Workforce Planning: 10 Best Practices to Maximize People Resources

It’s exciting when your company starts growing quickly, but it can get a little overwhelming when half of your departments need more people—and they needed them yesterday.

To add to the challenge, finding the right people with the right skills is becoming increasingly difficult. Because of this, organizations are paying considerable attention to workforce planning tools. The shift in focus is in hopes of fulfilling company goals, addressing skills gaps, increasing productivity and efficiency, and simplifying hiring.

In this article, we’ll cover 10 best practices for workforce planning in 2024 to help your business grow even during times of market uncertainty.

What Is Workforce Planning?

The workforce planning process involves analyzing, forecasting, and planning workforce supply and demand, assessing gaps, and determining target talent management interventions. The goal is to have the right people, with the right skills, in the right places at the right time. More simply, workforce planning helps organizations prepare for future staffing needs.

What Are the Best Workforce Planning Tools?

The best workforce planning tools help companies better manage employees’ schedules, ensure work is being done by the right person, and meet both employee and business goals. Employee data tracking, time tracking, and HR gap analysis are just a few capabilities a workforce planning solution should offer. Together, these tools enable you to understand your current workforce situation, forecast future needs, and address skills gaps.

For example, BambooHR features comprehensive HR data tracking, reporting, onboarding, payroll, time tracking, performance management, and employee wellbeing. The data captured by our all-in-one HR platform provides valuable insights into how the current workforce is performing, enabling HR teams to make strategic decisions regarding strengthening culture, increasing workforce efficiency, and planning for the future.

10 Steps for Successful Workforce Planning

1. Understand the Company’s Goals

Often overlooked, HR plays a critical role in fulfilling company goals as they’re responsible for attracting and hiring high-quality talent to meet business objectives. However, you can’t recruit the right people to help you without clearly understanding those goals.

One approach is to start with revenue. The math isn’t too difficult (but it might remind you of word problems from high school). If your company wants to make X by a certain date, and each salesperson typically brings in Y, how many more salespeople will you need to reach the goal? It might look something like this:

• We want $100,000 in revenue per month by one year from now.
• Each salesperson averages $1,500 in revenue per month.
• ($100,000/$1,500 = 66.6)
• To meet our goal, we need a total of 67 salespeople.
• Since we currently have 45 salespeople, we need to hire and ramp up 22 salespeople in the next year.

Revenue isn’t the only goal to consider, of course. Perhaps your product team plans to add to or completely revamp your product. You’ll probably need to hire a few new developers to meet that demand. Regardless, ensure you know exactly what your company is working toward and then find individuals to help accomplish those goals.

2. Invest in the Right Workforce Planning Software

Managing a workforce in today’s fast-paced environment is a daunting task overall. To simplify the process, invest in a comprehensive platform with the following features:

• Data analytics: Having real-time insights into employee data and performance will help you identify current skills gaps for future hiring needs.
• Recruiting support and screening: Bad hires are costly. A robust applicant tracking system can help you avoid them by thoroughly screening each applicant and centralizing feedback from recruiters, hiring managers, and other stakeholders.
• Internal job boards: You may already have the talent you’re seeking. Posting jobs internally on your workforce planning solution can reduce hiring costs, save time, and help employees advance their careers.
• Performance management: Today’s employees want frequent feedback and recognition for a job well done. Make sure your workforce planning solution offers performance management tools such as employee reviews, goal tracking, and reporting to monitor their performance over time.
• Succession planning: Platforms that facilitate succession planning enable you to identify potential leaders and high performers. Doing so ensures the right people are in the right positions and gives employees professional development opportunities.

3. Take Inventory of Your Internal Talent

Did you know the cost of hiring a new employee can be three to four times the position’s salary? Instead of starting from square one on multiple job boards, invest in your current employees’ growth and transfer or promote from within when positions open up.

You can offer various professional development opportunities such as educational reimbursement, lunch and learns, and coaching and mentoring programs. On top of saving the business time and money, investing in your current workforce boosts employee morale, engagement, and retention.

