• Workforce Planning
  • Knowledge Hub
  • Human Resources

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?

The banner for Skills Gap Analysis Guide

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 .

The banner for Succession Planning template

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

workforce planning definition in business

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.

Cookie Preferences

Valamis values your privacy. Please choose the cookie types you want to allow. You can read our Cookie Policy for more details.

Necessary cookies Necessary cookies are crucial for the website's proper functioning and cannot be disabled without negatively impacting the site's performance and user experience. These cookies do not store personal information and are strictly necessary for basic functions. Without them, the website would not be operable.

Marketing cookies Marketing cookies track website visitors to display relevant ads to individual users. These cookies do not store personal information. They measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns and remarketing, relying on a unique identifier for the user's browser and devices.

Analytics cookies Analytical cookies enable the website owner to gain insights into how visitors interact with the website by gathering and reporting data. These cookies do not store personal information. These data help optimize website's performance and user experience.

What Is Workforce Planning?

workforce planning definition in business

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.

You will have access to 50+ pages of data, tips, and advice.

Great Companies Need Great People. That's Where We Come In.

EU whistleblowing laws have changed: Is your business ready? Act now!

Support your planning with the right foundations.

Build The Perfect People Strategy

Support your planning with the right foundations.

Latest blog posts, workforce planning: 6 strategic steps in the right direction.

Workforce planning definition - what is workforce planning?

The workforce planning process can help answer some of your business’s most pressing questions: Who do you need to employ? Who do you have on hand? How do you keep your top talent around? In this article, we answer each, while providing an actionable guide to strategic workforce planning success.

  • 1 What is Workforce Planning?
  • 2 What Is Strategic Workforce Planning?
  • 3 Why Is Workforce Planning Important?
  • 4 Who Is In Charge Of Workforce Planning?
  • 5 Do You Need Workforce Planning Tools?
  • 6 The Six Steps Of The Workforce Planning Process
  • 7 How Does Workforce Planning Benefit Employees?
  • 8 Start Strategic Workforce Planning With HR Software

What is Workforce Planning?

Workforce planning is the strategic evaluation and management of an organisation's present and future talent requirements. It involves analysing, forecasting and planning workforce supply and demand. The goal is to ensure that organisations have the right people with the right skills in the right places at the right time to drive success.

What is the Purpose of Workforce Planning?

The purpose of workforce planning  is to find out where you have the right people in the right roles. It’s ensuring you have the right number of people, who have the right mix of skills, knowledge and experience to help your organisation reach its goals. These often will include both your short and long-term goals.

What is an Example of Workforce Planning?

Here's an example of workforce planning: Let’s say that your business has ambitions to expand internationally, but your sales staff is centred in one country, in one language and attuned to the needs of one target group. Your workforce p

lanning efforts would involve finding out:

The number of new sales staff you need

The number of languages you want to cover

If those sales staff should be based in other countries

If members of that staff should have certain regional skills or knowledge

A common workforce plan  will often include a brief analysis or summary of your current workforce, your future needs, and how you plan to bridge the gap in between. This might include hiring plans,  learning and development opportunities , or identifying key hires that are not necessarily related to scaling your business (like a new leader or content specialist).

What Is Strategic Workforce Planning?

Strategic workforce planning  is designed to meet scenarios three-to-five years in the future. Therefore, it must be aligned with business needs and objectives. It also requires the knowledge and time to prepare a plan that looks at future business strategy and includes scenario planning.

What Is The Workforce Planning Process?

The workforce planning process encompasses:

Workforce planning might come across as a vague term. Especially when it comes to overall business strategy. But. it has a very straightforward purpose and reasoning behind it.

Plan For Your Future With Data-Led Decisions

Reports Overview in HR Reporting Software

Gain access to the a wealth of people analytics you can use for more accurate planning. Automatically generate detailed reports in just one click.

Why Is Workforce Planning Important?

In today’s talent-based economy, the key element that keeps successful companies running is people.

But, as  the SHRM  states: “Despite its importance, this asset is often not carefully planned, measured, or optimised. This means that many organisations are not sufficiently aware of the current or future workforce gaps that will limit the execution of business strategy.”

As anyone who has ever experienced staff shortages will know, not having the right talent in place can cause enormous strain on a business. The professional services and HR consulting firm,  Mercer , explains it well: “A weak pipeline or hidden talent issues can shake your organisation’s very foundation before anyone has realised there might be a problem.”

However, if organisations are able to look ahead and plan what roles, skills, and people will be needed to meet their business goals now, and in the future, they are more likely to thrive.

Of course, this is often easier said than done. It involves a systematic, rigorous, and disciplined process combined with a:

Future-forward view of the world

Solid grasp of business strategy

Deep understanding of human talents and capabilities

Strategic, time-conscious, and thoughtful process

Download our guide to discovering solutions for resilient companies today.

Who Is In Charge Of Workforce Planning?

The short answer: a lot of people! In some organisations, there are a multitude of stakeholders in charge of the workforce planning process (HR, sales leaders, even the CEO). In some, it’s simply a mystery left to the C-suite. But, should it be that way? The responsibilities of workforce planning may reveal to us who truly should be in charge of steering the conversation.

After all, HR teams are the ones doing the majority of the sourcing, vetting, recruiting, and hiring. Being accountable to results like those means having a place at the table. This is most often where  strategic human resource management  comes into the equation as a tool to enable HR teams to lead conversations on greater workforce planning.

All of this is to say that the responsibilities of workforce planning will vary by organisation. It really depends on the role an HR team has, and whether or not they have been able to reserve their own spot at the table of management.

Do You Need Workforce Planning Tools?

Workforce planning tools can help offset some of the uncertainty surrounding workforce planning. That’s because it is an attempt to bridge the gap between where your workforce currently stands, and where it can go.

Check out our article about the top five workforce planning tools you can try today.

The Six Steps Of The Workforce Planning Process

The workforce planning process can be categorised into six key steps. As an organisation, it helps to sit down and define answers to each of these to try and bring meaning to each.

And, as mentioned before, while HR may drive the conversation, it is imperative that many key stakeholders find themselves a seat at the table. They all should be able to weigh in, in order to align your ‘people plan’ with your business plan.

Check out our guide to aligning your HR’s goals with the company’s goals today.

the strategic workforce planning process

1. What Is The Plan?

Where is your business going? Where do you want it to go? What are the current goals of top-level management? Workforce planning needs to start from the top down, and it needs to be set out by some kind of vision or overall goal to work toward. Whether that is doubling headcount or increasing the amount of leaders.

How do you formulate a proper HR strategy, overall? Here’s our guide to the process.

2. Who Do We Have Now?

The next step is to analyse the talent you have on hand. Who do you currently have working for you? What skills or training do they have? What seniority levels do you have a lot of? Take into account everything you currently have, ideally in the form of data and over a period of time to see how you’ve grown to this point.

3. What Do We Do Next?

Think about the space in between your current inventory of talent and your ultimate goal. So, what do you need next? Do you need more people? Different kinds of skills? More leaders? This will begin to inform you in terms of what you should do and what concrete measures you may need to implement.

4. Talent Gaps

Let’s dig a bit deeper. If we think about what we need to do next, first we need to think about what’s missing. What are the most pressing talent gaps in your organisation? Which ones would help you reach your goal sooner? For instance, would hiring the perfect high-level executive help to recruit even more mid-level talent? Which gaps, when solved, turn into their own amazing opportunities for growth?

5. Fixes & Initiatives

To address those gaps, what will you do? Will you focus on campus recruiting, formulating a more compelling remuneration package or rewards for top talent? What kind of fixes will help address those gaps, help you take the next in your workforce plan, ultimately to achieve your goal.

6. Measure Results

Did your fixes work? How much closer are you to your goal? Here, analytics and reporting are absolutely essential, as they can track your progress over time against your goal. And, in a click or two, you should be able to have a report that you can use and bring to executive management.

Here’s how to create reports in an instant with Personio.

Centralise Employee Data In One Ultra-Secure Place

Digital Employee Files on Different Devices

Create one single source of truth for all employee data and use it to prepare for your organisation’s future. Know exactly the talent you have on hand at a glance for your workforce planning.

How Does Workforce Planning Benefit Employees?

Mercer puts it this way in their  Global Talent Trends Report 2020:  “It can’t just be about employee capacity and business unit alignment, [workforce planning] must recognise employees’ potential and engagement and be intertwined with the company’s technology roadmap.”

Sadly, the same report which gathered insights from 7,000+ people from nine industries and 16 regions says that two in five HR leaders say they don’t know what skills they have in their workforce today!

That means that successful workforce planning requires a combination of:

WATCH: Get to know Personio in three minutes

workforce planning definition in business

We need your consent to load this service!

This content is not permitted to load due to trackers that are not disclosed to the visitor.

Start Strategic Workforce Planning With HR Software

Start your workforce planning journey on the right foot with an HR software like Personio. Unlock the power of employee data management, enhanced reporting, and improved decision making. Upgrade your people operations for now and into the future by starting a free trial with Personio today .

We would like to inform you that the contents of our website (including any legal contributions) are for non-binding informational purposes only and does not in any way constitute legal advice. The content of this information cannot and is not intended to replace individual and binding legal advice from e.g. a lawyer that addresses your specific situation. In this respect, all information provided is without guarantee of correctness, completeness and up-to-dateness.

Get The Data You Need To Strategise

Analytics and Reporting Employee Headcount Overview

Find out about insurance programs, pay types, leave options, and retirement planning.

Discover resources to have a balanced career at NIH.

Resources for training to develop your leadership and professional skills.

Access your personnel information and process HR actions through these systems.

Information for managers to support staff including engagement, recognition, and performance.

Discover what’s next at the NIH.

Workforce Planning

Workforce Planning is the process of analyzing, forecasting, and planning workforce supply and demand, assessing gaps, and determining target talent management interventions to ensure that an organization has the right people - with the right skills in the right places at the right time - to fulfill its mandate and strategic objectives.

Get Started

Enter the Toolkit and learn how to get started with your Workforce Planning Activities.

Explore the 6 Stages of Workforce Planning

Workforce planning slice

Click on a slice of the Cycle below to get started.

1. Strategic Direction

2. supply analysis, 3. demand analysis, 4. gap analysis, 5. solution implementation, 6. monitoring progress.

Contact us to ask a question, provide feedback, or report a problem.

right-icon

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vivamus convallis sem tellus, vitae egestas felis vestibule ut.

Error message details.

