individual contributors are ready for a promotion?

Do current employees need additional training to advance their careers at the company?

Is there a skills gap among current employees that needs to be filled by an external hire?

How long do employees typically stay at your company?

Why do employees leave your company?

To answer the majority of these questions, you need to take a deep dive into your overall employee lifecycle , which  will also help you better understand why people apply for roles at your company and why they leave.

Additionally, look carefully at your recruitment metrics so you can better optimize your strategy. 

Forecast Workforce Supply & Demand

Now that you've analyzed the current state of your workforce, look more closely at the employees you currently have, otherwise referred to as your workforce supply, and predict how their roles will change over time. These factors play a significant role in how, who and when you should hire candidates. Key areas to consider are: 

Employee retention: Determine roles that can be filled by internal candidates through promotion or professional development 

Turnover: Anticipate turnover by knowing individual employee goals and career paths.

Departmental attrition: Are certain departments or roles becoming obsolete or less valuable to the company, and if so, will you need to downsize or reorganize.

Physical office space: Is there enough physical office space and equipment to sufficiently support more employees?

Recruiting resources: Identify which roles need to be filled by external candidates what resources your team will need to recruit them — professional recruiters, money for job boards and advertisements, etc.

Communications resources: Recruiting and building an employer brand consumes a significant amount of time and resources. Check to see if anyone on your marketing team has the bandwidth to help out.

Once you’ve estimated your current workforce supply, you’ll want to consider the demand of each area. Understanding the difference between supply and demand in your workforce will help you identify gaps between what resources are readily available and what resources your organization needs to grow on track. In terms of workforce demand, you’ll want to look at:

Employment market: Take a look at the recruitment market to see which roles are in high demand and will be difficult to hire. 

Upcoming funding: What roles are critical right now and which ones can wait until you raise more capital?

Skills training: Will you need to train new or current employees skills to ensure they will keep up with change, or will you need to hire already skilled candidates for the roles.

Keep in mind the supply and demand of workforce planning will change over time so it's important to include your team in the workforce supply planning process because the decisions made will ultimately affect their jobs and careers.

Create a Workforce Planning Budget

At this stage, you should have a fairly detailed blueprint of who you have employed today, who you will need in the future and any gaps between the two. Now, you need to start prioritizing your roles by the most difficult to fill, highest priority and cost-per-hire.

How you prioritize roles will also depend on your external hiring and internal retention budgets. To hire talented candidates — and pay them what they’re worth — you need to determine a budget through workforce planning.

Figure out how long it takes to hire someone and how much it will cost by comparing your external hiring budget to your current recruitment metrics. By looking at the metrics, you should also be able to pinpoint areas of the recruitment strategy that need improvement.

Set a Hiring Timeframe 

workforce-planning

From here, build out a timeline that prioritizes certain roles and takes into account how long it will take to hire each role. This timeline can span between one year to 10 years depending on your strategy. Regardless of how far out your strategy spans, include intermittent short term goals throughout the plan to ensure you're always pacing on track.

Also, keep in mind this plan is not set in stone, it will fluctuate over time and require adjustments along the way.

Reevaluate Workforce Plan

Once you’ve created a workforce plan, you’re not done. In fact, you will constantly be monitoring the workforce needs of your company as business goals change and your internal workforce evolves. It's important to frequently get feedback and buy-in from employees, especially as the company grows.

If you create a culture that is open to having tough conversations with employees about their roles, performance and future career, you will be significantly better equipped to anticipate and adjust your workforce plan as changes occur. Employees will also be more keen to stay at your company and refer cohorts to open roles, thus further simplifying your recruiting and retention process. Even as the plan you create changes over time, it will always be a guideline for your teams to assess the effectiveness of their strategies and keep them on track over the course of several years.

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Strategic Workforce Planning

Translate business strategy into workforce strategy, strategic workforce planning insights.

Today’s environment of rapid change and uncertainty increases pressure on HR to ensure the organisation has the required talent to support changing business priorities. Strategic workforce planning sets HR up to identify talent needs associated with the organisation’s future goals and establish a strategy to ensure the organisation has the right mix of talent, technologies and employment models to reach these goals.

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Strategic workforce planning begins with business strategy

The first step in building an effective workforce plan is understanding the organisation's business strategy and goals. HR leaders should partner with business leaders to understand strategic objectives and build a business case for the investment in a strategic workforce plan. Tip: Business leaders are under tremendous pressure to hit short-term targets and focus on immediate staffing needs. HR leaders should leverage data to illustrate how strategic workforce planning can mitigate those pressures and set leaders up for future success.

67% of users surveyed rate their organisation's HR function as not effective at using data in workforce planning, while 33% rate their organisation's HR function as effective.

Insights You Can Use

Gartner offers insights, advice and tools, like Gartner TalentNeuron, that help HR practice effective workforce planning, thinking ahead to address tomorrow's talent and business needs today.

how to do strategic workforce planning

Sources of Workforce Planning Intelligence

To develop a successful workforce planning strategy, organisations must gather intelligence to understand business strategy, identify talent risks associated with successfully executing that strategy and develop a plan to address those risks. In this Gartner research, we detail 13 internal and external labour market sources HR can leverage during the workforce planning process.

how to do strategic workforce planning

Build a Business Case for Workforce Planning

Based on extensive research on strategic workforce planning, this Gartner presentation template is designed to help HR leaders build a business case for workforce planning. The template includes guidance on building a proposal, explaining the importance of workforce planning and how to address potential challenges.

how to do strategic workforce planning

How to Leverage Data for More Influential Workforce Planning

Effectively use data in workforce planning to ensure business leaders consider talent implications when making strategic business decisions. Data will help identify future needs and communicate the top talent risks to executing business objectives.

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How Gartner Helps CHROs with Strategic Workforce Planning

how to do strategic workforce planning

Reengineer Workforce Planning for Transformation and Cost Savings

Business disruption increased 260% in the past five years, and COVID-19 further turbocharged this disruption. This webinar addresses the necessity to know where you need to reassign roles by skill and build internal skill sets for future workforce needs.

View Webinar

how to do strategic workforce planning

The Unbounded Workforce: Decode the Future of Business

This complimentary webinar spotlights how trends like remote work, increased reliance on a contingent workforce, and the decoupling of critical skills and critical roles bring new challenges and opportunities to the forefront for human resource leaders.

how to do strategic workforce planning

3 Workforce Planning Imperatives That Drive Business Outcomes

Understand the top challenges HR leaders face while workforce planning at their organisations, the implications of those challenges and how insight into the external talent market allows the HR team to best address each challenge.

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Strategic Workforce Planning Case Studies

How does gartner support your future workforce strategy.

Ram Vadivelu, Senior Director, Talent and Workforce Analysis, Qualcomm, shares how Gartner TalentNeuron helped his team accurately identify emerging skills to solidify their talent strategy and how they rely on TalentNeuron's robust analytics and tools to support strategic planning and drive decisions.

Gartner TalentNeuron helps with both strategic and operational workforce planning. TalentNeuron figured out a way to synthesize over 60,000 data points that you can pull, leverage and then present to your senior leadership.

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Workforce planning questions Gartner can help answer

What is workforce planning.

In strategic workforce planning, HR evaluates workforce supply and demand, assesses skill gaps and determines what talent management initiatives are required for the workforce to drive business objectives now and into the future. 

To successfully implement a future-proof workforce planning model, HR leaders need to gather the right information to inform them of the existing skills gaps in the organisation and identify pathways to filling those gaps as the business grows and develops. 

The workforce planning model is the road map of where HR’s hiring practices are currently and where they need to be to develop and acquire the strategic skills needed for the future.

Why do you need strategic workforce planning?

Organisations rely on workforce planning to map existing and future talent needs. Without strategically analysing the skills gaps within the business, and projecting what skills will be required as the business evolves, the organisation will lack the critical talent and knowledge needed to deliver on strategic goals.

What is the role of HR in workforce planning?