4. Consider the Status Quo Then Develop a Plan

For instance, are departments requesting additional employees working at full capacity? Before a team hires someone else, everyone should already be meeting the status quo for efficiency. If someone isn’t contributing as much as they could, have them boost their productivity before you bring someone in to pick up the slack.

On the other hand, if you have a team that wants to cover more ground, they’ll need more help. Let’s say your HR team wants to invest in more strategic initiatives, but operational tasks are bogging them down. The first step would be to get a system to automate those tasks. If they still can’t do it all, you may need to hire someone to help.

5. Prioritize Hiring Needs and Succession Planning

Workforce planning involves balancing both short- and long-term goals. After all, how can you accurately project how many new hires a department will need as the company grows if there’s a chance “emergency” positions will open up and take priority? Organizing the various hiring needs of your organization will help sustain daily operations plus inform succession plans.

For example, comparing skill gaps to company goals and target dates can help you determine whether you should hire new employees now or invest in professional development opportunities to help top performers grow into higher-level roles.

6. Consider Employee Working Capacity

New hires should be ramped up before you need them. Otherwise, they’ll come into the office, no one will have time to help them, and they’ll feel pressured to start contributing faster than they’ll be ready to.

This is another reason why workforce planning is crucial. Hiring before additional help is desperately needed leaves time for appropriate training and acclimation, which are vital to employee success. Plus, this also ensures current employees won’t feel overwhelmed because by the time work exceeds their bandwidth, they’ll have a new, fully onboarded coworker to share the load with.

7. Add in Attrition and Turnover

Keep in mind you’ll probably lose a few employees over the year, too. If you have an HRIS, you should be able to pull a report to better understand your company’s employee attrition and turnover and plan accordingly. For example, if you lost five salespeople, two marketers, and one developer last year, you should also account for those positions in your workforce plan.

Plus, having real-time data can help inform your retention plan. If certain departments have higher turnover rates than others, look into what factors may be driving employees away.

8. Consider Reduction Processes When Necessary

Hopefully, your workforce plan involves hiring for the most part, but there may be a time when you will need to reduce your staff. Perhaps a certain department isn’t necessary anymore (or won’t be in the near future), or the entire company needs to make a reduction, which may call for conducting furloughs or layoffs.

If you have a plan, you can control how a reduction will affect your employees. If you don’t, you may have to do massive layoffs that can kill morale. You may also need to figure out natural turnover and encourage retirement or gradual layoffs. Either way, those options are preferable to an out-of-the-blue mass firing.

9. Map the Impact Your Recruitment Will Have

Hiring in one department impacts all the others. After you’ve mapped the simple hiring needs to reach the big goals, consider how increasing your staff in those departments will create needs in other departments.

For instance, hiring those 22 new salespeople to increase revenue will impact the customer service and product-implementation departments. Also, consider the support those new employees will need. If marketing needs to increase leads so the new salespeople have potential customers to contact, you may need to bring on more marketers. Perhaps you’ll also need a new recruiter or HR generalist to find and support all those new hires.

10. Talk to Hiring Managers

It can be hard to understand how increases in one area impact others. The many moving pieces within departments often make it impossible to understand what’s needed without talking to the people on the front lines. This is why looping in hiring managers and company leadership as often as possible is vital.

For example, consider setting up a monthly meeting between HR, managers, and leadership where you can ask managers how they think they’ll be impacted or what they need. Tell your marketing manager you’ll be hiring 22 new salespeople, so she’ll need to provide enough leads to keep them busy. Then let her tell you what she’ll need to meet that demand.

Maintaining constant communication helps you see things you may not be able to “calculate.” For instance, you couldn’t calculate that your marketing team wants to create a blog. But your marketing manager could tell you she’s planning to do so and needs you to hire a writer with blogging experience.

Do It All with a Complete HR Platform

For organizations with many people coming and going, workforce planning and management can quickly get complex. BambooHR’s comprehensive workforce planning tools are designed to do the heavy lifting for you. From detailed reporting that provides in-depth insights into your current skill stack to seamless onboarding, you’ll have everything you need to plan for current and future business needs right at your fingertips.