Reuse Permissions

Request permission to republish or redistribute SHRM content and materials.

Workforce Planning Is Essential to High-Performing Organizations

In today’s talent-based economy, the workforce itself is arguably the most important tangible asset of most organizations. Despite its importance, this asset is often not carefully planned, measured or optimized. This means that many organizations are not sufficiently aware of the current or future workforce gaps that will limit execution of business strategy. Yet at the same time, boards of directors, CEOs and chief human resources officers will frequently declare that workforce planning and data- driven decision-making is a top priority for their organizations. While it is difficult to understand this apparent gap between intent and execution, the most obvious cause is a lack of consistent objectives regarding the outputs of workforce planning, and a lack of consistent process by which organizations conduct workforce planning and predictive modeling. Organizations need an approach that moves workforce planning from the domain of “futurists,” where only a few people live, to the domain of operational effectiveness, where management is accustomed to spending its time and energy.

This article outlines what a pragmatic and operational workforce planning process should look like—as well as predictive tools that help organizations measure and respond to their workforce gaps. Using this model and tools, high-performance organizations can use workforce planning to ensure that they have the required talent to drive business objectives.

Overcoming Traditional Barriers to Workforce Planning

Workforce planning has topped the wish list of HR executives for years, but it has consistently been one of the most difficult programs to launch within HR. There are myriad reasons, but the most common are:

  • Time frame. Many managers are focused on executing current-year results, but workforce planning has typically addressed a longer time frame and doesn’t show immediate gains that can help meet this year’s results.
  • Data integrity concerns when “getting out of the gate.” Managers are reluctant to review future plans when they feel that they can’t get a proper view of current head count.
  • Control. Some managers have gut feelings and don’t want to reference data without a compelling data story. There is no opportunity to shift this stance until managers experience the actual pain that could have been avoided through workforce planning.
  • Detail. Organizations have a hard time settling on the appropriate level of granularity of workforce planning, or their job taxonomy. It’s generally understood that a workforce plan has to distinguish one type of job from the next, but is it sufficient to look at broad labor categories, narrower job families, individual jobs, or actual skillsets? So many organizations get into self-imposed delays in rolling out their planning program by trying to find the perfect level at which to plan. From a planning perspective, however, if organizations could start by planning out high-level job categories, this is a great start, and may be enough.
  • Forecasting. Traditional forecasting methods are poor at predicting the actual individuals at risk for turnover and retirement, and, thus, are not sufficiently actionable.

Two recent trends serve to moderate—and sometimes even eliminate—these potential roadblocks. The first is a broad-scale acceptance of data-driven decision-making that is infusing the culture of organizations and making workforce planning inherently more attractive. The second involves recent advances in predictive analytics and modeling technology. These advances provide more compelling near-term actionable information about granular employee-level supply risk, while simultaneously helping with demand-based scenario planning. Coupled together, these trends have a profound ability to move workforce planning from a “nice-to-have” status to a critical program for high-performance organizations. Diagram 1 outlines a workforce planning process that combines end-user-based demand planning with predictive supply analytics.

workforce planning definition in business

Following the workforce planning activities outlined in the diagram results in these benefits:

  • Aligns strategic planning with head count and talent planning.
  • Creates a clear view of talent demand and supply issues by expense area, reporting relationship, and by location.
  • Provides managers easy-to-use reports and tools to determine the impact of their talent decisions and prioritizes future workforce investments.
  • Provides leaders the right metrics—identifying talent risk before it impacts business objectives.
  • Helps control unplanned talent costs and highlights issues that limit employee productivity.
  • Builds competitive advantage through planned versus reactive talent management.
  • Gives business leaders consistent reporting of results to quantify measurable and meaningful outcomes.

The concepts of planned versus reactive risk management, and developing the right metrics are perhaps the most crucial levers to drive support for workforce planning. By shifting workforce planning from a top-down strategic exercise that is only geared towards provoking thought about the future to an operational exercise designed to manage talent risk, workforce planning becomes a concrete activity with specific financial implications. By providing metrics to quantify the risk, it provides something even more concrete for leaders to manage.

Demand Planning

Within the demand planning component of workforce planning, an organization determines the head count it needs in each job role for each organizational unit. Traditionally, a single person has conducted this work or a center of expertise has created plans and reports for internal customers. However, the future is inherently uncertain.

According to Peter Cappelli in his research on workforce planning, “The error rate in the U.S. on a one-year fore- cast of demand at the stock keeping unit (SKU) code or individual product level, for example, is over 30 percent” (“A Supply Chain Approach to Workforce Planning,” Organizational Dynamics ). Considering this uncertainty, centrally-generated reports and plans are interesting, but understandably have not resulted in the business gaining long-term adoption of the plans, or the workforce planning process.

There are two keys to moving beyond this demand planning impasse. The first is cultural. Organizations should avoid confusing planning with the plan, and should value planning as much, if not more, than the actual plan. The plan will not happen. The future is far too uncertain. Planning, however, is a competency that helps managers deal with such uncertainty more quickly and effectively.

The second key is to move from top-down planning to bottom-up planning, which requires technology that al- lows end users to evaluate various factors and define talent demand for their business area. This bottom-up planning can be rolled up for various corporate-wide outputs such as the corporate workforce plan, the budget feed, the real estate plan, the reforecast, and more. But, it also can be conducted as needed as part of a frequent recalibration of talent needs based on the state of the business.

According to Quinn Thompson, global director of Talent Acquisition and Diversity at International Paper on the shift to user-defined input driving their workforce planning process: “It starts with the benefits created by a center of excellence (CoE), but is based on software that allows end users to create their own workforce plans and end-customers to leverage predictive analytics for their customized gap analyses.”

A lower-performance organization will have managers decide in a vacuum on their need for talent. In this setting, the industry experience of managers and the amount of data available to make the decision defines the quality of the output. In a high-performance organization, managers are guided through the decision-making process.

For example, a manager may be led through a decision tree based on strategic objectives and job criticality. Alternately, a manager may be provided with demand drivers and conduct what-if scenarios that help determine the appropriate number of workers for the workload based on a combination of historical staffing levels and productivity objectives.

In the ideal situation, a manager could be provided a detailed proforma demand plan that describes the staffing level for job roles based upon how the organization typically staffs against work volumes and other demand drivers. Then the manager can be led through decision- making to ask questions such as:

  • Do we typically staff against demand correctly? Specifically, do we hire too soon, too late, too much, too little—because knowing how the business is likely to behave in its staffing approach does not mean it’s the correct approach. It’s just a great starting point of the decision-making—and not the end, as there may be a need to not only know, but also optimize staffing levels.
  • When we examine our business strategies and look at the specific ways we want to create value, does that describe certain roles that should be staffed up?
  • Conversely, when we look at those strategies, are there certain staff areas that are relatively low risk for understaffing. Because it is not possible to staff everything generously, where can we “understaff” with minimal risk to the business?

In summary, a technology-enabled bottom-up approach to demand planning creates a more accurate plan and enables a planning culture where managers use data to make staffing decisions – and are more equipped to evaluate how changes to business objectives and environment should impact staffing levels.

Internal Supply Analysis

Within the internal supply analysis component of workforce planning, an organization evaluates whether it has the supply internally to meet its demand. On a quantitative basis, the process is to evaluate talent supply by job role after attrition: turnover, retirement and internal job movement. On a qualitative basis, it is important to also look at capability and performance, even within jobs that are fully staffed.

To derive a supply forecast, a lower performance organization will simply carry forward historical turnover rates or use industry benchmarks. This approach is not sufficiently actionable—at best it is only interesting data to consider as part of workforce planning; at worst, it is incorrect.

A high-performance organization will use predictive analytics to identify the risk of turnover, retirement, and workforce mobility of specific individuals. Machine learning statistics packages allow an organization to conduct complex multivariate analysis that incorporates employee demographics, employer actions and workplace conditions, and external economic conditions. Diagram 2 illustrates some of the factors that can be used for predicting turnover, retirement and mobility, as well as the rough importance of such factors in predictive studies.

workforce planning definition in business

Diagram 2. Drivers of Attrition.

An accurate internal supply forecast can thus be aggregated by any dimension and provide a much clearer line of sight into supply risks that need to be closed to fully meet talent demand requirements. Knowing which individuals are at highest risk for turnover provides an organization the lead-time to address future workforce gaps with minimal disruption to the business, enabling the following outcomes:

  • Creation of targeted replacement planning and knowledge transfer for critical roles.
  • Understanding which talent gaps are largest, highest priority and/or most difficult to fill externally.
  • Proactive sourcing by the recruiting function based on prioritization of gaps.
  • Road map of future open positions that can be fi through promotions and developmental assignments.
  • Managed attrition programs that avoid costly work- force reductions for job roles that have a reduced staffing requirement.

As with demand planning, technology is a key enabler for internal supply analysis, since it provides a forecast of attrition and movement risk on an employee-by-employee basis. Furthermore, this approach helps organizations that are not currently proficient at demand planning to move towards proficiency by highlighting problems that require consideration of the importance of that problem, i.e., the demand. For example, if a certain employee is known as highly likely to turnover, a manager can ask what’s the risk to my work unit of this likely turnover event? Will we still get the required work completed? If the answer is no, is it because of the necessity of the role or the performance of the individual? If the answer is yes, is it because we are overstaffed in this role? Can we eliminate the role with the likely turnover event and hire for a more critical need? In short, reviewing turnover, retirement, and movement risks helps this hypothetical manager conduct demand planning on a micro level, and with the right tools and training, the manager will improve talent decision-making.

Gap Analysis and Action Planning

Within the gap analysis and action-planning component of workforce planning, an organization evaluates its gaps and determines what actions it can take to close those gaps. Traditionally, those actions consisted of recruiting, development and transition, but with modern predictive technology, an organization can also model the prospective impact of potential interventions in HR policies and talent management actions.

A lower performance organization may not understand its gaps, except in the most qualitative sense. This organization can have qualitative action-planning discussions that educate leaders about some workforce risks, but cannot quantify those risks or change any organizational behaviors based on these gaps.

A proficient organization can combine its demand planning and internal supply analysis as described above and gain a much clearer picture of the size, type, and timing of gaps between demand and supply. These gaps will lead to a high-quality directional recruitment plan and will highlight areas where an organization may wish to beef up its developmental programs where there are large and consistent gaps. This gap analysis will also highlight where there are job roles that are subject to career transition in one part of the business (demand less than supply) and requiring recruitment in another part of the business (demand greater than supply), so that an organization can reallocate resources and avoid some of the costly cycles of staffing up and down. Each of these responses to the demand-supply gap represents valuable organizational action-planning to address gaps, but do not go as far as making specific interventions to change and control the demand-supply gaps.

