Why Workforce Planning Is Important?

Strategic workforce planning is one of the most powerful tools for companies to reach and sustain performance against their strategic objectives in a highly competitive market.

Planning is the engine and the main link between talent management and workforce. A solid human capital management team is built around a comprehensive workforce plan.

Although many companies recognise the importance of better planning, most still lack the skills and tools to manage and execute strategic steps that will drive business results.

Let’s begin by explaining workforce planning and why it’s essential.

Workforce Planning

What’s workforce planning?

According to Human Resource Management Sydney, Workforce Planning refers to an organisation’s process of assessing its workforce and deciding the best steps that must be taken to meet future and current staffing requirements. It involves finding cost-effective and efficient ways to retain and recruit talent.

Why is workforce planning important?

Your future is built when you act with purpose. Agile workforce planning significantly impacts employee experience and allows companies to form cohesive teams for long-term, impactful results. Investor relations are improved, and talent management capabilities are enhanced.

Workforce planning assists companies to:

Attain financial goals

Business planning is made easier by the collaboration between finance and human resources. The productive union between these two groups enhances collaboration through connecting people, processes, and technology.

Finance and human resources depend on each other as a key source of revenue.

Finance should analyse people’s data to understand how they contribute to the organisation. With these insights, HR can strategise how to allocate resources, hire the right employees at the right time, create programs that nurture talent, and establish a workforce aligned with financial goals.

Enhance employee experience

Planning for a workforce is about people. A company that plans keeping its employees in mind, it prioritises and cares for their well-being, ultimately improving the employee experience.

Your organisation can increase business agility by utilising engaged employees and their talents. Flexible workforce plans tailored to employees’ experiences and needs will help you achieve this.

An analysis of your workforce can help you determine how to increase productivity and profitability. This will ensure that your hiring strategies align with business needs and your workforce plans align with your corporate plan.

Promote collaboration

Planning for the workforce is collaborative and encourages participation from all members. Collaboration is the only way to gain cross-functional insight and identify interdepartmental connections. Knowledge and teamwork can also broaden your horizons.

A focused approach is a key to getting the best out of your team. Where should you begin? There are four fundamental principles that can help you design your workforce planning model.

Expert Knowledge

4 fundamental principles of workforce planning

Right people

Many companies depend heavily on new employees to reach their goals. These companies may need to increase their workforce to handle their workloads.

The new world of remote business has made it possible to find top talent regardless of their location. Expand your talent acquisition strategy to find the best talent for your team.

Some things to consider:

• A global talent search
• Factors that impact staffing
• Productivity

Right skills

It is crucial to know what competencies your company needs from its employees in order to meet future challenges and fill skills gaps and this can be done through human resource consulting brisbane. Identifying the experience levels that support strategic competencies to translate hiring into strategy and turn business models into long-term success is crucial.

Some things to consider:

• Essential skills required throughout the organisation
• Impact of skills on strategy and business model

The right time and place

Continuing growth means putting the right people in the right positions at the right times and in the right places, and this requires that employees are evenly distributed across the company.

This means that companies must establish clear business goals to hire people who can help them achieve their company’s future objectives.

Some things to consider:

• Alignment between talent distribution and company requirements
• Adjustment to the hiring strategy to achieve business objectives

Right price

Consider the direct and indirect costs of hiring. This includes costs for job advertisements, interview time, new employee salaries, benefits, and insurance.

Knowing what these costs are will help you keep your budget within reach and make sure that you are optimising your costs by only hiring the right people when they’re needed.

Some things to consider:

• Aim to reduce costs for talent
• Planning for direct and indirect hiring expenses
• Budgeting only for the skills and talent your company requires

These principles should be the basis of your strategic workforce planning.

The 7-step process for strategic workforce planning

Once these are in place, you can use them as building blocks for a productive, engaged team.

Set goals

Strategic workforce planning is designed to help you achieve your business goals. The first stage of strategic workforce planning should assess your short- and long-term business goals.

Including the right people in this step is essential; it is not enough to have business partners or HR professionals only. Some of the best people to include in strategic workforce planning initiatives are line managers, business executives, financial service representatives, and HR technology experts.

Analyse the workforce

Analysing the current workforce is the second step of the planning process, and this step requires business leaders to assess the quality and quantity of their workforce.

Identify skills gaps

A skills gap analysis can provide valuable data for the future workforce. A skills gap analysis could indicate when an employee is planning to retire. The skills gap analysis would have given enough time to allow human resources to prepare rather than scrambling for the replacement.

Future issues are to be anticipated

Companies with adequate preparation for the future have a competitive edge in their industry.

