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Workforce Planning

The workforce planning process involves forecasting your business’s future skill requirements and establishing how you will attract, develop and retain people with those skills.

Workforce planning will assist your business to respond to changes in the demand and supply of labour, and ensure that your business is staffed to meet future challenges. As a result, your business will be better placed to attract and retain employees in a tight labour market, have higher productivity and profitability and improved quality of product and service.

Checklist

Workforce Planning This checklist summarises key information about planning for your workforce needs You can adjust this document to suit your own needs.

Factors that may affect your workforce

Internal factors

Think about the internal factors affecting your workforce, such as people approaching retirement age or finishing their apprenticeship and workforce turnover rates.

Develop a process to collect and retain information about your current workforce, including total number of employees, and the number of full-time, part-time and casual employees.

Template

Workforce Information records This template assists you to collect and retain workforce information. You can adjust this document to suit your own needs.

See Section 5. Retain and Support
Retaining Employees
Measuring your workforce turnover.

External factors

It’s worth thinking about the things that happen outside your business and the effect these can have on your workforce. These external factors can be managed if you take notice of the following factors.

• Social/cultural, technological, economic, demographic, political and legislative trends. What impact will these external forces, locally, nationally or internationally, have on your capacity to ensure you have a skilled workforce?
• Competitors – what are your competitors doing? Are they offering different employment packages/conditions to their staff?
• Other sources of information – including the Australian Bureau of Statistics, employer associations, trade journals, research papers, news media, competitors/competitors’ annual reports, government agencies and community groups.

Forecasting your workforce needs

Have you considered whether you will have the skilled workforce you need in the coming months and years?

Gap analysis

A gap analysis will help you to consider whether you have the workforce you need. This involves looking at:

• Your current workforce
• Calculating your supply and demand forecast
• Calculating the gap between the supply and demand.

Setting goals and planning for the future

Plan ahead and create strategies so you can you deal with an expected labour shortage or surplus. Scenario planning and succession planning are two strategies that may be useful

Scenario planning

Scenario planning helps businesses to foresee what might happen and plan how to address it. Think about events and circumstances that are likely to affect your business in the future and plan what you can do about these.

For example, if you lost your biggest supplier or customer, what would need to happen in your business. What if prices of certain goods or services changed – how could you respond to this quickly so it didn’t affect your business?

Succession planning

Succession planning ensures that key roles in the business can be filled by existing employees when people retire, resign or take extended leave.

Succession planning will help you to:

• identify replacements with the appropriate skills, knowledge and abilities (whether internally or externally)
• understand how much it will cost your business if a key role isn’t filled quickly
• ensure there is no cost in downtime, lost production and customer service
• train/develop leaders who can step into a role if key staff leave
• identify when people may be thinking of leaving.

For example, if one of your employees left your business, would you be caught short? Make a plan and decide who might assume key roles when other employees leave or retire.

Factsheet

Succession planning This fact sheet provides more information on methods succession planning.

For more information see:

Putting your plan in place and measuring the results

Creating an action plan will identify what needs to be done, who needs to take charge of each task, what resources will be required and when they need to be completed.

Identify what needs to happen to turn the plan into reality. Workforce planning can be very successful if you break your long-term goals into shorter-term, more achievable steps and measure your progress regularly.

Reviewing your progress

• Analyse targets and actual results. This will help to identify patterns in your workforce and the reasons for them.
• Conduct ‘one-on-one’ discussions. ‘Checking in’ with employees will give management feedback on business performance and identify where changes need to be made.
• Arrange informal focus groups. Conduct group discussions regarding the business and its direction. This might be done as part of a regular staff meeting.
• Compose an employee attitude survey. These allow staff to give confidential feedback on their opinion of the workplace and the way it works.

*(Demographic Change Advisory Council (DCAC) 2007, Demographic change in Tasmania, challenges and opportunities, DCAC, Tasmania.)

* (Kosmas, S 2006, Australian Family and Private Business Survey, RMIT and MGI, Melbourne.)