A high-performance organization will build upon the specific quantitative plan for build-buy-lease as discussed for a proficient organization and will also use technology to conduct what-if analysis to evaluate specific management interventions. The organization will understand how a number of factors drive retention, engagement and organizational performance, including:

  • Pay strategy and annual merit increase.
  • Career ladders and working structures.
  • Promotions, lateral transfers and reorgs.

By understanding these relationships, a high-performance organization can seek to close gaps not only through the traditional means of build-buy-lease, but also achieve higher retention and performance by optimizing its workforce policies around those desired outcomes.

This organization will not only be creating the appropriate plans to address gaps between its forecasted demand and supply, but will be selectively addressing potential retention and performance risks of critical resources and roles, and will manage those risks through individual action planning measures.

There is now an approach for high-performance organizations to develop and sustain high-quality workforce planning programs, and break down the traditional barriers to effective workforce planning. The organization must foster a data-driven planning culture and be willing to value the planning process as much as the actual plan. The managers who participate in this planning process will then be better equipped to make decisions as business results and forecasts change—and more skilled at simulating how changes in business objectives and conditions require different talent sets. The organization must also invest in workforce planning technology that supports predictive supply analytics, bottom-up demand planning, employee- level action-planning, and summarization of gaps.

By taking this approach, a high performance organization will be able to conduct gap analysis on the work unit, business unit, and on the organization as a whole. At the work unit level, managers will be better at planning and responding to changes in the business. Managers will also be able to make data-driven decisions that move gradually from blanket HR policies to targeted HR interventions based on the importance of a role or the performance of the individual. Business units and the total organization will also reap the benefits of the workforce planning pro- gram. Finance and real estate will have the information needed to construct their budgets. Human Resources will be able to make better high-level decisions about recruitment, development, redeployment, and transition pro- grams. And, senior leadership will be able to monitor the people health of the organization and the organizational capacity to meet present and future business objectives.

About the Author

Peter Louch is the founder and CEO of Vemo, a software and services organization that is pioneering the new way to do workforce planning. As founder of Vemo, he works with customer executive teams and ensures that Vemo’s road map for technology and services are geared to provide simple and elegant solutions to the most complex and highest-impact customer problems. Louch also works with select global customers and industry leaders to provide consulting/advisory services and build requirements for complex engagements. Prior to Vemo, he led the Talent value Management practice area of Right Management Consultants and The Empower Group, divisions of Manpower. He has also held successive sales and leadership positions with the Advertising & Communications division of TMP Worldwide. He graduated with high honors from University of California at Berkeley with a degree in astrophysics. He can be reached at peter.louch@vemoworkforce.com .

Copyright 2014 International Association of Human Resource Management. Used with permission.

Related Content

workforce planning definition in business

Rising Demand for Workforce AI Skills Leads to Calls for Upskilling

As artificial intelligence technology continues to develop, the demand for workers with the ability to work alongside and manage AI systems will increase. This means that workers who are not able to adapt and learn these new skills will be left behind in the job market.

A vast majority of U.S. professionals  think students should be prepared to use AI upon entering the workforce.

Employers Want New Grads with AI Experience, Knowledge

A vast majority of U.S. professionals say students entering the workforce should have experience using AI and be prepared to use it in the workplace, and they expect higher education to play a critical role in that preparation.

Advertisement

HR Daily Newsletter

New, trends and analysis, as well as breaking news alerts, to help HR professionals do their jobs better each business day.

Success title

Success caption

  • Auto Insurance Best Car Insurance Cheapest Car Insurance Compare Car Insurance Quotes Best Car Insurance For Young Drivers Best Auto & Home Bundles Cheapest Cars To Insure
  • Home Insurance Best Home Insurance Best Renters Insurance Cheapest Homeowners Insurance Types Of Homeowners Insurance
  • Life Insurance Best Life Insurance Best Term Life Insurance Best Senior Life Insurance Best Whole Life Insurance Best No Exam Life Insurance
  • Pet Insurance Best Pet Insurance Cheap Pet Insurance Pet Insurance Costs Compare Pet Insurance Quotes
  • Travel Insurance Best Travel Insurance Cancel For Any Reason Travel Insurance Best Cruise Travel Insurance Best Senior Travel Insurance
  • Health Insurance Best Health Insurance Plans Best Affordable Health Insurance Best Dental Insurance Best Vision Insurance Best Disability Insurance
  • Credit Cards Best Credit Cards 2024 Best Balance Transfer Credit Cards Best Rewards Credit Cards Best Cash Back Credit Cards Best Travel Rewards Credit Cards Best 0% APR Credit Cards Best Business Credit Cards Best Credit Cards for Startups Best Credit Cards For Bad Credit Best Cards for Students without Credit
  • Credit Card Reviews Chase Sapphire Preferred Wells Fargo Active Cash® Chase Sapphire Reserve Citi Double Cash Citi Diamond Preferred Chase Ink Business Unlimited American Express Blue Business Plus
  • Credit Card by Issuer Best Chase Credit Cards Best American Express Credit Cards Best Bank of America Credit Cards Best Visa Credit Cards
  • Credit Score Best Credit Monitoring Services Best Identity Theft Protection
  • CDs Best CD Rates Best No Penalty CDs Best Jumbo CD Rates Best 3 Month CD Rates Best 6 Month CD Rates Best 9 Month CD Rates Best 1 Year CD Rates Best 2 Year CD Rates Best 5 Year CD Rates
  • Checking Best High-Yield Checking Accounts Best Checking Accounts Best No Fee Checking Accounts Best Teen Checking Accounts Best Student Checking Accounts Best Joint Checking Accounts Best Business Checking Accounts Best Free Checking Accounts
  • Savings Best High-Yield Savings Accounts Best Free No-Fee Savings Accounts Simple Savings Calculator Monthly Budget Calculator: 50/30/20
  • Mortgages Best Mortgage Lenders Best Online Mortgage Lenders Current Mortgage Rates Best HELOC Rates Best Mortgage Refinance Lenders Best Home Equity Loan Lenders Best VA Mortgage Lenders Mortgage Refinance Rates Mortgage Interest Rate Forecast
  • Personal Loans Best Personal Loans Best Debt Consolidation Loans Best Emergency Loans Best Home Improvement Loans Best Bad Credit Loans Best Installment Loans For Bad Credit Best Personal Loans For Fair Credit Best Low Interest Personal Loans
  • Student Loans Best Student Loans Best Student Loan Refinance Best Student Loans for Bad or No Credit Best Low-Interest Student Loans
  • Business Loans Best Business Loans Best Business Lines of Credit Apply For A Business Loan Business Loan vs. Business Line Of Credit What Is An SBA Loan?
  • Investing Best Online Brokers Top 10 Cryptocurrencies Best Low-Risk Investments Best Cheap Stocks To Buy Now Best S&P 500 Index Funds Best Stocks For Beginners How To Make Money From Investing In Stocks
  • Retirement Best Gold IRAs Best Investments for a Roth IRA Best Bitcoin IRAs Protecting Your 401(k) In a Recession Types of IRAs Roth vs Traditional IRA How To Open A Roth IRA
  • Business Formation Best LLC Services Best Registered Agent Services How To Start An LLC How To Start A Business
  • Web Design & Hosting Best Website Builders Best E-commerce Platforms Best Domain Registrar
  • HR & Payroll Best Payroll Software Best HR Software Best HRIS Systems Best Recruiting Software Best Applicant Tracking Systems
  • Payment Processing Best Credit Card Processing Companies Best POS Systems Best Merchant Services Best Credit Card Readers How To Accept Credit Cards
  • More Business Solutions Best VPNs Best VoIP Services Best Project Management Software Best CRM Software Best Accounting Software
  • Manage Topics
  • Investigations
  • Visual Explainers
  • Newsletters
  • Abortion news
  • Coronavirus
  • Climate Change
  • Vertical Storytelling
  • Corrections Policy
  • College Football
  • High School Sports
  • H.S. Sports Awards
  • Sports Betting
  • College Basketball (M)
  • College Basketball (W)
  • For The Win
  • Sports Pulse
  • Weekly Pulse
  • Buy Tickets
  • Sports Seriously
  • Sports+ States
  • Celebrities
  • Entertainment This!
  • Celebrity Deaths
  • American Influencer Awards
  • Women of the Century
  • Problem Solved
  • Personal Finance
  • Small Business
  • Consumer Recalls
  • Video Games
  • Product Reviews
  • Destinations
  • Airline News
  • Experience America
  • Today's Debate
  • Suzette Hackney
  • Policing the USA
  • Meet the Editorial Board
  • How to Submit Content
  • Hidden Common Ground
  • Race in America

Personal Loans

Best Personal Loans

Auto Insurance

Best Auto Insurance

Best High-Yields Savings Accounts

CREDIT CARDS

Best Credit Cards

Advertiser Disclosure

Blueprint is an independent, advertising-supported comparison service focused on helping readers make smarter decisions. We receive compensation from the companies that advertise on Blueprint which may impact how and where products appear on this site. The compensation we receive from advertisers does not influence the recommendations or advice our editorial team provides in our articles or otherwise impact any of the editorial content on Blueprint. Blueprint does not include all companies, products or offers that may be available to you within the market. A list of selected affiliate partners is available here .

What is workforce management? Definition and best practices

Robert Bruce

Alana Rudder

Alana Rudder

“Verified by an expert” means that this article has been thoroughly reviewed and evaluated for accuracy.

Published 7:38 a.m. UTC Dec. 14, 2023

  • path]:fill-[#49619B]" alt="Facebook" width="18" height="18" viewBox="0 0 18 18" fill="none" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
  • path]:fill-[#202020]" alt="Email" width="19" height="14" viewBox="0 0 19 14" fill="none" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">

Editorial Note: Blueprint may earn a commission from affiliate partner links featured here on our site. This commission does not influence our editors' opinions or evaluations. Please view our full advertiser disclosure policy .

Featured Image

© Doug Engle/Ocala Star-Banner / USA TODAY NETWORK, Imagn Images

Workforce management (WFM) is the process by which a company makes all of the complex factors of running a successful business come together to maximize an organization’s productivity and competency. 

The concept of workforce management began in the 1980s in call centers to improve customer service and call center performance. Many other industries have since adopted workforce management to improve their own processes. 