HR needs to drive the future-proofing of the workforce. If HR fails to fill skills gaps strategically, the workforce will continue to lack the necessary talent to develop and deliver on business strategy. 

Additionally, HR needs to educate and influence business leaders on the importance of upskilling employees and developing leaders to thrive in the digital workplace.

What are the key focusses of a workforce plan?

Keys to executing a successful workforce plan include:

  • Develop productive partnerships with business leaders and educate yourself about the future of the business. 
  • Integrate workforce planning into business planning so it is not a stand-alone process and cannot be easily dismissed by business leaders.
  • How key roles are evolving in the industry
  • How talent is flowing in and out of key competitors
  • How specific trends are affected by location 
  • How available diverse talent is in the labour market
  • Build HR’s ability to use and interpret talent data: Leveraging data is not only important for identifying talent; it can help determine the best strategy to close talent gaps. Data can drive your decision to build, buy, retain, outsource or automate. To improve HR’s ability to understand future organisational talent needs and the external labor environment, data skills are vital. 

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The Complete Guide to Strategic Workforce Planning

  • Nadia Ponomareva Head of Recruitment
  • April 12, 2022

Key Takeaways

1.  Strategic workforce planning is a tool for business and HR leaders to scope and plan for the capabilities which their companies are likely to need in order to meet future business goals.

2. A strategic workforce plan aims to shape staffing in line with future business needs and challenges. Robust planning should enable companies to operate more effectively and meet key goals in a future environment with evolving demographics, economic trends and commercial opportunities.

3.  The continued normalization of remote working, use of a  contingent workforce , and integration of collaborative online working platforms, could all have significant potential impact for future workforce shape, size and skill requirements.

4.  Strategic workforce planning can help companies to operate more smoothly, with more predictable staffing costs and greater productivity and profit. Without a strategic workforce plan, fluctuating staff costs, unforeseen trends, and gaps or performance failures affecting critical business, could all waste time, energy and money.

Introduction 

2022 may be a good year to look towards the future and make decisions on the long-term direction of your company and the workforce needed to power your business ambitions.  International HR  leads in particular should be reviewing and revising the longterm strategic workforce plans for their companies in the light of the COVID pandemic and related shifts in labor markets and working patterns.

In larger and/or multinational companies, it’s important that changes to staffing are made intelligently and in a coordinated way which supports business objectives and minimizes business disruption. Strategic workforce planning is often the answer to this need.

Definition of strategic workforce planning 

Strategic workforce planning is the art of creating a workforce which can operate effectively in the future environment in order to meet your company’s goals. It sets out the numbers, skills and nature of workers likely to be required by the company, while considering relevant trends, challenges and opportunities at play in the external environment. 

A strategic workforce plan should be developed and updated in alignment with core business planning. Business leaders should consider their strategic workforce plans regularly as one of the fundamental delivery mechanisms for their company’s vision and objectives.

What is the purpose of strategic workforce planning? 

The ultimate goal of strategic workforce planning is to make sure that you have the right staff in the right positions at the right time to realize your company’s strategic vision and meet the objectives in your long-term business plan.

It should act as a guide and reference point for managers, HR leads and anyone making decisions around recruitment, training, promotion or other staffing issues. Business leaders should refer to the strategic workforce plan when monitoring business performance data and looking for ways to improve productivity, engagement and cost effectiveness.

In terms of scope, the strategic workforce plan should include information around:

  • Businesses must plan to have neither too many staff nor too few, balancing recruitment levels against retirement, redundancy and other exits.
  • Staff must be deployed in the right regions, countries or cities to fit business needs.
  • Recruitment and internal appointment systems must be managed to ensure that critical business areas do not carry long staffing gaps. Succession planning is required for senior roles.
  • A strategic workforce plan should include a budget and demonstrate the financial value added to the company by the shape and size of any proposed future workforce.
  • Worker type
  • The nature of the proposed workforce should reflect business needs for permanent, temporary, casual, part-time, contractor, or any other types of staffing. Where the work is to be remote, the strategic workforce plan should cohere with a  remote work policy . 
  • Skills, knowledge and competences
  • The workforce must maintain the key skills, knowledge and competences required for business (e.g. languages, project management, economics).

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Benefits of strategic workforce planning.

With a strategic workforce plan in place, your HR leads should have a superior vantage point to inform staffing policies and decisions. This can help to get the right staff in the right positions at the right time, with advantages including:

  • Better business performance
  • A well-designed and competently-delivered strategic workforce plan is a powerful tool for realizing a company’s core business goals. If you get it right, your plan could open a door to greater productivity, access to new markets and support your broader  international expansion strategy.  
  • More predictable staff costs
  • Better strategic workforce planning should mean less budget surprises around staff payroll and wider costs. Finance leads should be better placed to estimate future workforce costs. 
  • Efficient use of line-manager and HR time
  • With an effective plan guiding recruitment, staff development, monitoring of levels of skills, competences and learning etc.. there should be less time and energy spent by managers and HR leads on planning and support around individual roles. 

What does a Strategic Workforce Plan look like? 

Strategic workforce plans will look different from one business to another, depending on sector, size and company goals. At the same time, a  strong strategic workforce plan  is likely to have certain key features, or background research and evidence components:

1. Mission and vision

The strategic workforce plan should have clear scope, timescale and links to the company’s top-level  vision, aims and business plans .

2. Current workforce snapshot

HR leaders should conduct or commission a full review of the shape, size and fitness of the current workforce. This would typically include information on demographics, locations, contract types, costs, skills, competences etc..

3. Business intelligence and foresight reports

For a robust long-term view, a strategic workforce plan requires an assessment of current business intelligence in relevant sectors, as well as an investigation of trends, opportunities and challenges likely to matter for the company along the time horizon of their business and workforce planning.

4. Staff engagement and public opinion data

Information around internal staff engagement and public perceptions of a company can help establish how they are seen as an employer and give insights into potential issues around staff retention or recruitment. 

5. Future workforce snapshot

Drawing on key inputs, HR leads or external experts will need to set out the shape of the future workforce that would be needed to deliver business goals, considering the wider environment, affordability and feasibility of recruitment. This should include estimated staffing costs and long-term liabilities.

NB Depending on the importance and predictability of wider trends beyond company control, planning for 2-3 different future workforce scenarios can make a plan more robust. 

6. Transformation roadmap

A strategic workforce plan needs a roadmap and/or action plan showing how the current workforce can be transformed into the future workforce. HR leads should be ready and able to monitor the transformation and report progress to business leaders. Recruitment, promotion and redundancy needs should be made clear and communicated appropriately to existing staff to maintain engagement.

How to introduce strategic workforce planning 

1. senior ownership.

Introducing strategic workforce planning requires board-level leadership, explicit buy-in and active support alongside the work of the HR leaders and managers who will usually carry out or oversee the necessary scoping, reviewing and drafting.

2. Staff involvement

If this kind of thinking is new to your company, or your strategic workforce plan has not been refreshed in some time, you should pay particular attention to how you communicate this work stream to your current staff. Be clear on what the plans will cover and how they will be used.

Some staff may fear that strategic workforce planning will precede a forced redundancy program or pay cuts, while others will feel more positive, potentially being interested in opportunities for promotions, acquiring new skills or transferring location.

3. Expert advice and support

This is an area where it can be helpful to involve external experts. From horizon scanning the economic and social trends which could affect future recruitment and retention, through identifying new markets and opportunities for  overseas expansion , to on-the-ground delivery of your strategic workforce plan in a key country, sometimes there is no substitute for local expertise and insight.

Foresight advisors, business intelligence consultants and Global Employment Organizations (GEOs) may all have a role to play.  

How Horizons supports strategic workforce planning

For international companies, external expert advice around strategic workforce planning can save time, identify gaps and opportunities, and add wider value, especially around international HR. Horizons has extensive experience in providing employment solutions to support strategic workforce planning around the world.

  Call us today  to discuss your company’s strategic needs. 

