The burning need for workforce planning analytics

Abstract

Strategic workforce planning empowers companies to shape the future of work by opearationalizing predictions of changing workforce supply and enables appropriate talent management. An IBM study done in 2015 has pointed out internal factors like shifts in strategic direction, pressing workforce challenges, company-wide analytics mandates and external factors lime labour market trends, regularity and compliance issues, and emerging data sources. The Business objectives of this exercise are to create a more efficient and effective workforce, cross skilling, strategic and proactive talent management decisions, enhanced job satisfaction, newer career options to employees and more focused training and development. The potential solution involves evaluation of current skill inventory, gap in skills to keep the business running, evaluation of future skills and headcount needed to drive the organization forward. At a more micro level, need is to define the optimization objectives, workforce levers, inputs dynamics, costs and constraints, optimize the objective and iterate basic business feedback. From analytics stand point, a phase-wise proof of value has empirically seemed to work better - business & data understanding, design & development of a workforce planning model, business value assessment, dashboard prototype and an implementation roadmap. Levers that can be used on insights from the above models are training courses, leadership programs, retention, external hiring (full time vs. contingent hires), and secondment or movement of SMEs.