It’s an intentional process that starts with top-level leadership defining strategic goals, so every employee knows their role and has clear direction on expectations. The idea is to have every employee positioned to succeed and in the right place at the right time. 

Featured payroll software offers

workforce planning definition in business

Via Rippling’s website

Monthly fee

Starting at $8 per month per user

Direct deposit

workforce planning definition in business

Via OnPay’s website

$40 per month plus $6 per employee

workforce planning definition in business

Via Paychex’s website

$39 plus $5 per user

SurePayroll

workforce planning definition in business

Via SurePayroll’s website

$29.99 per month plus $5 per employee

What are the benefits of workforce management?

Workforce management software offers a wide range of benefits, including:

  • Streamline payroll: Human error is eliminated through a centralized hub with automated processes that analyze data and identify patterns to make payroll more reliable. 
  • Maximize productivity: Employee attendance and time data is tracked to allow employers to improve time management productivity if needed and even implement a scheduling system. 
  • Manage compliance and risk: Tracking tools allow companies to save time while making sure they are following up-to-date compliance measures and reducing risk. Accompanying recordkeeping information will help in case of an audit. 
  • Manage costs: With real-time information on hand, managers can forecast future expenses and staffing needs and adjust budgets if needed. 
  • Applicant tracking: Workforce management tools give HR leaders the information they need to spot organizational needs and hire the right people for those positions. These tools also help with talent recruitment and retention. 

What does workforce management include?

A solid workforce management solution will provide a variety of functions to help employers. When shopping around for workforce management software, keep some of the following key functions in mind. 

Workforce management software allows managers to filter through different criteria — such as experience, preferences and availability — to create optimized and balanced schedules that place employees in the right spots on the right days. 

Good software will also allow managers to look at past data to get a feel for likely labor needs as they schedule in the future. 

Absence and overtime management

A good workforce solution can track accumulated employee absences and even trigger alerts when an employee is approaching overtime accumulation levels. A feature like this also allows managers to regulate overtime hours to avoid unexpected payroll costs. 

Learn how to calculate overtime with our guide.

Labor forecasting

Life happens — for both you as a company and your employees. You may go through a season where turnover is light and a season where turnover is high, and even when workers are more absent than usual. 

A workforce management tool allows you to see that info in real time so you can stay within labor budgets. And it’s not just turnover — good workforce tools allow you to know when your workers may be more or less available so you can model future staffing issues and resolve them before they pose a risk to your operations.

Customizable dashboards allow employers to run historical reports to see trends in many filtered categories and make adjustments if needed. These tools also provide insights into improving employee productivity and capacity. 

Keeping up with changing state and federal labor laws can be challenging. A workforce solution provides the real-time and historical data you need to stay in line with wage and hour laws and employer policies. They can also help with valuable reporting information in the case of an audit. 

Top workforce management solutions

There are a countless number of workforce management solutions on the market in 2023. Here are three of the top performers based on our data and research. 

Monday Work Management 

Monday.com Work Management is one of the highest-rated workforce management solutions on the market. 

The tool’s intuitive software helps managers plan and manage the strategic side of work from the top. Monday.com’s user interface is bright and colorful. The dashboard — which comes with more than 30 widgets — is easy to navigate, helping managers make informed decisions about scheduling, project management, requests and approvals. 

Monday.com offers five pricing plans:

  • Free plan: For individuals getting started, this plan allows for up to two users. 
  • Basic plan: For $10 per user per month, this plan allows unlimited free users, five GB of storage and prioritized customer support. 
  • Standard plan: For $12 per user per month, the Standard plan offers timeline and Gantt views, guest access and 250 automations and integrations per month. 
  • Pro plan: The Pro plan is $20 per user per month and includes private boards, time tracking, chart views and 25,000 automations and integrations per month. 
  • Enterprise plan: For this plan’s pricing details, you must call Monday.com. It offers exclusive features like enterprise-scale automations and integrations, multi-level permission, high-grade security, advanced reporting and analytics and tailored onboarding. 

Monday.com’s software received highly rated reviews from customers. The app receives a 4.8 rating out of five stars on the Apple App Store and the software receives a 3.6 out of five stars on Trustpilot. 

ClickUp is another highly-rated workforce management solution. The company says its major features help align everyone on a single platform and offers a design that allows users to manage any type of work. 

ClickUp’s software works in many different team environments — including for project management, marketing, product management and sales teams. The company says the software benefits different-sized companies, from startups and nonprofits to medium-sized companies and full enterprises. 

ClickUp has four different pricing plans. Its annual plans allow users to save up to 37% per year. 

  • Free plan: This plan is ideal for personal use and comes with 100 MB of storage, unlimited tasks, unlimited free plan members, whiteboard, real-time chat, calendar view and kanban boards. 
  • Unlimited plan: The Unlimited plan is $10 per user per month and serves small teams. It comes with unlimited storage, integrations and dashboards, as well as resource management tools, unlimited Gantt charts and native time tracking. 
  • Business plan: This plan is $19 per user per month. Ideal for mid-sized teams, it comes with Google SSO, unlimited teams, custom exporting, workload management tools, timesheets, goal folders and advanced automations and dashboard features. 
  • Enterprise plan: For pricing details on this plan, you must contact ClickUp. It best serves large companies with multiple large teams and comes with advanced permissions, enterprise API, unlimited custom roles, single sign-on (SSO), live onboarding training and a customer success manager. 

ClickUp also receives great customer reviews. The app is rated 4.6 out of five on the Apple App Store and Trustpilot reviewers give ClickUp a 3.3 average rating. 

For more details on the difference between Monday.com and ClickUp, read our Monday vs. ClickUP comparison guide .

Rippling’s workforce management solution receives high user ratings from both customers and professionals. The company says its software allows users to easily manage employees’ payroll, benefits, expenses, devices and apps in one place.

Its workforce management software works for both small teams and a fully distributed workforce around the world. It gives employers a single system to hire, pay and manage employees and contractors.

Rippling doesn’t publish its pricing online, other than saying it starts at $8 per user per month. Its Core plans are used as a unifying system in which users can integrate other workforce management modules, such as Rippling’s IT Cloud, Finance Cloud or HR Cloud. 

The four Core plans are: 

  • Core: The Core plan includes a global employee graph, global org chart, global workforce analytics, advanced compensation management, vacation and leave management and workflow and employee lifecycle automation. 
  • Pro: The Pro plan has everything Core offers, plus a workflow studio, 10 custom workflows, 10 formula fields and 10 advanced reports.
  • Unlimited: The Unlimited plan has everything Core and Pro offers, plus unlimited workflows, unlimited formula fields, unlimited advanced reports and webhooks that allow you to start actions in third-party systems.
  • Enterprise: The Enterprise plan includes everything in the Core, Pro and Unlimited plans, plus Rippling AI, which allows you to read and access your company’s data through API (Application Programming Interface). 

Rippling’s workforce management solution receives a 4.1 out of 5 rating on the Apple App Store and a 4.8 rating on Trustpilot. 

Learn more: Read our full Rippling review .

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Workforce management software allows employers to streamline payroll; manage labor, productivity, compliance, risk and costs and access applicant tracking. It can be used by individuals, small teams, mid-sized businesses and large multi-dimensional or global enterprises . 

Common challenges include scheduling, managing overtime and absences, labor forecasting, managing compliance, streamlining payroll and tracking applicants through the recruitment, hiring and onboarding process. A workforce management solution helps employers counter all of these challenges through analysis, automation and collaboration.

Workforce management software companies typically offer a wide variety of pricing plans. For example, many include free plans for individuals to get started and see if a workforce management software is right for them, as well as plans for small teams to large enterprises that can range from $7 to $20 per user per month when paying annually.

Blueprint is an independent publisher and comparison service, not an investment advisor. The information provided is for educational purposes only and we encourage you to seek personalized advice from qualified professionals regarding specific financial decisions. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

Blueprint has an advertiser disclosure policy . The opinions, analyses, reviews or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the Blueprint editorial staff alone. Blueprint adheres to strict editorial integrity standards. The information is accurate as of the publish date, but always check the provider’s website for the most current information.

Robert Bruce

Robert Bruce has been a full-time writer for nearly 20 years. His work has been featured in US News & World Report, Yahoo Finance, The Penny Hoarder, The Money Manual, WGN Chicago, Nashville Lifestyles Magazine, among others.

Alana is the deputy editor for USA Today Blueprint's small business team. She has served as a technology and marketing SME for countless businesses, from startups to leading tech firms — including Adobe and Workfusion. She has zealously shared her expertise with small businesses — including via Forbes Advisor and Fit Small Business — to help them compete for market share. She covers technologies pertaining to payroll and payment processing, online security, customer relationship management, accounting, human resources, marketing, project management, resource planning, customer data management and how small businesses can use process automation, AI and ML to more easily meet their goals. Alana has an MBA from Excelsior University.

How to start a small business: A step-by-step guide

How to start a small business: A step-by-step guide

Business Eric Rosenberg

workforce planning definition in business

Grade Booster exam workshops for 2024 . Join us in to Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, London, Manchester and Newcastle Book now →

Reference Library

Collections

  • See what's new
  • All Resources
  • Student Resources
  • Assessment Resources
  • Teaching Resources
  • CPD Courses
  • Livestreams

Study notes, videos, interactive activities and more!

Business news, insights and enrichment

Currated collections of free resources

Browse resources by topic

  • All Business Resources

Resource Selections

Currated lists of resources

Study Notes

Workforce planning

Last updated 22 Mar 2021

  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share by Email

For most businesses, large or small, the task of identifying what work needs doing and who should do it is a continuous challenge! Workforce planning is the approach most businesses take to address this challenge.

It is rare that a business of any size operates for long without having to recruit or remove employees.

For example, consider why a business might need to recruit staff:

  • Business expansion due to
  • - Increasing sales of existing products
  • - Developing new products
  • - Entering new markets
  • Existing employees leave:
  • - To work with competitors or other local employers
  • - Due to factors such as retirement, sick leave, maternity leave
  • Business needs employees with new skills
  • Business is relocating – and not all of existing workforce want to move to new location

The world of work is also changing rapidly:

  • Increase in part-time working
  • Increased number of single-parent families
  • More women seeking work
  • Ageing population
  • Greater emphasis on flexible working hours
  • Technology allows employees to communicate more effectively whilst apart
  • People rarely stay in the same job for life

Businesses need to understand and respond to these changes if they are to recruit staff of the right standard – and keep them!

So what is workforce planning?

