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Strategic Workforce Planning

“If you don’t know the activities you want to plan workforce for, your workforce planning is at the mercy of chance!” Uwe H Kaufmann

COE’s Strategic Workforce Planning tools allow organisations better meet the challenges of a rapidly changing economy. In other words, by using business strategy to align shifts in demand with the existing and future supply of human capital, organisations optimise the workforce to meet business goals, increase market share, and improve employee engagement.

Preparing Strategic Workforce Planning

First of all, strategic workforce planning is a major project for every organisation that wishes to embark on this ‘investment’. As an example, a typical challenge teams will face when conducting strategic workforce planning is the lack of buy-in from the leadership team, starting with the lack of involvement of HR in strategy planning and hence resulting in a missing link between workforce priorities and business strategy. Therefore, it needs to be prepared carefully. Hence, proper preparation includes:

Agreeing on the lead for the workforce planning process. To be effective, workforce planning should be led by corporate planning and
Assembling a team of dedicated members. Workforce planning involves affected functions and
Gathering all information needed. Workforce planning typically takes place on an annual basis, and is usually done in conjunction with the annual strategy planning

Deploying Workforce Planning

Consequently, strategic workforce planning should be done after a thorough workforce analysis. Hence, the basis for this workforce analysis is the system of core and support processes run by the workforce.

Thus, workforce analysis without accompanying process analysis could lead to having the right workforce for the wrong process.

Therefore, the logical steps for strategic workforce planning are:

Firstly, Understand Strategy and Demand

Secondly, Establish Process Priorities

Thirdly, Derive Workforce Priorities

In summary, by employing business strategies to align shifts in demand with the existing and future supply of human capital, organisations optimise the workforce to meet business goals, increase market share, and improve employee engagement. Thus, strategic workforce planning allows organisations to better meet the challenges of Singapore’s rapidly changing economy. Since no one is able to predict the future, the best workforce planning tool is the one that caters for many different scenarios and establishes a robust system to deal with them.

Read about our solution to strategic workforce planning, read about iiP Workforce.

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