Business leaders must create a workforce plan to anticipate future issues and provide steps to address them. Future workforce issues can include supply chain issues and labour market concerns.

Create an action plan

Next, you need to assess the objectives and analyse the workforce. These plans should include strategies to recruit & retain talent, restructure the company, and enhance technology.

Follow the action plan

Implementing the action plan involves ensuring that resources are available, roles are clearly defined, and that needs are met to achieve the business goals. This involves working with leaders and hiring managers to gauge the impact.

Monitor and test the plan

The workforce planning strategy must adapt to changing business needs. Regular Monitoring and testing of your plan allows you to monitor progress and identify areas for improvement.

Remote workforce planning

Companies can be prepared to adapt to the inevitable changes that are constant in the workplace through strategic workforce planning. It helps businesses to be agile in times of crisis, like the Covid-19 pandemic that has already changed how people live and work around the world.

In order to provide safety and well-being for employees in times of crisis, many organisations encourage remote work. However, remote work has become the norm.

Companies must adapt their business strategies for remote work to allow employees to be productive and reach their goals.

These are some strategies to plan a successful remote workforce.

• With clear guidelines and rules, establish remote work policies. These policies should outline job responsibilities, departmental and organisational goals & objectives, customer impacts, job performance, and job performance.
• Choose the right people to do the job. It is important to identify the best employees for your job.
• Prepare for potential problems and be prepared to address them. It is important to act to prevent or solve problems.
• Set clear objectives and expectations and monitor and evaluate the company’s actions.

Summary

In today’s changing marketplace, it is more important than ever to stand out from the crowd and be able to attract and retain talent.

Planning your workforce is key to maximising everyone’s talents for the benefit of your organisation.

The Art of Attracting and Retaining the Right Talent in a Highly Competitive Market

What’s one of the biggest challenges faced by the HR team of an organisation?

Well, if you guessed “helping the business areas to find and select the best possible candidates for an interview”, then you are partially correct. However, it’s not just about selecting the right candidate by running a professional, role focused recruitment process.  What’s often even harder is to retain the people that are selected.

This blog focuses on the need to ensure that business areas and Human Resource don’t drop the ball post the recruitment process. The hard work of retaining and developing the new people coming into your organisation is where the real return on investment is either realised or lost.

While there is no doubt that a strong remuneration and benefits package including components like performance bonuses, flexible work arrangements and assistance with health/fitness and child care services do play an important role in successful recruitment and retention, they are only part of the picture.

A recent study declares 91% of employees at small and medium size enterprises identified non-traditional benefits (like child care and gym memberships) as an important aspect of their job attraction and satisfaction

These non-traditional benefits can have positive impacts on employees’ well-being and likelihood to stay with an employer. A further breakdown pf this headline statistics shows that

• 85% of employees feel non-traditional benefits improve employee morale.
• 82% feel non-traditional benefits improve employee retention, and
• 73% feel non-traditional benefits boosts company culture.

Below-mentioned are a few tips that will help you to retain the right talent, help to keep them happy and more motivated to work with your organisation over time.

ENCOURAGE HEALTHY WORK/LIFE BALANCE: Good employees love to stay with employers where there is some ‘give and take’ in how and when work is done. Allow them to take an off to attend their children’s sports day, doctor’s appointment. Give them a birthday off or allow them to do work from home occasionally. Good employees will appreciate these types of offerings from there and in turn they can help to motivate that ‘extra effort’ when it’s needed.

PROVIDE AUTONOMY TO EMPLOYEES: Don’t try to be a ‘Sherlock Holmes’ constantly watching over your employees’ every move.  Show trust in your employees. The right employees want to take ownership of their own work and usually do tasks independently in order to come up with the required results. Conversely, don’t put off providing feedback to employees when they aren’t delivering – because good employees can get quickly demotivated when they work hard and others are carried at work.

RECOGNITION AND REWARD: The feeling of being genuinely appreciated motivates employees like nothing else. Meaningful recognition serves as a great motivation for employees to perform their best and grow themselves while continuing to work with the company. A simple ‘well done’ delivered as close as possible to the good work being done, and in a meaningful way and genuine way is worth a lot more to an employee than an award certificate or morning tea.

THE TAKEAWAY

The job with a new employee doesn’t stop when the recruitment process is finished, and the new starter arrives. All that investment can easily be wasted if they enter a work environment and culture that isn’t aligned with the employee expectations as set through the process. Aligning expectations with reality at work is a key obligation for all employers. Take time, invest time in new employees, be honest about the work and the organisation that they will be doing, recognise good work consistently and genuinely – are all critical to attracting and retaining good people.

Having a holistic and robust human resource strategy in place will help you to attract, develop, reward and retain employees in the most effective manner.