Frequently asked questions

Workforce planning is a proactive business approach to staffing where recruitment, staff development, redundancy, retirement etc.. are considered together as part of an overall strategy. Without any workforce planning, they might be dealt with individually for each job or team or handled as separate workstreams in HR. This would make it harder to evaluate the current workforce or create a workforce which meets future business needs.

A strategic workforce plan should be developed by HR and business leaders and guided by core business objectives. It should incorporate external trends, insights and expert advice as relevant for the sector and operations.

The exact shape of the plan will depend on the individual company but in general, it would need to include the broad vision and goals of the future workforce, an assessment of the current workforce, and a roadmap for transforming one into the other.

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What Is Strategic Workforce Planning? 5 Steps for Successful Planning

  • June 3, 2022

It’s a fact that all jobs are not equally essential to the survival of a business. For example, research by Bain and others have indicated that fewer than 5% of an organisation’s roles account for more than 95% of its ability to execute its strategy and deliver results.

Accordingly, the question that every business leader must answer is which 5% applies in my organisation? And what is being done to ensure that the talent pipeline is healthy with talents to fill these roles today and tomorrow?

The business world is complex, and only the proactively strategic will thrive in it. Companies that thrive in today’s complex business environment are constantly rethinking which skills will be most important to enable them to navigate the murky waters of the future.

As a result, these companies proactively develop these skills in their workforce and actively recruit them. I n all, the discipline that caters for this crucial task of developing and recruiting future talent is termed Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP). 

What is Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP)?

Strategic workforce planning enables businesses to map out what is required in terms of talent to deliver the business strategy and achieve the company’s long-term goals.

A good workforce plan looks at what’s required from the workforce perspective to build and sustain a competitive advantage for the organisation. It focuses on the strategic capabilities a business will need to master to accomplish its goals and the moves required to deliver those capabilities. 

 In a nutshell, strategic workforce planning is about ensuring your organisation will have : 

  • The right people 
  • With the right skills 
  • At the right cost 
  • At the right place 
  • At the right time 

The ‘strategic’ element of strategic workforce planning means looking significantly further ahead than the typical short-term hiring plans. For example, a good strategic workforce planning uses a three- to five-year outlook instead of just a one-year view. 

Questions & Actions Arising from Strategic Workforce Planning

Accordingly, questions arising from strategic workforce planning include: 

  • What new work is needed to be successful in the future, and how will our current work change? 
  • What capabilities are needed to deliver the business strategy?  
  • What internal capability do we have?  
  • What does the external labour market look like?  
  • What’s the gap?  
  • How do we fill the gaps?  
  • Where are the critical risks? 
  • How do we evaluate the effectiveness of the plan? 

Correspondingly, actions arising from strategic workforce planning will include: 

  • Buying in new skills or creating learning roadmaps or talent pipelines to develop them internally 
  • Developing transition pathways to reskill and redeploy people where demand is reducing 
  • Improving retention and engagement.     

When these conditions are met, your workforce will be better poised to deliver on your business goals effectively for the long term.  

Considering how vital an SWP is to the long-term health of an organisation, let’s explore the steps you can take to develop your workforce planning process. 

5 Steps for Developing Your Strategic Workforce Planning

First, ask, what’s the long-term business strategy .

Considering that strategic workforce planning caters for the future staffing needs of an organisation, the very first step to creating your SWP is to define the organisation’s long-term goals clearly. The fastest way to develop your long-term business strategy is to ask the question: Where do we see ourselves in the next five years? 

Decisions concerning the organisation’s long-term goals are not to be made trivially. Schedule time away from the daily grind to plot your company’s five-year goals. 

 Some insightful questions to ask your team include: 

  • What is our desired future state? 
  • As a company, what do we want to accomplish five years from now? 
  • What must we do to execute the strategy successfully? 
  • What must we stop, start or continue to do to achieve our goal? 
  • What must we do exceptionally well to win? 
  • What capabilities do we need to perform sustainably at an exceptional level? 

Next, conduct a current-state analysis

conduct a current-state analysis 

After establishing where the business is going, the next stage is to evaluate what you currently have in terms of people and skills. This step is called a current-state or internal supply analysis.

When evaluating your talent supply, do it by job role rather than a person; this will help you remain objective. Then analyse the capabilities the employees in those roles have right now and compare them to what you need them to be to execute your business strategy. 

Decide on which roles qualify as your 5% 

What roles are most critical to your organisation’s current and future success? Deciding which positions are essential in your organisation  or those most crucial to moving toward your goals mustn’t be done hastily.

Instead, together with your team, take the time to think carefully and answer the following questions:  

  • Which roles (present or future) will disproportionately drive the success of the business strategy? 
  • Which roles can we afford to understaff without risking our business unduly? 
  • What jobs are most crucial? 
  • What current or future skills will disproportionately drive the success of our business strategy? 
  • What capabilities will accelerate our ability to deliver on our promise? 

Analyse the gaps and the risks

This stage is usually the most eye-opening. If, after analysing, you find a skills gap between what you have and what you consider that you’ll need, take time to explore the possible ways by which you can close those gaps.

Some organisations will require training their employees ; for others, it will require hiring new talent to close those gaps.

It is vital to identify the external factors  that may endanger your strategy at this stage. Examples of external risks include changes in the labour market, alterations in economic or political conditions, evolving industry trends or new government legislation.

To effectively weigh the implication of these external risks, get your leadership team to share their topmost concerns. Then, as a team, determine which are most relevant or potentially catastrophic to your business. After that, you may follow up with scenario planning and proactively decide how to take action. 

Finally, draw up an action plan

After careful analysis of your most critical roles and skills, it’s time to start prioritising and implementing your action plans. 

The burning questions to answer are: 

  • Which skill gaps present the greatest strategic risk to your success? 
  • What actions must be taken to close those skill gaps? 

We recommend that you draw up specific, appl i cable, attainable, quantifiable, and time-bound goals  to guide your efforts. Then, once the wheel of progress starts rolling, do all within your power to ensure that it continues to roll. If you fall off the wagon by any means, make the necessary adjustments and get back on track. 

 In Conclusion

The future is uncertain. As a result, strategic workforce planning is highly iterative in practice. However, more important is that once conversations around strategic workforce planning begin, it will change the organisational mindset.

These conversations create the right conditions for managers to think deeply and systematically about the workforce and what it takes to move the organisation forward. 

If you need further clarifications or require the help of our senior and experienced consultants, please reach out to us at [email protected] .

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Workforce planning

What are the steps in workforce planning.

A step-by-step workforce planning guide

Speaking of workforce planning strategy, we can draw an analogy with the lighthouse: the strategy tells us the direction. It can show the stones and rocks that are on the coast, but only the ship’s captain decides how to guide his boat past the rocks to his destination. In this blog post, we’d like to deep dive into workforce planning and its planning stages.

strategic  workforce  planning 

What to start with

Workforce planning has a straightforward purpose and reasoning behind it. It must ensure that your company has the right people and those people have the right skills. It’s an integral part of HR management and provides the context for other HR activities like talent acquisition and employee development.

The planning process must be enterprise-wide. It requires effective communication between the HR team and top management as well as input from key stakeholders.

We agree with  CIPD : Workforce planning processes, when done right, can reduce labor costs, respond to changing customer needs, improve employee retention, and their work-life balance.

Unfortunately, despite its importance, the workforce planning asset is often not carefully planned, measured, or optimized,  SHRM  states. Many organizations are not sufficiently aware of the current or future workforce gaps that will limit business strategy execution.

Where this process starts and ends or what to consider when workforce planning

Consider the following factors during the workforce planning process:

  • Right size: how many people you need to hire
  • Right form: the critical competencies/skills you need
  • Right budget: how much it costs to hire
  • Technical feasibility

Workforce planning encompasses such processes as analyzing the current workforce and determining future needs, identifying gaps between status-quo and destination point, designing and implementing solutions to accomplish the goals, and finally, fulfilling the strategic plan through the proper use of talent.

