Employees are the backbone of any company. Skilled staff working in the right roles are vital to overall success. A shortage of these workers is a concern for many businesses, potentially causing organisations to miss out on revenue goals due to a disorganised recruitment process.

strategic workplace planning

To remedy this, strategic workforce planning is necessary. This process offers a variety of benefits, helping to boost productivity, increase ROI and streamline the hiring process. 

What is strategic workforce planning?

Strategic workforce planning anticipates current and future hiring needs and ensures your business has the resources necessary to meet your goals. A strategic workforce plan uses input from business analytics, finance and HR to ensure it meets a business’ long-term goals and helps maintain long-term success.

Strategic workforce planning builds a business with stable staffing levels across the organisation, ensuring each employee has the right skills for the right role. Ultimately, this delivers a more successful result and a higher return on investment (ROI).

What are the benefits of strategic workforce planning?

With a strategic workforce plan implemented, you’ll be able to hire the top talent in your particular field, which will help you stay ahead of your competitors. By analysing your current employees’ skills, you’ll also be able to address any skills gaps in your current workforce.

For a business to flourish, it constantly needs to develop and improve key performance indicators (KPIs). Using the data from your strategic workforce plan, you can drive your organisation to constantly improve its performance and meet its objectives. 

Not only that but a strategic workforce plan also enables businesses to prepare for the future. With a strategic workforce plan that takes your future requirements into account, your business will avoid potential, unexpected problems down the line. Ultimately, this means your business will be able to save time and money in the long term.

With a strategic workforce plan, you can also identify hiring needs and requirements for certain job roles much better. For example, it gives you insight into whether you need permanent staff, temporary or emergency. With this sort of plan and insights, you'll find the optimal balance between permanent and temporary staff, meaning you don't have to waste money where it isn't needed.

This process is heavily data-driven too as it looks at past data. For example, you could look at peak or seasonal period in warehousing, such as order and shipping volumes. With this, your business is in a better position to know when roles will be available in the short, medium or long term, rather than leaving hiring to guesswork.

Nearly two-thirds of business leaders said they have a better insight into their business through using a workforce management solution. With this insight, they manage their businesses more effectively by addressing different pain points and creating a tailored solution. 

Outsourcing a strategic workforce plan

By choosing an external agency to create a strategic workforce plan, you’ll gain the knowledge of experienced professionals who can tailor the plan to your unique needs. Through partnering with an agency, your staffing needs will be identified both now and in the future, as well as staff turnover rates.

A study conducted by HR.com found businesses that implement a workforce management solution see a 6-10% cost saving in under 12 months on average. Not only that but according to the survey, employee productivity improved. In turn, this usually increases revenue, saves costs and makes the business more profitable. 

The survey also found that nearly 40% of businesses said they have seen a decrease in absenteeism since investing in a workforce management solution. This is particularly important as absenteeism costs the UK economy £14 billion.

Strategic workforce plans are just one part of the solution. To learn more about creating an effective hiring strategy, take a look at our latest playbook.

Create a cost-effective hiring strategy

A high employee turnover costs businesses thousands. With a strategy in place to determine who you need to hire, how you’re going to hire them and how to onboard new starters, you’ll increase employee retention as well as productivity and ROI. Our playbook runs through everything you need to consider to hire the ideal candidate for the job.

Don't lose out on these unmissable insights. Click the link below to get started.Creating a cost-effective staffing strategy