Leveraging Allies and Partnerships for Strategic Workforce Planning - Workforce Planning Exchange
Effective strategic workforce planning can help organizations identify the skills and capabilities they need, address workforce gaps, and optimize their workforce to better align their capabilities with their strategic objectives, driving organizational capability growth. Effective collaboration between workforce planning professionals and others in the organization is critical to achieve business goals and optimal results.
Workforce Planning Exchange members came together to discuss their collaboration experiences, what has worked through the years, and any lessons learned along the way.
Top 4 Highlights.
Build partners and tell stories. Sometimes strategic workforce planning (SWP) is considered an afterthought. To be more strategic and bring more value to the organization, build partners and have them promote SWP through their success stories. Partners for Workforce Planning include:
- Finance, CFO and others
- Sr. management team
- Education development ream
- Business strategy teams
- ELT
- HR Data team
- Local colleges and associations
- Local department of workforce development
- CHRO
- Risk management
Connect to business plans. Develop relationships with teams doing long-term planning for the business, such as sales. Consider if this long-term plan comes to fruition, what are our workforce’s needs? What skills will we need? Where is our talent supply chain? Should we begin building talent now?
- One organization has noticed a large, unexpected attrition in nurses after burnout from COVID. Now, they are working strategically partnering with local colleges and associations to support the training and development of new nurses.
There is no perfect technology solution. In fact, the number of disparate and disconnected systems that contain important data is often a big challenge for strategic workforce planning (SWP).
- One organization decided to build an internal system with their technology and data teams. They are pulling data from 3 different systems to create an SWP center. The center shows total positions, current headcount, and what stage potential employees are in the recruitment process. They are looking to add more data around skills, next.
Talent hoarding and lack of talent mobility is an impediment to workforce readiness. Check out i4cp’s Accelerating Total Workforce Readiness report to learn more.
- Only 12% said they recognize/reward managers for talent development and movement.
- 39% said that for most employees it is easier to find a job externally than internally.
- 27% said that it is easier to hire externally than internally.
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