6 Aspects of Workforce Planning
Whatever your industry, there will be times when you need to plan ahead and adjust your team to help them succeed. Planning and executing changes to your staff is a continuous process. Making informed changes based on accurate workforce data from Revelio Labs can help keep your team competitive.
The Workforce Planning Cycle
The Office of Management for the National Institutes of Health describes improving your workforce as the Workforce Planning Cycle. This six-step process is a useful way to take an ordered approach to strengthen your team.
1. Strategic Planning
The first step to building a successful workforce plan is understanding your business strategy. Before you can know how your workforce needs to grow, you must develop reasonable expectations for your organization's future.
When making a strategic plan, you should know what changes your organization expects to undergo over the next five years. Know what to expect from your budget. Ask yourself how your current workforce will deal with possible market and economic changes. This information can help you build a robust plan to survive the challenges your company may face.
Don't neglect your strategic relationships or overarching goals when drafting this plan. These factors will play a role in how your organization deals with change.
Accurate workforce data gives you insight into industry trends. Better data helps you build a plan tailored to your business's and industry's conditions.
2. Supply Analysis
The next step in the planning cycle is to understand what resources you have at your disposal.
The first part of this is to look at your current workforce. Understand how your current staff supports your goals. Identify which positions on your staff will be the most difficult to fill. Determine whether changes in your staff will affect your ability to serve your clients. Track data on how your team performs and how it compares to other companies in your market.
Next, you need to find the holes in your organization. Identify local sources of new talent that you can draw from when necessary. Consider ways to reorganize your staff and your skill distribution. Reorganization may reduce the difficulty of recruiting for key positions.
Revelio Labs has the data and tools needed to help you stay on top of hiring trends.
3. Demand Analysis
The next phase of the workforce planning cycle is considering the demands you place on your staff. Take time to identify the drivers of the demand placed on your team. Find out how much time your employees spend on a single service or product. Understanding the demands on your employee's time will help you identify possible weaknesses to address.
You should also keep an eye out for new technologies or approaches that will redistribute the load on your staff. New policies, regulations, or clients could affect the demands placed on your staff. Keep these in mind as you plan for future workforce needs.
4. Gap Analysis
When you understand both the resources you have and the demands you need to meet, it is time to examine the gap between them.
Find those parts of your organization where the skills and human capital fall short of the demand. Look for gaps you can fill with a reorganization or more training. Identify areas where filling the gaps in your staff with new hires will be more difficult. These difficulties may arise from regional availability, hard-to-find skills, or other factors.
Don't limit your focus to existing shortfalls; try to anticipate gaps that will arise within the next five years. Addressing these issues can save your company time and money in the long term.
5. Solution Implementation
When you understand the scope of your organization's needs, you can implement the solutions that will benefit your organization the most. Make short-term and long-term plans that align with your goals, then begin your implementation with the most critical needs.
Don't fixate solely on the internal conditions of your company. Workforce data from outside sources can help you find solutions and sources of talent that may not be apparent from a limited point of view.
6. Monitoring Progress
The final phase in the workforce planning cycle is to monitor your organization's process. Even carefully planned and executed improvements commonly need adjustment throughout the implementation process. Use workforce data from Revelio Labs to continually evaluate your solutions.
The factors contributing to your available resources and worker demand will likely change over time. Careful monitoring can help you adjust to those changes as they arise.
Use Workforce Data To Improve Your Planning Cycle
Revelio Labs offers advanced workforce data that can help you at every stage of this cycle. We gather public data from many sources. We get data from online professional profiles, job postings, government records, and more. Our team then standardizes this data for easy analysis.
You can use our data to benchmark your team against other companies in your industry and market. You can see how they are composing their staff and find opportunities to strengthen your staff where other groups may be weak. The scope of our data can also help you find sources of talent and other solutions that you may not have otherwise considered.
Put Our Data to Work for You
Revelio Labs specializes in workforce data collection and statistical analysis. Our data can help you improve your team and benchmark your company against competitors. Contact us today for a demo.
