Approaches to
Workforce Planning
Source IPMA
In general, organizations can take one of three approaches to workforce planning or use a combination of the three:
“Workforce approach” examines the current workforce and occupations and projects the number and characteristics of jobs and the number of employees needed to fill them at a specific point in the future.
“Workload approach” focuses on the amount and type of work the organization anticipates handling at a specific point in the future, and uses this information to project the number of resources (people and skills) needed to perform that work.
“Competency approach” identifies sets of competencies aligned with the organization’s mission, vision, and strategic goals. This approach assumes the organization has already considered workforce and workload and can focus not only on the number of people, but the competencies employees must master for organizational success.
Workforce Approach — profile people and occupations, and conduct workforce forecasts.
With this approach, your goal is to analyze the following:
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the jobs that will need to be done,
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the type of occupations needed to do these jobs,
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the number of people needed to achieve organization strategies.
The current workforce profile is a starting point to assess the workforce your organization will need in the future. Supply analysis provides the data needed for your current workforce profile. A traditional job audit also may help you get needed information. Specifically, you will need to evaluate:
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What jobs now exist?
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How many people are performing each job?
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What are the reporting relationships of these jobs?
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How essential is each job?
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What are the characteristics of anticipated jobs?
The next step is to project the current employee population into the future as if there were no new hires. Make projections at whatever level the organization desires, estimating the employee population over the next three to five years as if nothing were done to replace employees lost through attrition. The result will show your demand for new workers if you institute no appreciable changes in work or workload. The Employment and Training Administration of the U.S. Department of Labor has funded research and development of valuable resource to help you make projections by occupation. The data is accessible through this web site, hosted by the State of Utah: http://www.projectionscentral.com
Workload Approach — assesses critical work, determine processes that drive work, and forecast future workload.
This approach starts with your organization’s strategic planning cycle, which will identify critical work (type and amount) the workforce must complete to achieve strategies. You will need to capture workload data such as cycle time, volume, cost, and performance measures when feasible. Your organization also may want to create flow charts for those key processes that will “drive the work” to aid in looking at efficiency and effectiveness. Your organization may decide workflow re-engineering is necessary to reduce redundancies or inefficiency, and this review will likely include considering further automation.
Workflow engineering may affect the strategies your organization uses during the planning period to project workload. You will want to consider all relevant metrics (time, speed, cost, and volume) and translate the amount of work and the time it takes to complete that work into the number of people and critical competencies needed to perform the work.
Competency Approach
Competencies are sets of behaviors (encompassing skills, knowledge, abilities, and personal attributes) that, taken together, are critical to accomplishing successful work and achieving an organization’s strategy. Competencies represent the most critical knowledge, skills, and commitments that underlie superior performance for your organization and/or within a specific job. The competency approach to workforce planning is futuristic and focuses on the “ideal” workforce. Competencies may be defined at several levels:
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Organizational: core competencies identified during strategic planning.
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Leadership: the behaviors your organization expects all leaders to demonstrate or to develop.
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Functional: competencies that cascade from the core competencies and are associated with specific work functions or business units.
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Occupational: competencies that cascade from the core and functional, then anchored directly to the needs of a specific occupation.
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Individual: what each employee brings to his or her function.
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Team: what members of a team, in the aggregate, bring to their work.
Your organization will need to determine the competency definition levels essential to ensuring critical work gets performed. Strategic planning usually provides the means to pinpoint the most critical, or core, organizational competencies for success.
Examining the Workforce’s Competency Requirements
To use the competency-based planning approach, your organization will need to examine its workforce for current and future competency requirements. During strategic planning, managers will develop core competencies at the organization level.
Leadership/management, functional, and occupational competencies should flow from the core competencies and align with operational and functional work activities.
Individual and team competencies are also critical components of organizational competencies. If individual competencies do not match organizational needs, your workforce planning effort will point out these gaps. You can assess current worker competencies through several ways:
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Performance management tools already in place.
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An evaluation system the organization can develop or purchase.
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Assessment processes designed to specifically determine employees’ current competencies, usually involving interviews with employees and supervisors.
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A combination of the above.
What is a Competency Model?
One way to assess competencies is with a “competency model,” which is a map to display a set of competencies that are aligned with your organization’s mission, vision, and strategic goals. These models are simple, visual representations of the most critical knowledge, skills, and behaviors that underlie and drive superior performance in an organization and/or a specific job. The competency model is future-oriented and describes an ideal workforce. The competencies that make up the model serve as the basis for HR practices in the organization since they play a key role in decisions on recruiting, employee development, personal development, and performance management.
A competency model helps an organization bridge the gap between where it is now and where it wants to be. This occurs in two ways. First, because it is based on the competencies that support the mission, vision, and goals of the organization, the competency model serves as a guide for management decisions. Second, the competency model serves as a map to guide employees toward achieving the mission of their organization and their functional areas. The result is that management and staff works to have a common understanding of the set of competencies important to the organization.
A well-developed and documented competency model will serve as the basis for organizational training and development activities as well as recruiting new employees with critical competencies. Click here and go to Wyoming's Competency Model.