Organisations need to measure, review and evaluate their workforce planning practices to improve their processes for future success. The following is a guide of relevant considerations to take into account.
Review of Outcomes
The Workforce Plan, especially the strategies and action items, should serve as a roadmap for managers to ensure the right people are in the right jobs at the right time in order to achieve the organisation’s short-term and long-term goals. The outcomes should be continuously evaluated to determine progress in addressing the gaps and, specifically, where adjustments to the strategies and action items are needed.
Assessing Accomplishment and Effectiveness of Outcomes
There are many ways to obtain feedback regarding the achievement of accomplishments and the effectiveness of outcomes. This information can be obtained via meetings, surveys, focus groups, review of HR and business data, and other inputs.
Questions to ask in order to determine the effectiveness of the Workforce Plan and opportunities for improvement include:
- Were the actions and strategies completed? Did they achieve their objectives?
- If not, what factors prevented the achievement of the objectives? Have the organisation’s strategies changed? Are the assumptions within the demand and supply models still valid?
- Have the conditions changed such that the strategies need to be revisited?
- Is there a need to modify the action items?
Addressing Need for Adjustments to Strategies and Action Items
After the above analysis has been conducted, steps should be taken to remedy problems in implementing action items. Examples include:
- Timeframe for implementation of action items may need to be changed
- Content of action items may need to be adjusted
- Deletion of action items because they may no longer be required and/or feasible
- Persons responsible for action item may need to be changed.
Changes to the action items must be communicated to responsible individuals (and relevant key stakeholders) in a timely manner to allow for questions and clarification. Similarly, achievement of action items should be reflected in the organisation’s annual accomplishments and ultimately the fulfillment of strategic goals.
Dynamic Review of Workforce Planning Process
The workforce planning process is a continuous process of forecasting, clarifying, and identifying organisational workforce needs, assessing competencies, and implementing appropriate interventions. The process should be continuously evaluated to determine how well each of its component parts are functioning and where adjustments are needed.
The review process is not just about updating the action plan and workforce strategy; it is also a learning exercise.
A methodical approach will ensure that lessons are learnt from the last planning exercise:
- Don’t be tempted to throw the old plan away and start from scratch – you will lose the learning
- Do go through every step of the workforce planning process again, even if you have an idea of where the problem lies. You can learn from what went right as well as what went wrong
- Do make sure that you have kept all the assumptions, modelling, data, and so on from the original workforce planning exercise and check or update them
- Re-engage with all the stakeholders and involve them in the process to make sure that they are still signed up to the goals and assumptions
- Make sure that managers own the process
- Prioritise positions and business units; focus on where workforce planning will have the greatest business impact
- Ensure the workforce planning review exercise is focussed on the future, not revisiting the past
- Integrate workforce planning across all business units
- Integrate the workforce plan with HR plans
- Support plans with incentives – back plans up with feedback, rewards, recognition etc.
- Workforce planning must be a decision filter – no project should be approved unless the HR component of it is property addressed.
It can be useful to review the workforce plan as part of the annual business planning process; key areas for focus are:
- Are the right people in the right place to deliver against plans?
- Is there sufficient flexibility within the planning process to accommodate changes in assumptions and requirements?
- Are outcomes regularly reviewed?
- Are gaps being closed effectively and quickly enough?
Determining Effectiveness of the Workforce Planning Process
Feedback should be obtained from all participants, including managers and senior-leadership, to determine the effectiveness of the workforce planning process in producing a useful product. This information can be obtained via a variety of information gathering methods such as interviews, focus groups, surveys, review of the quality of the workforce plan, etc.
When ascertaining the effectiveness of the workforce planning process, examples of questions to ask include:
- What was expected from this process? Did the outcome meet the expectation?
- Did this process produce a plan that is useful to managers in making resource related decisions?
- What worked and why?
- If some of the steps did not work, how did participants proceed? What actions did they take?
- What didn’t work and how could it be improved?
- Was there enough time to conduct the workforce planning activities?
- Were the appropriate stakeholders involved?
- Were adequate resources and training/information provided?
- Were the cost and saving estimates accurate?
In addition, there may be external and internal forces that precipitate changes to the process. Examples of these include reorganisation, redistribution of resources, new and/or changes to information data systems, budgetary and strategic planning cycle changes, etc.
Communicate Changes
Once the workforce planning process and outcomes have been evaluated, appropriate changes should be identified to improve the process moving forward. These changes need to be communicated to relevant stakeholders.
- Appropriate action should be taken to address any workforce planning process inefficiencies
- Any changes to the workforce planning process and subsequent impacts should be fully discussed and analysed with the multi-disciplinary team to ensure the changes do not create unforeseen roadblocks
- Modifications to the workforce planning process should be communicated to all relevant persons/groups as soon as possible to ensure sufficient time for training and/or questions.
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Updated February 2022