How Ingentis org.manager Adds Value to the Workforce Planning Process

‘An organization making the preparations to hire their future employees’

The above statement is simple and easy for anyone to understand. The ‘preparations’ bit might be a little vague for some but overall, the message is clear. The topic of this blog is ‘workforce planning’ and I wanted to start off the blog by explaining what we mean when we say workforce planning. In quite simple terms, it is a practice which enables an organization to make preparations to hire their future employees. Workforce planning can mean different things to different people but at the heart of the practice, there is a common theme, summarized in the above statement.

The practice is usually led by Human Resources (HR) practitioners, and it varies in its application in organizations. Some organization’s focus their workforce planning efforts on leadership and managerial positions, some focus on high-volume positions, while others focus on critical roles. Other practices vary in terms of the planning horizon, some organization’s focus on short-term, immediate recruitment needs, others on the medium and long-term.

Ultimately, whatever the particular practice, the organization is making the necessary preparations to fill future positions in a timely manner. It is a balancing act of supply and demand to ensure the organization has the required skills in post at the right time to enable the organization to deliver their mission, strategic goals and services. It is a seemingly simple and straightforward practice but in reality, it is a complex practice that requires a well thought through framework which outlines the process for its stakeholders, ensures a consistent approach across the organization, and actually delivers what it says it will deliver.

Workforce planning can be the most effective strategic activity an HR can engage in. It doesn’t need to be complicated and can be adjusted to suit the size and maturity of any organization. It can provide market and industry intelligence to help organizations focus on a range of challenges and issues and prepare for initiatives to support longer term business goals. So let’s look at some descriptions of workforce planning.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) describes workforce planning as the process of balancing labour supply (skills) against the demand (numbers needed). It includes analysing the current workforce, determining future workforce needs, identifying the gap between the present and the future, and implementing solutions so that an organisation can accomplish its mission, goals, and strategic plan. It’s about getting the right number of people with the right skills employed in the right place at the right time, at the right cost and on the right contract to deliver an organisation’s short and long-term objectives.

Strategic Workforce Planning has a planning horizon of 1-5 years. It results in a long-term blueprint to ensure workforce optimization – a holistic strategy encompassing recruiting, developing, managing, retaining and redeploying talent to maximize the effectiveness of both the current and future workforce in light of an organization’s strategic goals.

Strategic Workforce Planning is also effective when it focuses on an organization’s mission-critical roles only or what are called, ‘Roles of Interest’. Roles of Interest play a significant role in the organization’s success in terms of business impact, and execution of organizational mission and strategic goals. A position might become a Role of Interest because the time to competence is long, a scarcity of skills, or internal demand for a particular skill outstrips supply, and perhaps there are long term sustainability issues for the skills, for example, the skills may be replaced by artificial intelligence.

Tactical Workforce Planning has a planning horizon of 0-12 months. It results in a short-term blueprint to ensure the current workforce capacity is optimized within the current financial or fiscal year. Other roles may be categorized as Core or Supportive to the organization’s mission and which are best addressed through tactical workforce planning.

The process to identify Roles of Interest, Core and Supportive Roles is known as Role Segmentation and it is a fundamental prerequisite for strategic workforce planning.

Workforce planning is an effective way at enabling sustainable organization performance through better decision-making about the future people needs of the business. The practice enables HR to join strategic discussions with the business specifically:

• Reduce people costs in favour of workforce mobilisation, deployment and flexibility.
• Identify and respond to changing business needs.
• Identify relevant strategies for focused development of people.
• Target inefficiencies.
• Improve people retention.
• Improve productivity.
• Improve people’s work-life balance.
• Make recommendations to deliver strategic value through talent.

But this is all well and good, what you need to make the practice work is accurate and reliable data.

Ingentis’ org.manager is a great tool to visualize HR data in the strategic workforce planning process. The key metrics relevant in the process empowers HR to have strategic conversations with the business, gives an easy to view HR dashboard, and enables leaders to make decisions. So what key metrics would I suggest that you visualize? Here are my tips.

Ingentis org.manager propels your strategic workforce planning into the future. With their innovative software, you not only get automated organizational charts but also meaningful Big Data diagrams and dashboards for rapid insights and in-depth understanding of your workforce.

Org.manager also helps HR practitioners to fully leverage the data around the workforce: Ingentis org.manager bring the analysis of your workforce to a new level. Individual visualization rules and highlighting functions assist you in focusing on the key Strategic Workforce Planning metrics listed above, enabling you to obtain meaningful answers. Taking spreadsheets away from the process enables leaders and HR practitioners to focus on identifying potential areas for action and problems early on to act in a timely manner.

When you choose Ingentis org.manager, you’re not just acquiring a powerful tool for data visualization and analytics, you also gain access to its advanced simulation feature. This allows you to simulate the current workforce and future workforce, steps 2 and 4 in my recommended strategic workforce planning framework and to evaluate their impact as part of the decision- making process.

For the tool to work efficiently and effectively, it is important to have accurate and reliable data. The visualization of data makes it easy for organizational leaders and managers to spot errors in HR data which can lead to a loss of confidence in the strategic workforce planning process. So it makes sense to ensure there a data quality process in place that ensures strategic workforce planning is successful.

1. Workforce planning can be described as the process of balancing labor supply (skills) against the demand (numbers needed). It is a practice which enables an organization to make preparations to hire their future employees.
2. Role Segmentation is a fundamental prerequisite for strategic workforce planning. It categorizes an organization’s positions into Roles of Interest or mission-critical roles, Core and Supportive Roles.
3. Strategic workforce planning focuses on Roles of Interest only and has a planning horizon of 1-5 years. Core and Supportive roles are best addressed through tactical workforce planning which has a planning horizon of 0-12 months.
4. The strategic workforce planning practice follows a seven step process (see Figure 1): Steps 2, 3, 4 and 5 benefit from data visualization to facilitate decision-making by organizational leaders.
5. HR data must be accurate and reliable to gain credibility from the organizational leaders and managers involved in the strategic workforce planning process.
6. Ingentis’ org. manager has the tools to visualise HR data in a strategic workforce planning process, eliminating the need for spreadsheets and freeing up HR practitioners to join strategic conversations about the future talent of an organization.