Step-by-step guide

Step 1: supply analysis.

At this step, analyze the current company’s state and the external factors like market and economic situation to understand the business’ environment.

Internal factors  determine how the workforce is structured at the current moment in terms of gender and age rates, specialization, and location. Another internal factor is labor costs that incur wages and other workforce-related costs. Internal factors include organizational structure, i.e., how the recruitment process works.

A vital internal issue is attrition rate, i.e., how many people leave you and for what reasons. Flow analysis also belongs to internal structure – how the workforce moves within the company and how positions change.

External factors  are best estimated via PESTLE analysis:

  • P stands for politics (any preconditions for changing the legislation, taxation, labor remuneration, etc).
  • E for economics (inflation rates, labor outflow rates, etc).
  • S for social (number of students and graduates in the area, social changes like lockdowns and social distancing, etc).
  • T for technology (for example, digital transformation and automation of HR processes).
  • L for legal (changes in legal norms or requirements).
  • E for environment (like ecology, ethical norms, etc).

Step 2: Demand analysis

At this stage, you forecast the future HR needs: workforce skills a company needs to cope with market challenges, number of employees, their roles, and possible HR scenarios.

Earlier, to define the HR strategy and the employee skills gaps, you had to talk to line managers.

Even now, when asked, “What skills should your employees learn to be more effective a year from now?” the top managers often answer generically, e.g., “Communication” or “Time management.” But in reality, they need a particular skill on a more senior basis. What does a person have to do to make you assess a “good level of communication” for that particular function? English proficiency/customer relationship building/sales skills/non-conflict communication skills?

Step 3: Gap analysis

In this step, you analyze the competencies a business needs and what skills are at your hand. A recent  Future of Jobs report  states that by 2022, almost 54% of all employees will require considerable re- and upskilling.

Here are a few gaps you can analyze:

  • Skill gap. Vital for the company’s future growth as you assess your current competencies and skills you’ll need to succeed in the future. Also, knowing new skills and upskilling will help the employees perform more functions. It also helps to make all skills visible.
  • Opportunities gap. It includes opportunities, style of interaction with both clients and colleagues, and behaviors that boost efficiency. It empowers internal talent mobility, opens new possibilities for your employees, and motivates them to learn.
  • Distribution gap. Talents may be focused at one department, while other departments may lack A-Players. Look at how talents are distributed in the company and where the gap may be.
  • Diversity gap. For example, all key employees are in the same location or age group. What happens when the time to retire comes? Think about how you can allocate talent.
  • Deployment gap. Imagine you need to develop company departments in the regions. You must know precisely how you will move the talent there and whether you will be able to hire locally.
  • Time. Time-to-hire of a rare specialist can take up to 9 months, or even longer. If you decide to close the need for certain specialists through training and retraining, you must know how long it will take to get the top talent and preselect the candidates.
  • Cost gap. Besides, there is also cost-to-hire for the right talent and the costs for developing, retraining, or upskilling the workforce.

You may be working with only one of these gaps. But this list helps you look at the question from different perspectives and double-check yourself. Understand what is valid for your company and what is not.

Step 4: Solution analysis

Well, the information has been gathered and analyzed. Now it’s time to think about strategies for overcoming difficulties:

  • Time and money you’ll allocate to work with detected gaps.
  • The way you’ll organize and implement training.
  • Locations you’ll consider.
  • Resources and mentors you’ll involve.
  • Hiring strategy: to attract experts or hire entry-level staff and train them; to hire internally or externally.

You should look at the organization holistically. Let’s give an example. A company X needs to rewrite an existing codebase into another programming language. They decide to actively hire a dozen of developers of a certain specialization. Six months later, it turns out that the strategic plan hasn’t been thought through, and the company hasn’t suitable positions for these people.

The mistake was that the company switched to hiring without thinking that there’s a large layer of developers inside the company whose specialization is losing its popularity and customer demand. They  could have been retrained instead . At least, it would allow the company to reduce the recruiting costs, to save the existing employees, and, thus, to prevent the reputational risks.

Workforce planning isn’t just about recruiting.  Mercer  explains: “It can’t just be about employee capacity and business unit alignment, workforce planning must recognize employees’ potential and engagement and be intertwined with the company’s technology roadmap.”

The current state of workforce planning technologies

Earlier, the HR departments worked with Performance and Potential Matrix — the nine-box matrix or HR3P matrix, that displayed employee performance and potential in a single model. Today it is a doubtful approach since it evaluates the people too judgmentally. But can you imagine that… ( Global Talent Trends Report 2020 )

Sadly, not all companies have the HR process fully automated. Many still do not have an automated data warehouse and have to extract, process, and manually put together the data. That is much slower and risks losing important information.

It demonstrates, to assess the performance, potential, and future-orientation of your employees, you have better start using a smart workforce planning tool — HR dashboard. It is the most real, applicable, and effective tool for reflecting the existing skills, revealing the hidden talents, and forecasting your employees’ future needs.

On a conceptual level, an HR dashboard is filled with data from various sources, such as the payroll system, candidate tracking system, and other information systems used in HR. Based on this information, HR metrics are calculated and displayed. This data is then extracted; information is transferred and uploaded to a data lake or data warehouse. Finally, a  specially designed software   uses this information for reporting.

A quick test, let’s say you are a CEO. Can you answer three questions in 17 seconds as clearly and concisely as possible? — What percent of your workforce work for your long-term business goals? What amount of employees need to be up-skilled? How many people do you need to hire in 5 years? We tell you.

Workforce planning is the process of analyzing an organization’s workforce and identifying the steps to be taken to prepare for future needs. This process helps you understand where to go and how to move, so you don’t have to spend your recruiting and HR team’s resources on something that the company doesn’t need.

As you see, knowledge of hot skills, market demand, and own skill gaps help people to be ready for the new challenges. To achieve a smooth working structure that functions like a swiss clock, you have to conduct workforce risk analysis, i.e., demographics, retention, career bottlenecks. Then, you must identify and prioritize the workforce gaps, e.g., locations, job roles, skills. Finally, via visualization of insights, you will drive the strategic, data- and AI-based decisions.

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What Is Strategic Workforce Planning? A Complete Guide

By definition, strategic workforce planning means creating a hiring process that will make sure the right candidates are brought on throughout every step of your organization’s growth. Business leaders aim to develop a process that will proactively identify future hiring needs while filling current ones.

Human resources and business managers collaborate to determine a business’s long-term goals. They then develop a business strategy to make sure the current and future workforce are equipped to meet those goals. This means that thorough workforce plans can be a great help to growing businesses.

Let’s look at what makes a good strategic workforce plan and how your business can get started on theirs.

What is the purpose of strategic workforce planning?

Workforce plans are meant to set a team up to scale by making sure all internal needs will be addressed, and growth will be seamless. Companies do this by anticipating future hiring needs and working to make sure the right people will enter the company at the right time.

This also means identifying any skill gaps that currently exist within the workforce or may arise as the business grows. You can use workforce planning to make sure you meet your diversity initiatives as well as job postings.

4 components of strategic workforce planning

The main components of strategic workforce planning are:

  • The Right People : Hires will be beneficial to the company and work well with the company’s culture, values, and needs.
  • With the Right Skills : New hires will have the right work experience and skill set to do their job correctly.
  • Enter the Right Job : New hires or promotions will be placed in a job that correctly uses their skill set and furthers the company’s goals.
  • At the Right Time : Hires or promotions will be immediately able to produce work that furthers the company.

The best way to find the right people with the right skills at the right time is to hire across borders. Incorporating global hiring into your strategic workforce plan empowers you to find candidates who check every box while maximizing your hiring budget.

Learn how to easily hire talent across borders, quickly expand your business into new markets, and ensure compliance for global talent in our guide:

How to build a global workforce that takes your company farther - get the guide

Strategic workforce planning examples

A few examples of what strategic workforce planning might look like include:

  • Putting together a talent acquisition strategy
  • Leadership development training
  • Global expansion initiatives
  • Career path development
  • Workflow optimization and streamlining

How do you create a strategic workforce plan? 6 steps for success

How to create a successful strategic workforce plan

Each business is unique and has its own hiring needs and goals, so no workforce plan will look identical to another. However, there are a few guidelines that every business leader can follow when developing their own plan.

