When conducting an SWP project, you need to consider cost, time, place, skills and people
Hiring costs: Recruitment is more than just salary. You must remember things such as onboarding and the administrative burden of recruitment and calculate metrics such as time to fill and time to productivity.
Timing and availability: You must consider your timing and available staff when recruiting. Even though you have a well-functioning workforce, it is still often necessary to acknowledge that recruitment processes can be exhausting.
Redefining “the right place”: The future workplace allows you to hire anyone from anywhere. However, in order to create a sense of belonging, you need to give your employees the opportunity to be physically present with colleagues.
Skills and training: Consider if your current staff can fill out any of the roles you are seeking to fill, and if training and promotion costs will be a cheaper alternative to hiring externally (plus support internal mobility).
People and pipeline: It is essential that you create an overview of average tenure of both younger and older employees as well as a pipeline of key segments of new talent.
The future of strategic workforce planning
The future of SWP is here, and we know that competence is key to staying relevant. Therefore, your company must be able to:
- Project future recruitment and resource needs across the organisation.
- Conduct gap analysis and have a clear strategy for retention, redundancy and recruitment.
- Perform a competency mapping and build competence models.
- Dynamically replan and thereby react to the fast pace of changes, chocks and opportunities in the environment by focusing on strategic rather than detailed operational planning.
When we look at future workforce strategies, investing in reskilling of current employees and supporting mobility are some of the most important factors.