Decoding HR Success: Know What All Successful Human Resource Organisations Have In Common

Selecting and recruiting professionals, managing employees, providing proper training and development skills, ensuring employee safety, health and well-being, assessing and maximising employee performance through different operational ways including provision of compensation benefits and employee perks – There’s a lot more to human resource management than just contacting potential candidates and recruiting the best talent that makes it work for the entire organisation.
There’s no denying that success in business comes when effective and strategic human resource management practices are put into action. Taking a well-planned, strategic approach to work in order to help individuals, teams, departments and the whole organisation perform better is a matter of HR management strategy. For a HR manager and professionals to be influential, they need to be able to look at the business requirements (for now and for the future), understand how they translate to HR actions, and look at all the facets of employment, management, leadership, learning and development within the company and align with them, while making the best use of available human resources.
While some businesses have to work their ‘socks off’ to get things right in between the business requirements, how they are managed and led and the HR environment in which they are operated and supported, there are others that allow HR to simply operate as a ‘policeman’, a ‘compliance checker’ or an ‘unavoidable overhead’.
When H is located and operated well, there are often three proven practices that with delivering an effective HR management area and achieving desired business goals.
Implementing the right HR Philosophies
Happy employees equal happy customers and in turn, hefty profits. While struggling businesses focus mainly on efficiency and cost-cutting efforts, the most successful ones emphasise creating a working environment that encourages employees to work even more not only as individuals but as business contributors. The HR philosophy must communicate clearly the mission of providing employees with a positive environment to work in.
Putting Systematic Workplace Planning Into Effect
Thoughtful workforce planning revolves around proactively planning ahead and aligning workforce with business objectives. Incorporating forecasting and workforce analytics into management decisions (rather than simply relying on lag indicators of past performance to inform the making of future business decisions) helps avoid potential pitfalls and keep core operations running seamlessly – for now and for the future.
Having a Flexible HR organisation Structure in Place
An organisation must have a flexible and proactive HR governance design to operate at its peak efficiency. A well-structured governance design not only facilitates ongoing operations but prepares the management and organisation for the upcoming changes and issues.

How to Improve Employee Relations within Your Organisation

Starting a business is one great adventure to embark on; however, keeping it running at the same time is an arduous and painstaking job. While there are multiple factors that directly or indirectly affect the performance and growth of your organisation (business), whether your organisation fails or succeeds has a lot to do with the relationship shared among your employees.

Organisations where employees don’t find themselves comfortable with each other and struggle to maintain a cordial professional relationship with their co-workers, are in constant conflict almost always results in low productivity, poor performance and high turnover. So how can you go about managing or improving employee relations? By building a well-structured, fit for purpose human resource management strategy and framework.

Human resource management plays a vital role in promoting healthy employee relationships at work and helping to create an environment that brings the best out of each individual. With the help of human resource professionals, you can focus on the behaviour and interaction of individuals in the workplace and boost overall business performance, while minimising disputation and conflict in the workplace through the professional workplace dispute resolution.

In addition, here are a few tips that will help ensure the collective human resource management efforts positively influence the performance of your employees.

• Encourage effective communication among team members to prevent misunderstanding, confusions and conflicts.

• Encourage your people to understand the difference between personal and professional discussions at work.

• Organise relevant training sessions to provide opportunities to develop capability and capacity and keep people current and fresh in their chosen career path.

• Provide sincere and timely incentives in the form of meaningful recognition of work well done, which will encourage them to meet and exceed expectations into the future.

• Take some time out for some fun activities to help break the work monotony and boost communications.

• Ask for regular feedback and input from the people that you work with, to enable you to understand how the workplace is being experienced by the people that work with and for you.

With the involvement of HR professionals, all these simple strategies can help develop better understanding among employees of ‘what matters’ while encouraging them to use their skills in the best way possible to meet the organisational goals.

Corporate Governance and The Human Resource Management Function

Corporate Governance and the Human Resource Management function – is there a link?

• Is there a role for HR in the corporate governance framework and operations of an organisation?
• If so what might it be and why hasn’t HR always worked in that type of role?

The implications of the Global Financial Crisis still lingers for most organisations, either because of the lasting direct impact that it had and may still have on their operations, or because they realise that, but for circumstance at the time, they might have been more significantly affected than they were. For some organisations, they are continuing to focus on how better corporate governance might assist to better ‘GFC proof’ them for the future.

Government and business have had some time to try and address the underlying problems that often lead to corporate governance problems and to try out options for improvement. While the intent behind these considerations are well-meaning, for some organisations, they have slowly reverted to close to their pre GFC view of corporate governance – with ‘tick the box’ exercises and variable focus replacing the urgent and important status that it had a few years ago.