1. Analyze your current workforce 

The first step to workforce planning is assessing what you already have. Look at your current roster and identify strengths and weaknesses. Determine what is going well within your organization and how you can become even stronger.

There are three main workforce issues that should drive workforce planning: your strategic plan, outside factors changing your workforce, and maintenance of your current workforce.

  • Strategic plan: Figure out how your workforce is meeting or not meeting your current goals and the steps that need to be taken to get to a point you’re satisfied with.
  • Outside factors: Determine which outside factors — like new competition, diversity initiatives , adopting remote work , or other factors — are going to affect your workplace.
  • Workforce maintenance: Decide how to strengthen your workforce with better training, new focus on employee wellbeing, or initiatives to boost employee engagement before you start looking to grow.

Tip: Internal surveys can help you gauge your employees’ satisfaction while you work to pinpoint issues affecting your organization.

2. Set long-term goals for your organization  

Setting direct, actionable goals can help you figure out how and who to hire as you work toward them. Your goals should focus on your most crucial business needs and help set a trajectory for the way your business will grow.

Most businesses follow a S.M.A.R.T. framework for goal-setting. That means the goals will be:

  • Specific: Each goal should home in on one aspect of your business to make the goal direct and meaningful.
  • Measureable: Tie a tangible way of measuring success to each goal so you can prove you’re making progress.
  • Attainable: Shooting for the moon isn’t always the best option — your goals should be within scope for your organization within the designated time frame.
  • Relevant: Goals should align with your company’s business model, needs, and objectives to make sure you’re staying on track.
  • Time-Sensitive: Goals should be set within a specific time frame so you can keep moving forward and setting new goals.

Tip: Setting long- and short-term goals can help keep morale up by creating more opportunities to celebrate company wins.

3. Anticipate roadblocks or future needs 

The key to an effective workforce plan is doing a little guesswork to anticipate future needs or potential roadblocks. By planning for these in advance, you can be ready to meet them head on.

Consider where you are now vs. where you want to be. How many staff members are currently needed to execute a project or meet a deadline? And if your business grows at the rate you’re anticipating, how many will you need in six months? If the projected number is larger than the current, you need to make sure you’ll have the staff on hand to meet deadlines.

Tip: You can also gauge your current roster’s bandwidth and burnout levels to determine how many new staff members will keep the team productive while prioritizing their well-being.

4. Fill in the gaps 

Once you know where you are, where you want to be, and any obstacles that might stand in the way of getting there, you can start to fill in the gaps and finalize your workforce plan.

Identifying these gaps can help you fill roles with people who will help support your growth. It can also help you determine whether the needs can be filled with a greater number of employees filling your current roles or if you’ll need to develop new roles altogether.

For example, if you’ve been working as the boss with all of your employees as your direct reports, you may need to hire managers to act as middlemen so you can focus on other tasks and let them handle project management.

Tip: Once you start feeling like you’re never logged off, you should consider promoting employees to management positions.

5. Seek help from experts 

Developing a relevant, efficient, and actionable workforce plan may not come naturally to some business leaders. Third-party agencies that specialize in workforce optimization can help you nail down your business plan as you scale.

Consulting an agency to help identify your workforce needs and assist in hiring for those needs can help you make sure you’re not only preparing yourself for the future but also setting yourself up for a successful one.

Tip: For those growing globally, a third party is even more important. Globalization partners can make sure you stay compliant with labor laws while selecting the right candidates for your growth.

6. Implement and adapt as needed

Just like an adaptable workforce is important, so is an adaptable workforce plan. Your plan might give you a solid trajectory for your growth, but that doesn’t mean you won’t need to make adjustments as you scale.

More than likely, you’ll be confronted with situations and needs you didn’t foresee. And while your plan will be able to tackle the bulk of these needs, some may arise that weren’t accounted for. In these scenarios, you may need to revisit and restructure your hiring plan.

Tip: Keeping track of your goals and growth within those goals can help you pinpoint when you’re getting off track as early as possible.

What are the advantages of workforce planning?

An effective workforce planning strategy can help make a good workforce great.

Addressing current workforce gaps 

A workforce gap is a mismatch between what skills you’re going to need from your workforce as you scale and what skills your employees possess.

Looking toward the future can help you pinpoint any skill gaps in your current roster. This can not only keep your organization on track to grow, but it can also make sure your current roster isn’t going to become overloaded when expansion does start to happen.

Keeping goals met

New business leads, deadlines, and deals can feel like a snowball rolling down a hill for a growing business. And if you’re not careful, you could get buried. Workforce planning makes sure that the new employees will continue to be onboarded as the company grows and more needs arise. This makes sure business goals will continue being met, and the business can keep growing smoothly.

Preparing for the future

Workforce planning allows HR professionals and business leaders to create a long-term strategy that will see the company through years of growth. Once the strategy is in place, business leaders can then get back to focusing on their day-to-day tasks, knowing that the organization is ready to grow when the time comes.

It’s best to plan ahead

Preparation is key, especially when looking to grow a business or go global. When taking your business overseas, you’ll need to not only have a firm workforce plan intact but also make sure you’re hiring the best candidates and staying compliant with labor regulations in your new locale.

Contact Velocity Global  to learn how we can help you confidently and compliantly hire talent in 185+ countries.

Related resources

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Onboarding International Employees: Best Practices for Global Employers

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Adaptability in the Workplace: How to Navigate Change at Work

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Strategic workforce planning

Blob

What is workforce planning?

Why is workforce planning important for your company, who should be in charge of strategic workforce planning, workforce planning process, what tools can help you with your strategic workforce planning.

As recruitment becomes increasingly data-driven and strategic, recruiters must upskill their own knowledge and expertise to offer value to their clients. Strategic workforce planning is a vital area to understand, and in this blog post, we will look at everything to do with strategic workforce planning, what it is, why it matters, and how it can be carried out for the best results.

In today’s changing business climate, organisations use strategic workforce planning to ensure their business strategy and workforce align for the best possible results. This involves analysing the forces of supply and demand when it comes to the workforce and recruitment and then adjusting what the business does to meet its goals and needs.

At its heart, modern strategic workforce planning means leveraging the power of data and technology to align the organisation’s key resource; its people – with its intended strategic goals and plans. By using workforce planning, organisations can set themselves up for success by giving HR the insight it needs to make smart decisions about business talent needs, including strategic hiring and technology implementation (such as AI).

The process involves looking at workforce supply and demand and carrying out analysis, forecasting and planning. The end goal is to get the right people with the right skills in the business, at the right time and in the right locations, to deliver the strategic plan and drive the organisation’s success. Essentially, workforce planning recognises that business strategies can only be successful with the right people in place to deliver them.

When it’s done well, workforce planning ensures businesses have enough of the right staff. Without this strategic approach, organisations can become either overstaffed (and struggling to meet the payroll bill) or understaffed (and struggling to meet client needs.) Workforce planning is a tool that lets decision-makers rightsize the business in a way that meets business goals and strategic plans without creating a large and unnecessary overhead for payroll.

What are the benefits of workforce planning

Some of the main benefits of having an effective workforce planning process include:

  • Bringing the strategic plan to life by creating a road map that explains how it will be achieved. This is because the workforce plan aligns the supply and demand of talent with the business’s strategy to make it a reality.
  • Preparing for future needs by bringing a longer-term view on board with respect to labour market trends, job streamlining, the use of AI, flexible workers and other staffing solutions.
  • The change to find efficiency opportunities and staffing gaps- which can then be assessed and corrected.
  • Generating data that supports better HR decision-making rather than knee-jerk or impulse decisions.
  • Making succession planning easier.
  • Reducing turnover with better retention, as employees are well-used, developed and not over-stretched when a strategic plan is in place.

