Happy New Year! It’s the time of year for making resolutions, setting goals, and planning strategy. For HR data people, this typically means that it’s time to pull together the data to initiate the company’s Strategic Workforce Planning process.
Many companies have different definitions of this process, but SuccessFactors defines Strategic Workforce Planning as taking the steps today to ensure the organization has the right people in the right place with the right skills at the right time and right cost to reduce business strategy execution risks associated with workforce capacity, capability, and flexibility. The goal of Strategic Workforce Planning is to deliver impact to the organization and plan for future workforce needs
This may sound complex and it is in many ways, but it’s not impossible. I think half of the challenge for organizations is simply getting started. One of the easiest steps in getting started is consolidating what you already know. This means gathering the supply data needed for this analysis.
Luckily enough, most of the supply data that you need for Strategic Workforce Planning should be stored in your current HRIS system. Here’s the list of key data elements, you’ll need to get started:
Headcount: List of current employees in your organization. I know that sounds easy to some people who don’t work with data on a daily basis, but after having worked with many companies around the globe, I know what a painful process this can be. Hopefully, you have a way to pull a list of current employees.
Ideally, with that list of current employees, you would also be able to provide the following information on each employee:
- Department/ Business Unit/ Location
- Job Family / Function
- Level/ Grade
- Part Time/ Full Time and Regular / Temporary
- Age/ Workforce Tenure
Terminations and Retirements: Again, you’ll need a list of employees in your organization that have left the organization across the last year. If you can provide data for more than one year, I encourage you to go back even further. It will help if you’re trying to understand trends for a small job family/ function. Again, you should have the following information about these employees if available:
- Department/ Business Unit/ Location
- Job Family / Function
- Level/ Grade
- Part Time/ Full Time and Regular / Temporary
- Age / Workforce Tenure
Also in the case of Terminations, you’ll want to understand the type of Termination. This will be needed so you can determine if you include all Terminations in your supply model. Most often when analyzing terminations, we include only those employees who have chosen to leave the company voluntarily but haven’t retired. Retirees will be analyzed separately. (We don’t typically analyze involuntary terminations in the supply model, because many of these are under the companies’ control.)
Retirements can be defined in many ways. One of the easiest ways is if you have a specific code in your terminations that is reliable and defines them. If that isn’t available to you, perhaps you can review the Terminations from the last year and use the Age and Workforce Tenure to determine what you would classify as a Retirement. You’ll most likely want to separate out Retirements from other types of Terminations to get the right supply model/ distribution.
If you have those base data inputs, you can learn a lot about your organization and use the history to begin to understand the future supply needs for your organization. There are other elements that can be added in, but this is a great place to start.
Even if you don’t go through a big demand model and just assume steady state headcount, you’ll be able to see where you’re losing the most people. Supply data is just the beginning step, but if you can at least start with this step and begin to share the data/ model/ stories of what has happened in the organization and how that may affect the future, you’ll be one step closer to building the business case for strategic workforce planning.