Book Profile
Workforce Planning Toolkit
Lydia Cillie-Schmidt · 2018
A practical, tool-driven manual that guides HR professionals and line managers through the full seven-phase process of strategic and operational workforce planning to ensure the right people with the right skills are in place to achieve organisational strategy.
Get the book →Most organisations know that workforce planning matters, but they struggle to move from 'what' to 'how'. This toolkit closes that knowing–doing gap by offering 42 ready-to-use, adaptable tools organised around a generic seven-phase workforce planning roadmap: ensuring organisational readiness, creating context, understanding the current internal and external workforce, futuring, gap analysis, developing and implementing strategies, and monitoring and evaluation. Drawing on practitioner experience and academic research and grounded in the South African context, the book equips readers to build a business case, align workforce planning with strategic planning, segment critical talent, forecast supply and demand, identify and prioritise gaps, and deploy the '8 Bs' of workforce strategy. It is a hands-on companion for HR leaders who want to turn workforce planning into a genuine source of sustainable competitive advantage.
What it argues
A causal path model in which contextual drivers and organisational readiness enable a structured workforce planning process (context creation, workforce analysis, futuring, gap analysis, strategy development) which, mediated by workforce planning effectiveness, produces strategic workforce alignment and ultimately organisational success and competitive advantage. Leadership ownership, integration with strategy, and monitoring/evaluation act as moderators or enabling conditions.
Key ideas it contributes
- Workforce Planning Drivers — The internal and external forces that create the need and rationale for workforce planning in an organisation.
- Organisational Readiness for Workforce Planning — The presence of the strategic, stakeholder, role, framework, resource and change-management elements required before workforce planning can be effectively entrenched.
- Integration of Workforce Planning with Strategic Planning — The degree to which workforce planning is embedded within and informs the strategic planning process rather than operating as a stand-alone HR activity.
- Senior Leadership Ownership and Sponsorship — The visible commitment, accountability and resourcing of workforce planning by senior management, CEO or board.
- Stakeholder Engagement and Buy-in — The level of understanding, commitment and active participation of relevant internal and external stakeholders in workforce planning.
- Workforce Data Availability and Integrity — The extent to which accurate, reliable and comprehensive workforce data is available and trusted for planning decisions.
- Context Creation and Requirement Translation — Understanding the organisation's strategic direction and high-impact factors and translating them into future workforce requirements.
- Current Workforce Analysis — Comprehensive analysis of the current internal and external workforce to understand present capacity and capability.