Every organisation will have its own approach to strategic workforce planning . In some businesses, it’s a C-suite activity, and in others, it’s led by HR. Generally speaking, a lot of people will have input into this strategic process, including hiring managers, people managers, and possibly recruiting partners. It will be generally driven by HR as part of strategic HR planning.

1. Define the organisation strategy

The organisational strategy is the starting point for all workforce planning as it will drive the staffing needs to deliver the strategy’s projects, goals and outcomes. The business plan will be an output of the strategy, which usually has a 3-5 year timespan. The business plan will usually be for the coming financial year but may be longer. A workforce strategy may also have a 3-5-year timespan that matches the business strategy.

2. Assess your existing workforce supply

In this phase, you look at your existing talent pool within the business, factoring in existing employees and potential candidates within any talent pool process you nurture or within the recruitment pipeline. You can map the numbers against defined skills, competencies and qualifications to create a richer picture of your employee skills base. You can use skills gap analysis to pinpoint the skills that you need now and in the future.

3. Assess the demand

Look at how many employees will be needed to achieve the business’s current needs and to then achieve its strategic plans. This is your workforce demand.

4. Analyse gaps between the supply and demand

At this point, you have the supply and demand data needed to consider your workforce against your strategic plans. If you see gaps between them, you can look for ways to close them. For example, if your business is moving into a high-tech digital product field, you may see from your supply plan that you don’t have enough existing employees with the necessary skills to lead the development and marketing of this product. You can then plan a training budget, hire people with those skills or look at flexible staffing.

On the other side of the coin, you may see from your supply plan that you have too many employees in a customer service role at a time when you are implementing AI and no longer need this full headcount. You can then plan ahead to reskill existing employees and move them into other areas or consider whether programmes to reduce headcount will be necessary.

5. Put the plan in place

This is the stage where the data translates into action! You might hire new skilled staff, work with a recruitment agency to bring temps on board, consider using contractors or use technology in some areas to replace or augment human skills. You might also look at consolidating certain teams or outsourcing functions. Plenty of options exist when a business has the necessary data and insights to make confident decisions.

6. Measure progress

Once you’ve made the necessary adjustments to the workforce, continue to measure the results of these strategic actions to make sure they are having the desired effects.

A variety of tools and technologies exist to make the strategic workforce planning process. These include:

Strategic workforce planning map

This map shows how this activity aligns with organisational strategy and is the process’s core document. Most businesses will now use software that makes the creation of workforce planning maps far easier, with interactive documentation and templates that the business can populate, update and interrogate.

This is also called an HR3P matrix, and it maps the performance and potential of each employee in a single model, assessing every level from ‘talent risk’ to ‘shining stars’.

HR dashboarding

Many businesses are using dashboards as part of their commitment to strategic HR. These instruments are a great way to provide rich data about the workforce in real-time, with information from HR databases such as the ATS, payroll, training records, etc.

Compensation & benefit analysis

This tool can also feed into workforce planning analysis because it allows businesses to map their workforce and its skills and performance against the cost of payroll.

Scenario planning

This vital business tool lets businesses model different scenarios and plan how they would respond to them. These challenge scenarios could be anything from new product introductions to climate change. By identifying these risks, the business can build contingency plans.

ATS systems and recruitment software

Applicant tracking systems also feed into the workforce planning process by showing where talent is in the recruitment process. Teamdash is a highly customisable recruitment software that businesses are using to unlock powerful insights and value into their recruitment, with rich features such as interview scheduling, asynchronous video interviews, social media recruitment tools, etc.

Workforce planning is a powerful strategic tool that is also surprisingly easy to implement as a framework. Its power lies in providing the necessary framework for robust workforce analysis and generating valuable data that supports business decision-making to support strategic goals. For a surprisingly simple framework, it can yield extremely powerful results and help organisations position themselves to achieve their strategies.

For recruiters, it offers a way to provide extra value to clients by offering the services that help them rightsize their workforce, whether from temporary staffing to skilled contractor hiring or through targeted recruitment and executive search. Today’s recruiters must be smart and strategic to demonstrate value, and understanding frameworks such as workforce planning is a highly relevant way of demonstrating this value to client businesses.

RPO vs Recruitment Agency: What are the differences?

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Creating a path for continuous strategic workforce planning

How companies can integrate talent with finance and risk to better balance staffing needs.

how to do strategic workforce planning

Organizations face two major challenges when they implement ongoing and continuous workforce planning. The first is finding the technology and tools that are right for the organization today while also leaving room for it to grow. The second is identifying which skills will be needed for the future and which are becoming obsolete as automation and artificial intelligence (AI) reinvent jobs and the nature of work itself. To successfully enable continuous workforce planning, we recommend the following steps:

  • Match technology to maturity: New or growing strategic workforce planning (SWP) functions require tools that enable basic workforce planning now while allowing more complex planning to be conducted in the future.
  • Anticipate organizational changes: Generative AI is leading to the creation of a new support ecosystem requiring different skillsets, such as automation managers, and the development of new types of tech functions, such as AI prompt engineers.
  • Leadership alignment and education: Leaders need to focus on being more interconnected with their organization and other leaders, as SWP is a living process that is impacted by many variables, requiring organizational-wide buy in and collaboration.

In this paper, we discuss the benefits of integrating SWP into the wider enterprise performance-planning process. We also describe effective ways to hire, develop, outsource, and automate your staffing needs so that you can accomplish the strategic, operational, and financial goals that will support your business growth.

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how to do strategic workforce planning

Strategic Workforce Planning: Why and How to Begin

Glenn gutierrez • nov 20, 2020, by insperity’s leslie gorman in collaboration with the cannon.

You probably have a hiring plan. But do you conduct strategic workforce planning?

Many companies discuss staffing when it’s time to establish annual goals and set a budget. Perhaps the desire to increase profits in the upcoming year demands headcount adjustments, and so plans are made to grow or reduce staff, contractors or consultants.

But this staffing practice is shortsighted for two main reasons:

The focus is usually short-term (one year or less).

  • It doesn’t take into consideration outside and internal factors that may impact that narrow-focused approach.
  • That’s where strategic workforce planning comes in. Staffing plans are still needed but are only one piece of a broader strategic workforce plan.

Let’s explore the reasons why you may want to develop such a plan and how to create one for your organization.

how to do strategic workforce planning

What is strategic workforce planning? 

Where a staffing plan addresses only one future-state scenario, strategic workforce planning may address multiple situations .

It uses a three- to five-year outlook instead of just a one-year view.

And because of the strategic emphasis, this type of workforce plan may be less detailed than a staffing plan, which usually has a more tactical focus.

Strategic workforce planning is about ensuring your organization will have:

how to do strategic workforce planning

  • The right people
  • With the right skills
  • At the right place
  • At the right time
  • At the right cost

When these conditions are met, your workforce is poised to deliver on your business goals effectively for the long-term. But also, if any one of these factors is off, there is a negative impact to your organization’s ability to meet its goals.

That’s why strategic workforce planning is so important and can be so beneficial.

Now, here are the steps you can take to develop your own strategic workforce plan.

1. Discuss business strategy 

Your organization must have a clear, shared vision of its long-term goals to have an effective strategic workforce plan.

To get there, develop your long-term business strategy by exploring where you want to be as an organization in five years.

Just make sure that all the right people are in the room. Human resources leaders are often left out of these conversations, but that’s a mistake because it’s your people who make your goals happen.

Offsite meetings are helpful to get into the right mindset (so you won’t be interrupted by the daily grind). Aim to specifically plot your company’s five-year goals.

Here are some great questions to ask your team:

  • What is our strategic focus or desired future state?
  • What do we want as a company five years from now?
  • What is most important to successful execute the strategy?
  • What will we have to stop, start or continue to get there?
  • What do we have to do exceptionally well to win?
  • What are the capabilities we need to perform at that exceptional level?