Workforce planning is about deciding how many and what types of workers are required

There are several steps involved in workforce planning:

  • The workforce plan establishes what vacancies exist
  • Managers produce a job description and job specification for each post
  • Job description
  • Detailed explanation of the roles and responsibilities of the post advertised
  • Most applicants will ask for this before applying for the job
  • Refers to the post available rather than the person

Job specification

  • Sets out the kind of qualifications, skills, experience and personal attributes a successful candidate should possess.
  • A vital tool in assessing the suitability of job applicants
  • Refers to the person rather than the post
  • Workforce planning
  • Flexible working

You might also like

Workforce effectiveness & management (revision presentation).

Teaching PowerPoints

Flexible Working

Workforce planning (revision presentation).

workforce planning definition in business

Is This the World's Worst Job Description?

26th August 2015

Seasonal Demand - the Operational & HRM Challenges of E-Commerce

30th November 2015

Low unemployment is bad news for employers needing seasonal labour

Recruitment.

Quizzes & Activities

Human Resource Planning

Our subjects.

  • › Criminology
  • › Economics
  • › Geography
  • › Health & Social Care
  • › Psychology
  • › Sociology
  • › Teaching & learning resources
  • › Student revision workshops
  • › Online student courses
  • › CPD for teachers
  • › Livestreams
  • › Teaching jobs

Boston House, 214 High Street, Boston Spa, West Yorkshire, LS23 6AD Tel: 01937 848885

  • › Contact us
  • › Terms of use
  • › Privacy & cookies

© 2002-2024 Tutor2u Limited. Company Reg no: 04489574. VAT reg no 816865400.

Field Engineer

The Importance of Workforce Planning for Business Success

Workforce planning is a strategic process that identifies and addresses current and future workforce needs. It involves analyzing goals, assessing the workforce, and projecting future requirements. This article explores key steps and tips for effective implementation.

The Importance of Workforce Planning for Business Success

How can an organization ensure that it has the right people, with the right skills, in the right positions, at the right time? The answer lies in workforce planning.

Workforce planning is a strategic process that enables organizations to identify and address their current and future workforce needs. It involves analyzing the organization's goals and objectives, assessing its current workforce, and projecting future workforce requirements.

Effective workforce planning can help organizations to optimize their workforce, reduce costs, and improve productivity. In this article, we'll explore the key steps involved in workforce planning and provide tips on implementing an effective workforce planning process in your organization. Whether you're a small business owner or an HR professional in a large organization, this article will help you better understand the importance of workforce planning and how it can benefit your organization.

fieldengineer.com | The Importance of Workforce Planning for Business Success

What Is Workforce Planning?

Workforce planning is essential for businesses to leverage their most valuable asset – their people properly. It allows organizations to effectively plan and use data to ensure the workforce supports its business needs, goals, and strategic plans. Workforce planning helps HR departments make informed decisions regarding needed talent by assessing the organization's needs and strategic plans.

Once this assessment has been conducted, workforce planning utilizes possible staffing solutions and technology-based solutions that can help balance out resources, optimize operations and create more efficient processes.

Furthermore, having an adequate workforce with capable employees can help reduce operating costs and increase employee engagement and job satisfaction. Ultimately, proper workforce planning gives businesses a competitive advantage in today’s highly digitalized world by understanding talent needs and predicting outcomes or potential gaps to fill them promptly.

Why Is Workforce Planning Important?

Workforce planning is a critical component of any successful business. It is important for businesses to regularly assess current and future staffing needs to ensure the proper number of employees is allocated for the tasks that need to be completed.

Without workforce planning, companies risk becoming overstaffed, incurring high payroll costs, or even worse, becoming understaffed and unable to meet customer or client needs adequately. This affects efficiency and profitability and could lead to additional stress on existing staff members and potential reputational damage.

When done properly, workforce planning will keep businesses running smoothly by enabling them to prepare for change proactively. A well-defined plan increases productivity as teams will know what tasks must be completed at all times, allowing them to work cohesively towards shared goals.

Workforce planning can also improve customer satisfaction by ensuring timely deliveries and consistent quality of service regardless of changes in demand patterns or employee changes.

Additionally, this practice can help reduce overhead costs associated with re-hiring or providing unnecessary training due to frequent staff turnover. Ultimately, it’s an investment worth making as it allows organizations to effectively maximize the use of their human resources while remaining competitive in their industry.

Steps Involved in Workforce Planning

Workforce planning should be an ongoing process. Here are the steps to creating an effective workforce plan:

Evaluate Current Talent

Talent evaluation plays a key role in any organization’s success. Organizations must assess their current personnel on an ongoing basis to understand the skills and abilities within their reach. It is important to consider how well employees are performing, how they match with the organization’s goals and objectives, whether there is potential for growth or specialization, and if further training and development are necessary. Additionally, organizations need to analyze external factors to determine if the talent supply is sufficient for current needs as well as future plans of expansion.

Organizations often need new talent when there are gaps in abilities or when further growth is needed. One way to acquire talent from outside the organization is through hiring new employees; however, this can be costly or difficult depending on budget constraints and access to available sources of skilled labor.

Another avenue to explore is tapping into external networks such as universities, professional associations or private companies that specialize in employee recruitment. From these networks, sourcing qualified candidates for positions may be possible while still keeping costs reasonable. Ultimately evaluating ones existing talent supply through internal reviews and recognizing external opportunities will give organizations the best chance at acquiring the right personnel for successful growth.

Think About the Future.

In order to think about the future effectively, it is necessary to review the organization's objectives and business plans. This can be done by examining current goals, industry trends, and even competitors' strategies. This forms an important foundation for developing a viable path forward.

Once that path has been established, the personnel needed to achieve it should be assessed. This involves understanding specific talent requirements across roles and duties within each role. It also necessitates consideration when it comes to how changes in staffing might affect organizational capabilities. For instance, if employees are expected to leave soon, or there are opportunities for additional growth, these factors should inform staffing decisions. Forecasting who is likely to fulfill specific roles and obligations in the next few months or years allows companies to pivot quickly when necessary.

Identify Potential Gaps

Finding potential gaps in an organization is an important component of planning for the future and ensuring that all necessary resources are available. By comparing assessments of employees, their skills, credentials, and capabilities to the organization's objectives, it is easy to spot potential weak points or imbalances in the organization. This can lead to identifying any surpluses or deficiencies of certain skills or roles that could benefit from additional staff or more training.

The assessment process should be ongoing; as an organization grows and needs change, its skill set requirements will vary over time. Analyzing employee experience and credentials can help identify any existing vacancies or those that may arise in the future. Lastly, incorporating external experts into organizational operations can broaden perspectives on how things might work better in the future and identify any potential pitfalls along the way.

Develop a Solution

When developing a solution for an identified problem, it is important to conduct an assessment and evaluate the organization's needs. This involves closely examining the current state and potential future outcomes based on different factors. After careful consideration, you will be able to determine an appropriate solution.

For example, if additional training is necessary for better preparing the current workforce, consider undertaking a training program to address any skill gaps that may arise. Consider the best course of action based on budget, staff availability, and other resources.

If more personnel are needed to meet organizational requirements, it is important to research your budget options and prepare for the recruitment process. This could involve expanding networking efforts and utilizing recruitment sites like LinkedIn, Indeed, FieldEngineer, or others.

Additionally, make sure to verify credentials when conducting interviews so that only qualified candidates are considered for available positions. When developing a successful solution, it is essential to consider all relevant factors to achieve positive outcomes for both employees and organization.

Implement & Monitor Your Solution.

Once solutions have been identified to address workforce needs, it is important to implement them according to plan. This will ensure that the strategies are successfully implemented and positively impact the company’s efficiency and productivity. Prioritizing solutions can be done based on the urgency of their need and how likely it is to produce successful results. For example, if one resource gap is needed right away, then implementing this solution should be prioritized above others for which more time may be available.

In addition to implementation, monitoring is necessary to evaluate whether these strategies are creating the desired outcomes. It may involve analyzing indicators such as employee satisfaction, operational results, and budget costs associated with implementing new solutions.

Regular evaluations help identify where adjustments or improvements can be made to ensure goals are achieved effectively and efficiently. Companies that continue to monitor and assess their strategies can more easily stay focused on what works best for their business so that they remain competitive in their industry.

Benefits of Workforce Planning

workforce planning can provide organizations with the tools needed to make strategic decisions about where their workforce stands in relation to their overall vision and goals. By taking the time to practice effective workforce planning, companies can enjoy many benefits.

Through workforce planning, businesses create a road map for achieving their goals. By aligning the supply and demand of the workforce with the organization's strategic plan, it sets them on a path to success for turning those plans into reality.

It also allows them to prepare for future needs by looking at labor market trends, technological alternatives, and other options for optimizing job responsibilities. This enables them to proactively avoid potential issues they’ll need to tackle later down the line rather than reactively. All in all, taking the time for thoughtful workforce planning brings numerous advantages that make it well worth investing in.

Workforce planning also offers businesses the opportunity to identify and develop talent. Through proper workforce planning, companies can identify the skills they need from their employees to execute their plans and achieve their goals. This allows them to determine which roles require further training or development and which require more experienced professionals to maximize efficiency.

Additionally, it enables them to look at potential gaps in knowledge or skill sets and ensure that the necessary training is provided to fill those gaps. This helps optimize existing resources and provides employees with more opportunities for professional growth, leading to increased job satisfaction.

Who are Key Players in Workforce Planning?

The workforce planning process is a critical part of any organization, so knowing who is in charge is important. In many cases, it can seem unclear and even mysterious which individuals are ultimately answerable for the decisions made. It may be left to the C-suite to make the big calls, but often this is not ideal without input from other key stakeholders. This could include those within Human Resources (HR), the sales leaders, or even other senior areas like Executive Leadership.

HR teams are frequently at the center of workforce planning, largely responsible for sourcing, vetting, recruiting, and hiring personnel. Indeed, they should have an influential voice when discussing matters of strategy and policy around staffing solutions. Ensuring transparency across different functions regarding workforce planning will help ensure everyone involved in the process understands how key decisions are made. With all parties correctly focused on creating a successful pathway forward, success can be firmly rooted in perspective and buy-in from throughout an organization.

Example of Workforce Planning

To ensure the organization’s success, workforce planning is essential. It is prudent for HR leaders to develop multiple plans that are flexible and agile according to potential future needs. An example of workforce planning would be if a company was rapidly expanding into a new market. In order for it to be successful, hiring the right talent quickly and effectively is necessary. Thus, this type of plan focuses on recruitment while also evaluating current employees in terms of their possibilities for leadership roles or management positions.

