Strategic Workforce Planning
Anticipating future workforce needs
Large multinational organisations and public sector ecosystems like the NHS, both need to understand the implications of externally driven changes such as digitalisation and internally driven changes on the workforce, to be able to deliver their strategic objectives.
We also recognise that managing and adapting a workforce in complex, changing environments can be challenging as the planning scope may cover the whole system; one business or location; a specific service or clinical pathway; or even a specific profession.
For us workforce planning is ensuring that an organisation or even wider ecosystem has the right workforce capacity and capabilities, at the right cost, focused on the right work, located where they are needed to both deliver the organisations strategy and respond to emerging events while mitigating key risks of over or undersupply.
Client Challenges
Our clients describe a range of challenges from the strategic to the more operational, these include:
Limited understanding how wider environmental drivers such as digital technologies will impact work and the workforce in the short, medium and long term
Shifting from transactional workforce responses to transformational impact by engaging wider groups of stakeholders to agree a shared future
Planning in a complex environment with unclear accountabilities and different priorities across functions, or even external agencies as within the healthcare sector
Not having a practical and rigorous approach to provide valuable insights to inform leaders decision making
Difficulty in identifying transformational workforce planning responses supported by economic rigour
Overly focussing on professions and not using a skills based approach to enable workforce transformation and better manage demand
Failure to integrate operational, financial, and workforce planning, with each function arguing their data is the most accurate
Identifying skills gaps or surplus and areas of succession risk
Lack of visibility into workforce data, to track the baseline, actual and plan at scale
Building a capability and embedding a workforce planning system to effect real transformational change
Our Approach
We have deep expertise in Strategic Workforce Planning, with many of our team prior national leaders across the public sector. We take a hands-on, holistic and iterative approach, leveraging workforce intelligence and economic rigour.
Our use of powerful analytics ensures decision makers are equipped with authoritative insights. We engage and collaborate with diverse stakeholder groups to secure meaningful change.
Our default is to transfer knowledge, building both capability and confidence into the organisation or wider ecosystem, leaving you better able to respond to evolving strategic and operational needs.
Strategic Workforce Planning
Benefits
An effective strategic workforce planning system within the organisation and wider ecosystem delivers a range of benefits including:
- Alignment with Strategic Goals – ensuring the workforce aligns with and supports overall strategic objectives
- Adaptability to Change – enhances the capability to adapt to changes in the external environment, such as technological advancements, economic shifts, disruptive events or changes in demand
- Improved Decision-Making – provides decision-makers with data-driven, economically rigorous insights into workforce capabilities, allowing for informed and strategic decision-making
- Risk Mitigation: Identifies and mitigates potential risks related to talent shortages, skill gaps, or workforce imbalances that could impact the ability to achieve objectives
- Strategic Resource Allocation – enables strategic allocation of resources, including training budgets, based on identified skill gaps and development needs
- Workforce Diversity and Inclusion – supports diversity and inclusion initiatives by ensuring that the workforce is representative and inclusive, fostering innovation and creativity