More content geared towards operating and accelerating your business will continue to appear in our Knowledge Center on Cannon Connect, including topics related to finance, branding, fundraising, leadership and more. Ready to dive into a carefully curated library of entrepreneurial content? Become a member today!

2. Perform a current-state analysis 

Next, look at what you currently have – both people and skills. This is called a current-state or internal supply analysis. Look at your talent supply by job role rather than by person, as this helps you to be more objective.

Then, analyze what capabilities your people in those roles have right now against what you need them to be according to your business strategy.

To determine future talent supply, some organizations make projections based on historical turnover numbers or industry benchmarks. Companies with more resources may use predictive people analytics to identify certain risks like turnover and retirement.

3. Decide which roles are critical to current and future success 

This may be the most difficult task involved in strategic workforce planning – deciding which are the key positions in your organization or those most crucial to moving toward your goals.

Remembering your key business objectives, ask yourself: 

  • Which roles (current or future) will disproportionately drive the success of the strategy?
  • Which roles could be understaffed with little risk to our business?
  • What jobs are most vital?
  • What current or future skills will disproportionately drive the success of the strategy?
  • What capabilities will accelerate our ability to deliver on our promise?

4. Analyze gaps and risks 

If there’s a skills gap between what you have and what you think you’ll need, take time to explore all the ways you could close those gaps.

For example:

  • Would it be best to train your people or plan to hire from the outside?
  • If some of your people are nearing retirement, do you need to offer packages to get people to stay so you don’t lose their knowledge?

Also examine any external factors that may put your strategy at risk. Outside risks may arise from economic or political conditions, changes in the labor market, evolving industry trends or new legislation.

Your leadership team can work together to evaluate how to weigh these risks. Have everyone share their top three to five concerns. As a group, determine which are most relevant or potentially catastrophic. Follow up with scenario planning, and preemptively decide how to respond.

5. Develop an action plan 

Looking again at your most critical roles and skills, start prioritizing and putting your action plan in place.

  • Which roles and/or skill gaps present the greatest strategic risk to your success?
  • What actions should you take regarding those roles and skill gaps that pose the greatest risk?

Use SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) goal s  to focus your efforts. Continue following up to make sure it happens. If something changes or doesn’t go according to plan, see what you need to do to adjust.

Planning over plan 

Creating an organization-wide strategic workforce plan is a sizable endeavor, so it can help to start small, develop a plan for one department to get more familiar with the process.

And remember, the plan itself is unlikely to unfold as you intended. After all, nothing in the future is certain no matter how thorough you’ve been.

In this case, going through the planning process is more valuable than the plan itself. Doing so will help your organization handle the unpredictable faster and better.

If you’d like to learn more about how to how to hire talented employees, read our complimentary magazine: The Insperity guide to attract, recruit and hire top talent.

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Stay on track for retirement by knowing how much you need to save by what age

how to do strategic workforce planning

Investopedia / Sydney Saporito

A key part of retirement planning is to answer the question: How much do I need to save to retire? The answer varies by individual, and it depends largely on your income now and the lifestyle you want and can afford in retirement.

Knowing how much you need to save based on how old you are now is just the first step, but it starts you on the path to help you reach your retirement goals. There are a few simple formulas that you can use to come up with the numbers.

Key Takeaways

  • How much you need to save for retirement depends on your current income and the lifestyle you want when you retire.
  • Knowing how much you need to save “by age” can help you stay on track and reach your retirement goals.
  • Coming up with specific amounts involves using some easy formulas.

Many retirement experts recommend strategies such as saving 10 times your pre-retirement salary and planning on living on 80% of your pre-retirement annual income.

That means if you make $100,000 annually at retirement, you need at least $80,000 per year to have a comfortable lifestyle after leaving the workforce.

This amount can be adjusted up or down depending on additional sources of income, such as Social Security , pensions , and part-time employment, as well as factors like your health and desired lifestyle.

Order your copy of the print edition of Investopedia's Retirement Guide for more assistance in building the best plan for your retirement.

To determine just how much you will need to save to generate the income that you need, one easy-to-use formula is to divide your desired annual retirement income by 4%, which is known as the 4% rule .

For an income of $80,000, you would need a retirement nest egg of about $2 million ($80,000 /0.04). This strategy assumes a 5% return on investments , after taxes and inflation, no additional retirement income, such as Social Security, and a lifestyle similar to the one you would be living at the time you retire.

In general, the 4% rule assumes that you will live for 30 years in retirement. Retired adults who live longer need their portfolios to last longer, in part because medical costs and other expenses can increase as you age.

Knowing how much you should save toward retirement at each stage of your life helps you answer that all-important question: “How much do I need to retire?” Here are a few useful formulas that can help you set age-based savings goals on the road to retirement.

Percentage of Your Salary

To figure out how much you need to accumulate at various stages of your life, it can be useful to think in terms of saving a percentage of your salary.

Fidelity Investments suggests saving 15% of your gross salary starting in your 20s and continuing throughout the course of your working life. This should include savings across various retirement accounts as well as any employer contributions you receive to those accounts, assuming you have access to a 401(k) or another employer-sponsored plan.

How Much to Save for Retirement by Age

Fidelity also recommends the following benchmarks—based on a multiple of your annual earnings—for how much you should have saved for retirement by the time you reach the following ages.

An Alternative Formula

Another, more heuristic formula holds that you should save 25% of your gross salary each year, starting in your 20s. The 25% savings figure may sound daunting. But don't forget that it includes not only 401(k) holdings and matching contributions from your employer, but also other types of retirement savings.

If you follow this formula, it should allow you to accumulate your full annual salary by age 30. Continuing at the same average savings rate should yield the following:

  • Age 35—two times annual salary
  • Age 40—three times annual salary
  • Age 45—four times annual salary
  • Age 50—five times annual salary
  • Age 55—six times annual salary
  • Age 60—seven times annual salary
  • Age 65—eight times annual salary

Whether or not you try to follow the 15% or the 25% savings guideline, chances are your actual ability to save will be affected by life events such as the job loss many experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Retirement Savings Confidence by Age

Anxious that you aren't saving enough for retirement? You're not alone. As of Sept. 30, 2023, there were roughly 70 million active 401(k) participants, in addition to former employees and retired adults. And while they may be active participants, people’s feelings toward retirement vary widely based on age.

According the the Northwestern Mutual Planning & Progress Study 2023, the majority of adults (52%) believe they will be prepared for retirement, but many are worried that they won't be. Among those surveyed, 55% of Generation X, 48% of Boomers, 46% of Millennials, and 35% of Generation Z have those fears.

These concerns also affect the age when members of the different generations expect to retire. The same study found that Boomers plan to work until age 71 while Gen Z expects to retire more than a decade earlier at 60. Millennials and Gen Xers plan to work to age 63 and 65, respectively.

Those numbers are a bit less rosy than the 2022 Investopedia Financial Literacy Study , which found that Boomers expect to work until age 68; Gen Xers, 64; Millennials, 61; and Gen Z, the most optimistic about retiring early , said they believe they will retire by age 57—three years younger than Gen Z respondents in the 2023 Northwestern Mutual study.

In Investopedia’s study, not all adults are particularly confident in their understanding of retirement planning. Behind digital currencies and investing, retirement was the third least-understood concept. And retirement was the top personal finance concern for about one-sixth of all those surveyed.

In the early and middle years of your career, you have time to recover from any losses in your retirement accounts. That's a good time to take some of the risks that allow you to earn more with your investments.

In addition to using the above methods to determine what you should have saved and by what age, online calculators can be a useful tool to help you reach your retirement savings goals . For example, they can help you understand how changing savings and withdrawal rates can impact your retirement nest egg.

Although there are many online retirement savings calculators to choose from, some are much better than others . The  T. Rowe Price Retirement Income Calculator and MaxiFi ESPlanner are two worth trying.

How Much Does a Couple Need to Retire?