Further researching best practices in recruiting, onboarding, and developing staff is vital when growth surges due to market or product launch changes. This proceeds through providing proper onboarding materials, training sessions upon hire, continuous mentorship, and career development initiatives created within the organization as seen fit by HR and other organizational leaders. Such actions create a conducive environment for employee loyalty and engagement, which directly link to retaining the best possible talents available to stay competitive even in an ever-changing business operations landscape.

Bottom Line

When it comes to achieving success within an organization, taking a strategic approach to workforce planning is essential. This plan outlines the number of employees needed, the skills and experience required of the team members, and promotes communication between management and employees alike. It takes effort to devise a successful workforce plan, but it is an invaluable asset with immense potential for improving company performance.

When done correctly, workforce planning can result in higher retention rates as well as promote efficiencies in business operations. This helps optimize employee resources and provides greater value for organizations. Knowing the right number of personnel needed in each role also assists in budgeting. Accurate employee data allows decision-makers to be informed when making decisions related to staffing and recruitment. Ultimately, effective workforce planning pays dividends for companies to achieve their goals and objectives.

fieldengineer.com | Extrovert Vs. Introvert: Understanding The Workplace Personality Types

Extrovert Vs. Introvert: Understanding The Workplace Personality Types

fieldengineer.com | What is the Talent Management Life Cycle?

What is the Talent Management Life Cycle? Key Stages Involved & Best Practices For Success

fieldengineer.com | The Importance of Achieving Work-Life Balance: Why It Matters

The Importance of Achieving Work-Life Balance: Why It Matters

  • Workforce planning

Workforce Planning: Definition, Process & Steps

Regardless of the size or type of company, taking the time to plan and make decisions as part of a broader strategy improves every aspect of your business, including your workforce.

Strategic workforce planning is one of the most powerful tools companies can use to achieve globalization objectives in an increasingly competitive market.

Planning is the driving force and the primary connection point between the workforce and talent management. A comprehensive workforce plan is at the heart of a great human capital management team. When used well, strategic workforce planning enables HR to plan for the capabilities they need in the future.

  • We often mention workforce planning, but do we know what it is?
  • Who do you need to employ?
  • Who do you have on hand? 
  • How do you keep your top talent around?

While many organizations realize the need for better planning, most still lack the tools and capabilities to effectively manage and execute the strategic steps necessary to drive significant business results.

Next, we will answer your questions and provide an actionable guide to strategic workforce planning success. 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

  • What is workforce planning?
  • Why is workforce planning important?
  • Basic principles of workforce planning
  • Main steps of the workforce planning process
  • The benefits of workforce planning
  • Remote workforce planning

1. What is workforce planning?

Workforce planning is a process that allows businesses to anticipate workforce needs, develop plans to optimize their staff and resources, and create a framework for managing future staffing needs. Workforce planning includes forecasting labor supply and demand, assessing labor gaps and making decisions about recruiting, redeploying and eliminating employees.

Workforce planning, also called strategic workforce planning, is about making sure that the right person is in the right job at the right moment. By planning your workforce, you ensure there are not too many people available (overstaffing) nor too few (understaffing).

Workforce planning solves staffing problems for today and the future. Strategic workforce planning is becoming increasingly important for several reasons.

Demographic changes: An aging workforce poses different problems, including a deficit of valuable skills, reskilling challenges, and mass retirement.

Cost reduction: Increasing global competition forces companies to work smarter. At the same time, the aging workforce is a more expensive one – but not necessarily a more productive one.

Talent management: Talented employees form a competitive advantage for the company. It is essential to have people with the right drive and line up a talent pipeline to replace the aging employees. 

Flexibility: Current competitive landscape requires faster and more disruptive innovation. The tactics that got us here will not take us where we need to go next.

While many see workforce planning as purely a staffing tool for anticipating employment needs, it can also be a critical tool for staff training and development and succession planning.

2. Why is workforce planning important?

In the current talent-based economy, people are the key that keeps successful companies running.

When you act with purpose, you build your future. Agile workforce planning shapes the employee experience in significant ways. It also helps companies form teams that work well together for impactful, long-term results and enhances talent management capabilities.

Anyone who has ever experienced staff shortages will know not having the right talent in place can cause enormous strain on a business. Many organizations are not sufficiently aware of the current or future workforce gaps that will limit the execution of business strategy.

However, if organizations can look ahead and plan what roles, skills, and people they will need to meet their business goals now and in the future, they are more likely to thrive.

Workforce planning helps companies to:

i. Reach financial objectives

Finance and HR are excellent partners in business planning. This partnership enhances collaboration by people, processes, and technology.

The finance department should analyze HR data to determine how the workforce contributes to the organization. With those insights, HR can strategically allocate resources, hire the right people at the right time, initiate programs that nurture talent, and create an optimal workforce mix that aligns with financial goals.

ii. Improve overall employee experience

People are at the center of effective workforce planning. When a company plans with its people top of mind, it prioritizes their well-being, work-life balance and improves the employee experience.

Workforce planning can help your organization gain business agility through engaged employees and their unique, individual talents. That starts with having flexible workforce plans tailored to their experiences and needs.

Analyzing your workforce helps you determine how to move toward higher productivity and profitability. This staff review ensures that your hiring strategies meet business requirements and that your workforce plans coincide with your corporate program.

iii. Promote collaboration

Workforce planning encourages member participation throughout the organization. Identifying interdepartmental connections and understanding how an area affects another requires a series of cross-functional insights gained through collaboration . Moreover, knowledge and teamwork broaden horizons.

3. The four pillars of strategic workforce planning

When it comes to workforce planning, there are four criteria.

A. Right people

Some companies rely heavily on new team members to achieve their goals. In these instances, it would be necessary to expand their workforce to process their workloads.

In the new remote business world , global barriers have dissipated. Now it is possible to find the best talent, regardless of where they live. Expand your talent acquisition strategy beyond your local area to find the right people for your team.

Things to consider:

  • A global talent search
  • Factors that affect staffing needs
  • Productivity

B. Right skills

Knowing exactly which competencies your company requires from its talent is critical to meeting future challenges and most effectively filling skills gaps. Identifying the experience levels that support strategic competencies is vital for translating hiring into strategy and turning business models into long-term results.

  • Key skills needed throughout the organization
  • Impact of skills on your strategy and business model

C. Right cost

The goal of cost revolves around reaching an optimum labor cost. Too much will bankrupt the company, but too little will result in work not getting done.

Plan for direct and indirect costs you can expect to incur while hiring, including job ads, hours spent on applicant interviewing, new employee salaries, benefits, insurance, etc.

Understanding what these costs look like will keep your team within budget. It will also ensure you optimize costs by securing the right talent only when those specific skills are needed.

  • Focus on strategies to optimize costs related to talent
  • Planning for direct and indirect hiring expenses
  • Budgeting for only the talent and skillsets your company needs

D. Right place and time

Continuous growth requires placing the right people in the correct positions at the right time. Companies must establish clear business goals to ensure they hire team members equipped to help meet current and future company objectives.

  • Alignment of talent distribution and company needs
  • Adjustment of hiring strategy to meet business objectives.

4. Main steps of the workforce planning process

Workforce planning should not be confused with HR analytics . People analytics primarily focuses on analyzing relationships between people drivers and business outcomes. Strategic workforce planning has a long-term focus and is mostly about employee formation. The goal is the main difference between HR analytics and workforce planning.

So how does workforce planning work? There are multiple approaches to workforce planning, but the process is usually similar.

Use the following steps as the building blocks to a successful, engaged, and productive team.

1. Assess objectives

One of the objectives of strategic workforce planning is achieving your business goals. You should assess them during the first stage of the strategic workforce planning process.

Including the right people during this stage is crucial. Besides HR professionals, you must involve line managers, financial services representatives, and business executives, to name some of the right people to include during strategic workforce planning initiatives.

2. Analyze workforce

The second step in the planning process is to analyze the current workforce. Business leaders must assess both the quantity and quality of the personnel during this step.

Good workforce planning follows the 80/20 Pareto principle : you can get 80% of the effect by only 20% of the work. Focus on the primary functions of the organization when you engage in strategic workforce planning. These are the ones that contribute most to the organizational results.

3. Identify skills gaps

Conducting a skills gap analysis will provide valuable future workforce data. For example, a skills gap analysis would indicate when an employee plans to retire. Instead of scrambling to replace the retiring employee, the skills gap analysis would have provided sufficient time for HR to prepare.

4. Anticipate future issues

Adequate preparation for the future provides companies with a competitive advantage within their industry.

Business leaders must be sure to develop a workforce plan that anticipates future business issues and provide actionable steps to address them.

5. Develop an action plan

After assessing objectives, analyzing the workforce, identifying skills gaps, and anticipating future issues, the next step is to develop an action plan. The plan should include strategies for recruiting, and retaining talent, restructuring the organization, and enhancing technologies.

6. Implement the action plan

Implementing the action plan means ensuring that the necessary resources are in place, roles are clear, and needs are met to execute the plan and achieve business goals. To achieve this, you must work with leadership and hiring managers to gauge the impact.

7. Test and monitor the plan

As business needs change, workforce planning strategy does as well. Regularly testing and monitoring your plan allows you to identify progress, areas for improvement, and any necessary adjustments to address potential workforce issues.

5. The benefits of workforce planning

Acquiring great talent is challenging, but retaining them can be even more difficult.

If you do not support the talent strategy and culture through methodical workforce planning, it will cost you resources due to the inability to hire, maintain, and empower top talent. 

Successful strategic workforce planning can have significant positive effects on your business. Here are six of the top benefits.

# Plan for change

With Strategic Workforce Planning, you can establish metric benchmarks that will inform executives about workforce issues and equip them with tools to identify talent risk before impacting business objectives.

This information will help you improve business planning and financial forecasts by quantifying talent requirements to meet short and long-term organizational goals.

# Decrease hiring costs

Make the most of your talent by making your decisions based on a detailed overview of the future headcount and productivity levels for the business to grow.

The recruitment costs will decrease, and business operations will run more effectively. These positive effects will impact all levels of the business ( employee morale , motivation , revenue).

# Improve recruitment processes

Strategic workforce planning can help you outline the characteristics and traits of the high performers in each department and inform your hiring criteria to find candidates that suit the business goals and culture .

This process will improve your employee retention rate , save time in your onboarding process and decrease recruitment costs.

