An Overview of the Strategic Staffing/Workforce Planning Process
Before describing the process, let’s review some of the key concepts that were introduced in Chapter 2. Strategic staffing/workforce planning is a process that organizations use to help them identify and address the staffing implications of business plans and strategies. By implementing this process, organizations can ensure that they will have the right number of people, with the right capabilities, in place at the right time. When implemented effectively, the process results in two major outputs or deliverables: staffing strategies (which describe what will be done in the long term, across planning periods, to address critical staffing issues) and staffing plans (which describe specific, short-term tactical plans and staffing actions to be implemented in the near term—within a given planning period).
These two components can be developed in many ways, but I have found one process to be particularly effective. This strategic staffing process has four steps:
1. | Define critical staffing issues/areas of focus. As you learned in the previous chapter, your strategic staffing efforts will be effective only when they focus on a relatively small number of particularly critical staffing issues or job categories—not on entire business units or organizations. The first step of the process, then, is to identify and prioritize your most critical staffing issues and select those for which specific staffing strategies are required. |
2. | Define staffing gaps and surpluses. Once you have selected an issue (or an area on which your analysis will focus), the next step is to develop a staffing model to address that issue that defines staffing requirements, forecasts staff availability, compares demand to supply, and calculates staffing gaps and surpluses for each job category for each period in your planning horizon. The design of the model will be specific to the issue that you select. |
3. | Develop staffing strategies. The next step is to review the preliminary staffing gaps and surpluses, as calculated by your model, across all the planning periods in your planning horizon. Create a series of long-term, directional plans of action that describe what your organization should do to address those critical staffing issues most effectively (i.e., how to best align staffing demand and supply) across all planning periods, throughout the entire planning horizon. At this point, do not focus your efforts on any one planning period. |
4. | Define staffing plans. After you have developed staffing strategies that span all planning periods, go back and examine the specific staffing needs for each period. Following the concept of the “upside-down T” (described in Chapter 2), use the staffing strategies developed in the previous step as a long-term context and define the specific staffing actions that will allow you to meet the staffing needs effectively and efficiently in each planning period. Make sure that those actions are consistent with and fully support the staffing strategies that you developed in the previous step. |
Finally, you will need to fully implement the plans, measure your results, and adjust your staffing strategies and plans as needed to reflect changing business conditions.
This chapter describes each step of the strategic staffing process in detail. Remember that while the process itself is relatively straightforward, it should be applied within the more focused context described in Chapter 4. It should be applied selectively, not to all units within an organization in a one-size-fits-all manner.