Corporate governance requirements can often be rationalised to be simply meeting legal requirements, rather than also meeting the intent behind the legislation. Too often, a focus on compliance and conformance to corporate governance policies and procedures overshadows or replaces the need to also understand the extent to which the correlation between corporate governance failure and deep-seated organisational culture problems exists and is being managed within a workforce.

Critical to establishing and maintaining a good corporate governance culture is the extent to which the most senior leaders in an organisation model the importance of good governance, how it looks and feels to work in a well governed organisation, and actively encourages and recognises behaviour and actions that underpin a good corporate governance culture

HR’s role in corporate governance

There are some consistent pointers to the role that HR can play in developing and sustaining good corporate governance in an organisation.

These include:

• Transparency in the appointment of staff, especially senior executive staff;
• Ensuring that remunerative arrangements are managed consistently and in accordance with policies and guidelines
• Establishing and applying agreed competency profiles to roles across the organisation that support a culture of good corporate governance
• Ensuring that organisational strategy is able to be delivered by the workforce, and identifying areas where development or expansion of capability is required to meet the forecast needs and also to minimise the risk of under achievement of expected objectives.

Some key messages for HR to succeed in supporting good corporate governance.

If the HR function is to be able, and be seen to be able, to support good governance, it needs to consider:

• Changing how they see themselves and how others see them, from HR first and business second, to a more balanced view of both roles in terms of how they operate;
• Demonstrate to the Senior Executive how they value add to the establishment and maintenance of good corporate governance, via policies, procedures, programs and reporting that confirms on track performance in areas such as recruitment, capability development and culture and values alignment.
• Actually develop, manage and report against a HR plan for the organisation that shows clear alignment with the key objectives of the organisation.

Human Resources Training And Development

Human Resources Training and development involves developing, through a range of practical and theoretical workshops, programs and activities, the necessary knowledge and skills to an effective human resource professional. Access to HR professionals that are across contemporary HR practices are crucial for efficient running of all organisations. Well-equipped HR professionals assist managers and supervisors to build the workplace environment in which optimal performance from an organisation’s employees is encouraged and nutured.

 

                                 Input                                             Process                                Output

 

Some points of focus for HBA HR Training

• Taking a systems view of HR

HBA Consulting builds its advice and training assistance around a ‘9 practice area’ model that clearly identifies the key components that make up the HR system. Not only does our advice and training look at the specialist requirements within each practice area, but we also explore and take into account the inter-relationships between the practice areas and the potential implications of not understanding these relationships in terms of unintended or compromised outcomes.

Identifying the specific needs of individual Human Resource Specialists

Different people bring with them to a training environment different skills, knowledge and experience. This needs to be identified and built on in order for the investment in training to be able to realise a good return on the time and monetary investment made, as well as to provide relevance and meaning for the individual human resource management specialist themselves.

This is where a pre-training assessment against the 9 practice areas and their related quality and performance indicators developed by HBA Consulting become invaluable in terms of properly targeting training needs and priority development areas for HR Specialists .

The Roles an HR Consultant Plays to Help you and your Business

Human resources consultant’s areas of expertise are very varied. They assist both small businesses and large organisations, and in almost every discipline of the field. From recruitment to safety and risk management to HR strategy and policy development, they can help you to position your company for success and growth.

Role in strategy

Many organisations, including small ones, consult an HR expert to assist them with developing a workforce strategy. An HR consultant can provide an expert view on workforce trends and analyse your current the pressures and risks associated with your workforce.

Role in implementation

When an organisation develops or revises its corporate or business strategy, an HR consultant can assist there with the implementation by identifying the steps necessary to put the people related components of the plan into action. Let’s say that a new Enterprise Agreement is to be implemented, then an HR consultant can advise you on the ability of the organisation to currently manage this process, as well as the kind of expertise you need on staff to manage employee and labour relations.

Role in functional areas

Apart from the above mentioned areas, an human resource management consultant can assist in major functional areas if an organisation is looking for cost efficiency. A few examples of these type of tactical levels of assistance include:

• Conducting a remuneration review
• Performing an HR legislative compliance review
• Handling formal complaints by employees for workplace discrimination
• Handling industrial disputation claims
• Assisting with a workplace grievance or alternative workplace dispute resolution matter
• Addressing employees issues related to policies
• Developing and mentoring current HR personnel
• Implementing a performance management system
• Creating an Enterprise Agreement that is aligned with corporate strategy and policy
• Creating or updating the corporate employment framework, work level standards and capability framework

The benefits of hiring an HR consultant are tangible as well as intangible. But most importantly, it does have a positive impact on the company’s bottom line.