Much like an individual, how much a couple needs to save to retire comfortably will depend on their current annual income and the lifestyle they want to have when they retire. Many experts maintain that retirement income should be about 80% of a couple’s final pre-retirement annual earnings. Fidelity Investments recommends that you should save 10 times your annual income by age 67.

What Is the 4% Rule?

The 4% rule is a guideline used to determine how much a retiree can withdraw annually from a retirement account. It is intended to make retirement savings last for 30 years.

How Much Should I Save for Retirement Each Year?

One rule of thumb is to save 15% of your annual earnings. In a perfect world, savings would begin in your 20s and last throughout your working years.

Sometimes you'll be able to save more for retirement—and sometimes less. What’s important is to get as close to your savings goal as possible and check your progress at each benchmark to make sure you're staying on track .

A 401(k) might be a good place to start—if you have access to one. If not, consider an individual retirement account (IRA) . Because the importance of saving for retirement is so great, we've made lists of brokers for Roth IRAs and IRAs so you can find the best places to create these retirement accounts.

Fidelity Investments. " How Much Do I Need to Retire? "

RBC Wealth Management. " Sustainable Withdrawal Rates in Retirement: Utilize as a Guideline to Help Avoid Running Out of Money. " Page 1.

Investment Company Institute. " 401(k) Resource Center ."

Northwestern Mutual. " Planning & Progress Study 2023 ."

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how to do strategic workforce planning

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  1. Strategic Workforce Planning and Its Importance

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  1. How to Build Out a Strategic Workforce Plan

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COMMENTS

  1. Strategic Workforce Planning 101: Framework & Process

    Strategic workforce planning (SWP) is a continual process of identifying gaps in the workforce and developing a methodical people plan to ensure an organization has the employees, skills, and knowledge needed to meet current and future business goals.

  2. Strategic workforce planning: Guide for people professionals

    Stage 1: Baseline Stage 2: Supply Stage 3: Demand Stage 4: Gap analysis Stage 5: Action plan Stage 6: Deliver Conclusion Make a start Appendix: Workforce planning checklist Checklist for workforce planning Understand what strategic workforce planning is and how to do it

  3. Strategic Workforce Planning

    Strategic workforce planning sets HR up to identify talent needs associated with the organization's future goals and establish a strategy to ensure the organization has the right mix of talent, technologies and employment models to reach these goals. Download Strategic Workforce Planning Case Studies

  4. Strategic Workforce Planning: How-To & Best Practices

    Jan 22, 2024 Project & Resource Management Strategic Workforce Planning: How-To & Best Practices Plan your workforce like a pro with our complete guide to strategic workforce planning - what it is, why it matters, who's involved, and how to ace it.

  5. Workforce Planning: How to Do It on an Organizational Level

    Designing Activities The first four steps in the strategic workforce planning process involve designing activities. The inclusion of stakeholders within a BU differs depending on the activity, some of which are conducted at both the BU and organization levels. Step 1: Prepare for Strategic Workforce Planning

  6. 7 Steps For Successful Strategic Workforce Planning

    Cost optimization A rather obvious benefit but nevertheless important one to start with. Strategic workforce planning enables you to, among other things: Plan your recruitment efforts (more on this below). Manage employee turnover. For example, when it comes to retiring employees. Increase productivity.

  7. Workforce Planning: Model, Process, Steps [Guide 2023]

    Strategic workforce planning tends to take place at the senior leadership level and focuses on big picture goals such as: Structural organization Employee redeployment Succession planning Staffing budgets Maintaining capacity Reducing risk Operational Workforce Planning

  8. 10 Steps for Effective Strategic Workforce Planning

    Strategic workforce planning is the systematic identification and analysis of an organization's future talent needs associated with its long-term goals and objectives, establishing a clear strategy that ensures that it will achieve these goals. Workforce planning aims to align an organization's people strategy with its evolving needs.

  9. What is Strategic Workforce Planning? A Complete Guide

    Workforce planning is the process of auditing, predicting and managing the employment needs of your company in relation to its greater strategic business goals. When it comes down to it, the goal of workforce planning is to help your workforce meet the following criteria as closely as possible: Image via Analytics in HR

  10. 3 Steps to More Strategic Workforce Planning

    To do this: Develop productive partnerships with business leaders and educate yourself about the future of the business. Integrate workforce planning into business planning so it isn't a stand-alone process and can't be easily dismissed by business leaders.

  11. Workforce Planning: Definition & Best Practices

    Workforce planning is the process of leveraging data to ensure that a business's workforce supports business needs, goals and strategic plans. By utilizing workforce planning, businesses can set ...

  12. What Is Strategic Workforce Planning? 2024 Comprehensive Guide

    Steps Best Practices Next Steps What Is Strategic Workforce Planning? Strategic workforce planning is an organization's approach to evaluating its current and future workforce needs, and making plans to ensure that the right talent is in the right place.

  13. Strategic Workforce Planning

    Strategic Workforce Planning Insights. Today's environment of rapid change and uncertainty increases pressure on HR to ensure the organisation has the required talent to support changing business priorities. Strategic workforce planning sets HR up to identify talent needs associated with the organisation's future goals and establish a ...

  14. The Complete Guide to Strategic Workforce Planning

    1. Strategic workforce planning is a tool for business and HR leaders to scope and plan for the capabilities which their companies are likely to need in order to meet future business goals. 2. A strategic workforce plan aims to shape staffing in line with future business needs and challenges.

  15. What Is Strategic Workforce Planning? 5 Steps for Successful Planning

    With the right skills At the right cost At the right place At the right time The 'strategic' element of strategic workforce planning means looking significantly further ahead than the typical short-term hiring plans. For example, a good strategic workforce planning uses a three- to five-year outlook instead of just a one-year view.

  16. Strategic workforce planning guide: Key steps and objectives

    Step 1: Supply analysis. At this step, analyze the current company's state and the external factors like market and economic situation to understand the business' environment. Internal factors determine how the workforce is structured at the current moment in terms of gender and age rates, specialization, and location.

  17. A Complete Guide to Strategic Workforce Planning

    1. Analyze your current workforce The first step to workforce planning is assessing what you already have. Look at your current roster and identify strengths and weaknesses. Determine what is going well within your organization and how you can become even stronger.

  18. Workforce planning

    Understand what strategic workforce planning is and how to do it Read the guide What does workforce planning involve? Stages of workforce planning Implementing workforce planning Key action points for workforce planning Useful contacts and further reading

  19. Strategic Workforce Planning: Why And How To Begin

    That's why strategic workforce planning is so important and can be so beneficial. Now, here are the steps you can take to develop your own strategic workforce plan. 1. Discuss business strategy. Your organization must have a clear, shared vision of its long-term goals to have an effective strategic workforce plan.

  20. Strategic workforce planning: What it is and how to do it

    1. Define the organisation strategy The organisational strategy is the starting point for all workforce planning as it will drive the staffing needs to deliver the strategy's projects, goals and outcomes. The business plan will be an output of the strategy, which usually has a 3-5 year timespan.

  21. Creating a path for continuous strategic workforce planning

    The first is finding the technology and tools that are right for the organization today while also leaving room for it to grow. The second is identifying which skills will be needed for the future and which are becoming obsolete as automation and artificial intelligence (AI) reinvent jobs and the nature of work itself.

  22. PDF Worforce Planning Guide

    Workforce Planning assists organizations by providing critical data analytics and tools to inform leadership decisions on the workforce and to enable them to meet current and future organizational goals and objectives. Workforce Planning is the systematic process of analyzing and assessing to set targets to mitigate the gaps

  23. Strategic Workforce Planning: Why and How to Begin

    That's why strategic workforce planning is so important and can be so beneficial. Now, here are the steps you can take to develop your own strategic workforce plan. 1. Discuss business strategy. Your organization must have a clear, shared vision of its long-term goals to have an effective strategic workforce plan.

  24. How Much Do I Need to Save to Retire?

    Jim Probasco has 30+ years of experience writing for online, print, radio, and television media, including PBS. His expertise includes government programs and policy, retirement planning ...