# Align HR with business strategy

Align your HR programs and policies with the business strategy for workforce planning, such as data protection , employee assistance and benefits, learning and career development programs.

This alignment will ensure that those goals are supported in the best way possible and strengthen the company culture. 

# Drive allocation of talent investments

Strategic workforce planning will help you determine which groups of employees deliver the highest ROI for the business and warrant investment in their training and development. Workforce planning will outline what areas need extra resources to reach their full potential and contribute more to the business.

Furthermore, this will inform what roles are crucial for the growth of the business, so you can implement steps to protect that and minimize risk.

# Implement informed retention tactics

Without proper tools, HR and managers can misuse raises, bonuses, and promotions to prevent turnover . Strategic workforce planning will help you leverage predictive analytics to correctly identify top performers and people in critical roles who are at risk of leaving. From here, you can implement a retention strategy to minimize risk and move forward.

Wrapping up

Strategic workforce planning prepares companies to respond to continuous fluctuations in the workplace. It also ensures business agility in times of crisis, such as the Covid-19 pandemic.

Many organizations started encouraging remote work to ensure the safety and wellbeing of employees during the crisis, but remote work is now the new normal.

Companies must adapt their business strategies to the remote work model to enable employees to be more productive and meet their goals.

Here are some strategies for successful remote workforce planning.

Establish remote work policies with clear rules and outlines. These should detail job responsibilities, organizational and departmental goals and objectives, and employee job performance.

Select the right people for the job. It is necessary to define who will perform best in a virtual setting. Not all employees are best suited to work from home . Allow employees to be able to select the dates they will work from home using a WFH calendar . 

Anticipate issues and prepare to respond. It is crucial to prevent and solve any problems that could arise. When it comes to vacation planning, and tracking, consider online HR solutions like LeaveBoard .

Keep objectives and expectations clear and continue to monitor and test the company’s action plan.

With the ever-changing marketplace, it is even more crucial to differentiate your business in a way that resonates with talent and customers.

Recommended reading

Automate your employee management with the easy to use cloud HR software.

Easy set-up ● No contracts required ● No credit cards

Deflytics - Business Planning

  • +91 86552 68970

workforce planning definition in business

Workforce Planning Guide: Definition, Importance & Best Practices

workforce planning definition in business

In today's rapidly evolving business environment, organizations face a multitude of challenges, from talent shortages to unpredictable market conditions. Workforce planning emerges as a vital strategic tool that helps organizations align their human capital with business objectives. In this comprehensive blog, we will explore the importance of workforce planning, discuss various types of workforce planning, delve into the key elements involved, highlight best practices for effective implementation, and outline the wide-ranging benefits it offers.

Major Types of Workforce Planning

◎ Strategic Workforce Planning

◎ Operational Workforce Planning

Workforce planning can take different forms based on an organization's goals and context. Let's explore two common types of workforce planning:

Strategic Workforce Planning : This type of planning aligns an organization's human capital strategy with its long-term business objectives. Strategic workforce planning focuses on identifying critical roles and competencies necessary to achieve strategic goals. It involves analyzing internal and external factors, such as demographic trends, talent availability, and technological advancements, to ensure the organization has the right talent to succeed in the future. Operational Workforce Planning : Operational workforce planning concentrates on short-term workforce requirements to meet immediate operational needs. It involves analyzing current staffing levels, skills gaps, workload distribution, and seasonal variations. Operational workforce planning ensures that day-to-day operations run smoothly by balancing workloads, managing leave schedules, and responding to short-term fluctuations in demand. Importance of Workforce Planning in Today's Business Environment Workforce planning is integral to ensuring organizations have the right talent, skills, and competencies to achieve their strategic goals. Here are some key reasons why workforce planning is important: Anticipating Future Needs : Workforce planning enables organizations to forecast their future workforce requirements. By analyzing business objectives, market trends, and industry changes, organizations can proactively identify the skills and talent needed to meet evolving demands. This ensures a consistent supply of capable employees, preventing disruptions in productivity and customer service. Mitigating Talent Shortages : Through workforce planning, organizations can identify potential talent gaps and develop strategies to address them. By implementing targeted recruitment, training, and development initiatives, businesses can bridge skill shortages. This proactive approach ensures a strong talent pipeline and reduces reliance on external hiring. Controlling Labor Costs : Effective workforce planning optimizes labor costs by aligning staffing levels with operational demands. By avoiding unnecessary recruitment or layoffs, organizations can strike a balance between workforce size and business objectives, minimizing costs while maintaining productivity Key Elements of Effective Workforce Planning To implement effective workforce planning, organizations should consider the following key elements: Data Analysis : Workforce planning relies on accurate and reliable data to forecast future needs. Organizations should collect and analyze data related to workforce demographics, turnover rates, skills inventory, performance metrics, and market trends. This data-driven approach provides insights for making informed decisions. Collaboration : Successful workforce planning requires collaboration between HR, finance, operations, and other key stakeholders. Engaging these departments ensures a comprehensive understanding of business objectives, financial constraints, and operational realities. Collaboration fosters alignment and increases the chances of successful workforce planning implementation. Succession Planning : Identifying and developing future leaders is a critical aspect of workforce planning. Organizations should establish a robust succession planning process to ensure a smooth transition of key roles and minimize disruptions. By cultivating a talent pipeline, businesses can prepare for potential leadership gaps and ensure continuity. Talent Acquisition and Development : Workforce planning goes beyond hiring. It includes strategies for attracting top talent, developing existing employees, and creating a learning culture. Organizations should implement effective recruitment and onboarding processes, provide continuous training and development opportunities, and promote internal mobility Best Practice for Workforce Planning To optimize the outcomes of workforce planning, organizations should consider the following best practices: Align Workforce Planning with Business Strategy : Workforce planning should be integrated with the overall business strategy. This alignment ensures that the organization's human capital strategy supports its strategic objectives. Regularly review and update the workforce plan to reflect changes in business goals and market conditions. Involve Key Stakeholders : Engage senior leadership, department heads, and line managers in the workforce planning process. Their insights and perspectives are invaluable for understanding the current and future workforce needs of their respective areas. Collaboration fosters ownership and enhances the accuracy of the planning process. Use Scenario Planning : Develop multiple scenarios to assess the impact of different workforce planning strategies. Consider factors such as technological advancements, industry disruptions, and economic shifts. By exploring various scenarios, organizations can anticipate potential challenges and devise agile workforce strategies to respond effectively. Invest in Workforce Analytics : Leverage advanced analytics tools to analyze and interpret workforce data. This allows organizations to gain deep insights into workforce demographics, skills gaps, and performance metrics. Workforce analytics enables data-driven decision-making and facilitates proactive planning. Benefits of Implementing a Workforce Planning Strategy Implementing effective workforce planning offers numerous benefits for organizations: Enhanced Agility and Adaptability : Workforce planning enables organizations to adapt swiftly to changing market conditions. By identifying potential skill gaps and aligning talent with emerging needs, businesses can stay ahead of competitors and seize new opportunities. Improved Employee Engagement and Retention : Workforce planning emphasizes the development and growth of employees. By providing clear career paths, training opportunities, and succession planning, organizations can foster a culture of engagement, motivating employees to stay and contribute to long-term success. Cost Optimization : Workforce planning helps optimize labor costs by ensuring the right number of employees with the right skills are available when needed. By avoiding unnecessary recruitment or layoffs, organizations can minimize expenses while maintaining productivity levels. Talent Pipeline Development : Workforce planning facilitates the identification and development of high-potential employees. By nurturing internal talent, organizations can build a strong talent pipeline and reduce reliance on external hiring, saving recruitment costs and ensuring continuity. Workforce planning is a critical strategic tool that enables organizations to align their human capital with business objectives. By anticipating future needs, mitigating talent shortages, and optimizing labor costs, workforce planning positions organizations for success in an ever-changing marketplace. By incorporating the key elements and best practices discussed in this blog, businesses can unlock the full potential of their workforce and drive sustainable growth. Steps to Develop a Successful Workforce Planning Process Developing a successful workforce planning process requires careful planning and execution. Here are the steps to follow: Define Strategic Objectives : Start by aligning your workforce planning process with the organization's strategic objectives. Understand the long-term goals and business priorities to identify the workforce capabilities required to achieve them. Gather and Analyze Data : Collect relevant data about your current workforce, including demographics, skills, performance, turnover rates, and future workforce needs. Use workforce analytics tools to analyze the data and identify trends and gaps. Conduct Workforce Analysis : Analyze the data to understand your organization's current and future workforce requirements. Identify areas of strengths and weaknesses, critical roles, and skills gaps. Consider both internal and external factors that may impact your workforce, such as market trends, technological advancements, and regulatory changes. Develop Workforce Strategies : Based on the analysis, develop strategies to address the identified gaps and meet future workforce needs. This may include strategies for recruitment, training and development, succession planning, talent acquisition, and retention. Align these strategies with the organization's goals and budget constraints. Collaborate with Stakeholders : Involve key stakeholders, including senior leadership, department heads, and HR representatives, in the workforce planning process. Seek their input and ensure alignment with the organization's overall strategy. Collaboration enhances buy-in, ownership, and the accuracy of the planning process. Implement Actionable Plans : Translate the workforce strategies into actionable plans with clear objectives, timelines, and responsibilities. Identify specific initiatives and programs to address the identified gaps and support the organization's long-term goals. Allocate resources, budget, and track progress regularly. Monitor and Evaluate : Regularly monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of the implemented workforce planning initiatives. Review key metrics, such as employee turnover, skills development, and performance, to assess the impact of the workforce strategies. Make adjustments and refinements as needed to optimize outcomes. Foster a Learning Culture : Encourage a culture of continuous learning and development within the organization. Offer training programs, mentorship opportunities, and career advancement paths to nurture talent and increase employee engagement. Monitor and support the development of high-potential employees for future leadership positions. Stay Agile and Flexible : Workforce planning is an ongoing process that needs to adapt to changing business environments. Continuously monitor market trends, industry disruptions, and evolving workforce needs. Be prepared to adjust your strategies and plans accordingly to ensure alignment with the organization's goals. Communicate and Engage : Effective communication is crucial throughout the workforce planning process. Transparently communicate the objectives, progress, and outcomes of the workforce planning initiatives to all employees. Involve them in the decision-making process when appropriate, and seek their feedback and suggestions. By following these steps, organizations can develop a successful workforce planning process that aligns the workforce with strategic objectives, addresses skills gaps, and positions the organization for future success. Best Workforce Planning Tools ⊛ Workday Adaptive Planning ⊛ Anaplan Software In today's fast-paced business environment, utilizing effective workforce planning tools can significantly enhance efficiency and accuracy. Two widely used tools in this domain are Anaplan and Workday Adaptive Planning. At Deflytics, we specialize in assisting organizations with the implementation and integration of these tools, ensuring their workforce planning processes are streamlined and effective. Anaplan: Connecting Real-Time Collaboration and Accurate Forecasting Anaplan stands out for its "connected planning" approach, facilitating real-time collaborations across all business functions. By harnessing the power of hyperscale computing, Anaplan enables more precise and accurate forecasting. This feature is invaluable for organizations seeking to make data-driven decisions based on real-time insights. One of the key strengths of Anaplan is its ability to narrow down the best candidates within a company. Using attributes such as time in role, years of experience, and skills, the software helps identify the most suitable individuals for specific positions. Anaplan also offers compensation modeling, which allows organizations to work on retention strategies with a focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Furthermore, Anaplan Strategic HR Planning seamlessly integrates with other software solutions such as Boomi, DocuSign, Salesforce, and OneCloud. This integration capability enhances the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the workforce planning process. Workday Adaptive Planning: Real-Time Modeling and Seamless Integration Workday Adaptive Planning empowers organizations to model various what-if scenarios in real time, providing valuable insights into the potential impacts of different workforce planning strategies. By enabling planning based on levels, departments, skills, project locations, and more, organizations can create comprehensive and adaptable workforce plans. A notable feature of Workday Adaptive Planning is its ability to sync plans and budgets with financial plans in real time. This eliminates the need for back-and-forth email exchanges and ensures alignment between workforce planning and financial objectives. The software also allows for rapid modeling in critical situations like mergers or restructuring, enabling organizations to respond effectively to significant events. In terms of integration, Workday Adaptive Planning seamlessly connects with any HR system and other Workday-related products within an organization's ecosystem. This integration capability ensures smooth data flow and enhances the overall efficiency of the workforce planning process. In the realm of strategic workforce planning, leveraging powerful tools like Anaplan and Workday Adaptive Planning offers numerous benefits. These tools reduce manual effort, optimize resource allocation, and enable faster and more accurate workforce planning outcomes. However, effectively utilizing multiple workforce planning tools can pose a challenge. At Deflytics , we are dedicated to helping organizations overcome this challenge by providing implementation support and expertise in integrating these tools into their existing systems. With the right tools and expert assistance, organizations can enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of their workforce planning processes, ultimately leading to improved business performance. Frequently asked questions about Workforce Planning Q. What are examples of workforce planning? Ans. Strategic workforce planning and Operational workforce planning are two examples of workforce planning Q. What is the importance of workforce planning? Ans. Workforce planning gives organization the ability to link their resource plans to their revenue objectives and change the workforce mix to ever-changing business demand. Q. What are effective workforce planning tools? Ans. Anaplan and Workday Adaptive Planning are two of the most widely used Workforce planning platforms. Q. What is succession planning, and why is it crucial in workforce planning? Ans. Even after taking care of its employees it is likely that some may decide to leave for various reasons. Similarly some employees may be nearing their working tenure. Thus organizations need to proactively work on identifying candidates, both internally and externally, who will be able to take up the roles left vacant. This is succession planning. Succession planning is important because without it organizations will be left with roles but no people to execute them literally impacting the their chances of meeting the annual plan. Q. How can organizations identify future workforce needs and skill gaps? Ans. In line with the business plan, every workforce plan must align the resource spend to a particular outcome, deliverables as identified in the business plan. Thus the workforce plan when developed at a detailed level will intrinsically be able to point out which type of resource in which function, location, skill-set is required to support the business plan. And when compared with the current state and probable churn, will easily be help identify the gaps and future needs. Q. What role does collaboration play in effective workforce planning? Ans. What role does collaboration play in effective workforce planning? Workforce planning is closely related to the business plan of an organization. Based on the business plan different departments (sales, manufacturing, operations, etc.) need to develop their respective resource plan to support their individual KPIs.

Read More: DEMAND PLANNING: YOUR GUIDE TO DEMAND PLANNING & PROCESS

Recent Blogs

IMAGES

  1. Workforce Planning

    workforce planning definition in business

  2. Workforce planning tools

    workforce planning definition in business

  3. How Workforce Planning Contributes to Business Success

    workforce planning definition in business

  4. Business Benefits of Operational Workforce Planning

    workforce planning definition in business

  5. Business Strategy and Workforce Planning

    workforce planning definition in business

  6. Workforce Planning: A Complete Practical Guide 2023

    workforce planning definition in business

VIDEO

  1. Working Through the Facts about Workforce Planning & Prioritisation

  2. Business Planning: Stages in Planning and Managing an Enterprise

  3. Corporate planning process

  4. Workforce Planning (Part 1)

COMMENTS

  1. Workforce Planning: Definition & Best Practices

    Workforce planning is the process of analyzing workforce supply and demand, and then making adjustments as necessary to meet business needs and goals. This article explains the definition of ...

  2. What is workforce planning, and why is it important?

    Workforce planning is a strategic alignment of business goals with people strategy. It involves reducing labor costs, responding to changing customer needs, identifying strategies for people development, targeting inefficiencies, improving employee retention, productivity, and work-life balance, and delivering strategic value through talent. 13,156

  3. Workforce Planning: Definition, Process and Principles

    Workforce planning, also known as strategic workplace planning, is the process of analyzing, forecasting and planning workforce supply and demand. It involves reviewing current staff, examining current and future personnel needs and identifying gaps between supply and demand.

  4. Workforce planning

    Workforce planning is a core business process which aligns changing organisation needs with people strategy. It can be the most effective activity an organisation can engage in. It doesn't need to be complicated and can be adjusted to suit the size and maturity of any organisation.

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

    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.

  6. Strategic workforce planning: Guide for people professionals

    Workforce planning definition What is driving your need for workforce planning? How does workforce planning help? What methodology and tools help with workforce planning? Six stages to workforce planning Stage 1: Baseline Stage 2: Supply Stage 3: Demand Stage 4: Gap analysis Stage 5: Action plan Stage 6: Deliver Conclusion Make a start

  7. Practicing the Discipline of Workforce Planning

    Whether handled separately or as part of the business plan, workforce planning involves working through four issues: The composition and content of the workforce that will be required to...

  8. 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.

  9. 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

  10. 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

  11. Workforce Planning: A Complete Practical Guide 2024

    Workforce planning (WP) is a strategic process that organizations leverage to align their workforce with their goals and objectives. It involves analyzing the current workforce, forecasting future talent needs, and then creating strategies to ensure they have the necessary talent in place to achieve strategic goals. Per Harvard Business Review :

  12. What is workforce planning and why is it important?

    Workforce planning is the ongoing process of assessing your current and future talent needs in an effort to identify competency gaps as well as develop, implement and monitor a structured workforce management plan that meets the company's human capital needs for today and the future.

  13. What is workforce planning?

    Workforce planning is the strategy used by employers to anticipate labor needs and deploy workers most effectively, usually with advanced human resources technology. Workforce planning is a subset of workforce management, a critical element of most large organizations' software-based human resources and enterprise resource planning systems.

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

    Step 1: Prepare for Strategic Workforce Planning As part of preparation for the strategic workforce planning process, identify: Key components in a workforce plan document Key stakeholders and their responsibilities in the process Critical BUs to partner and prioritize investments in

  15. Workforce planning: 6 strategic steps in the right direction

    Workforce planning is the strategic evaluation and management of an organisation's present and future talent requirements. It involves analysing, forecasting and planning workforce supply and demand. The goal is to ensure that organisations have the right people with the right skills in the right places at the right time to drive success.

  16. Workforce Planning

    Overview Workforce Planning is the process of analyzing, forecasting, and planning workforce supply and demand, assessing gaps, and determining target talent management interventions to ensure that an organization has the right people - with the right skills in the right places at the right time - to fulfill its mandate and strategic objectives.

  17. Workforce Planning Is Essential to High-Performing Organizations

    October 3, 2014 | Peter Louch, Vemo Reuse Permissions  In today's talent-based economy, the workforce itself is arguably the most important tangible asset of most organizations. Despite its...

  18. What is workforce management? Definition and best practices

    Workforce management (WFM) is the process by which a company makes all of the complex factors of running a successful business come together to maximize an organization's productivity and ...

  19. Workforce planning

    Workforce planning is the approach most businesses take to address this challenge. It is rare that a business of any size operates for long without having to recruit or remove employees. For example, consider why a business might need to recruit staff: Business expansion due to. - Increasing sales of existing products. - Developing new products.

  20. What is workforce planning? (With definitions and a guide)

    Workforce planning, sometimes known as strategic planning, is the practice of planning the workforce supply and demand for a company. It's quite a complex process for a company as it involves reviewing existing staff and forecasting future staffing needs for the business. This occurs by identifying skill gaps in the company and making plans to ...

  21. Workforce Planning: Definition, Types, Importance And Steps

    Strategic or soft planning. A strategic workforce plan focuses on business strategy and development and ensures that the workforce aligns with the organisation's overall objectives and long-term vision. It may involve planning for goals that require months or years and identifying broad-based issues that involve all aspects of the enterprise.

  22. The Importance of Workforce Planning for Business Success

    When done correctly, workforce planning can result in higher retention rates as well as promote efficiencies in business operations. This helps optimize employee resources and provides greater value for organizations. Knowing the right number of personnel needed in each role also assists in budgeting.

  23. Workforce Planning: Definition, Process & Steps

    Workforce planning is a process that allows businesses to anticipate workforce needs, develop plans to optimize their staff and resources, and create a framework for managing future staffing needs. Workforce planning includes forecasting labor supply and demand, assessing labor gaps and making decisions about recruiting, redeploying and ...

  24. How Strategic Workforce Planning Can Help Scale Your Business

    Strategic workforce planning is when businesses ensure that they have the right people to staff the right positions at opportune times for business growth. Business's needs are always changing, and forecasting what roles you will need filled months in advance can help you avoid bottlenecks.

  25. Workforce Planning : Definition, Importance & Best Practices of

    Workforce Planning Guide: Definition, Importance & Best Practices. Makrand Jadhav 📋 ... In line with the business plan, every workforce plan must align the resource spend to a particular outcome, deliverables as identified in the business plan. Thus the workforce plan when developed at a detailed level will intrinsically be able to point out ...