Design and Build a Strategic Workforce Planning Toolkit

Create a workforce planning toolkit that will ensure the right talent is available when and where it is needed.

Executive Summary

McLean & Company

It is common practice to continually reassess customers, markets, and products in today’s VUCA environment, but there is often no parallel assessment of workforce composition. Leaders need to be planful and develop a strategy that positions their organization to take advantage of change rather than fall victim to it.

Situation

• Today’s rapidly changing operating environment is making it increasingly difficult to get the talent needed to execute on organizational strategies using traditional reactive talent management practices.
• 73% of executives predict significant industry disruption in the next three years, which will further transform the skills and roles needed (Mercer, 2019), and workforce planning is the solution: 60% of HR professionals rank strategic workforce planning as critically important to the organization’s ability to achieve business and HR goals (SHRM THRIVE360 HRMG, 2020; N=836).

Complication

• But organizations struggle to implement workforce planning. While headcount planning is a process most organizations are comfortable with, workforce planning is a more complex undertaking that involves more stakeholders, more quantitative and qualitative data, and longer planning horizons.
• A lack of suitable data and internal expertise on designing and applying workforce planning means that many organizations apply it infrequently, improperly, or not at all.

Solution

• Start the workforce planning journey by designing the process and planning for the different stakeholders and analyses that will be involved.
• Implement a clear and straightforward workforce planning process aligned with organizational capabilities and maturity to make workforce planning achievable and attain the benefits of this strategic planning process.

Operating environments are increasingly in flux, and the nature of work is rapidly changing

In today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world, it can be hard for organizations to keep up. With organizational disruption, shifting talent requirements, and changing workforce demographics, it’s more critical than ever to develop a plan for how to meet the organization’s future talent needs.

Organizational disruption

• 73% of executives predict significant industry disruption in the next three years, which will further transform skills needed in the future (Mercer, 2019).
• 2x The number of mergers and acquisitions worldwide each year has nearly doubled since 2002, resulting in increasingly complex organizations (IMAA, 2020).

Shifting talent requirements

• 42% of core workforce skills are projected to fundamentally change (World Economic Forum, 2018).
• The changing division of work between humans, machines, and algorithms will displace 75 million current jobs while creating 133 million new jobs (World Economic Forum, 2018).

Changing workforce demographics

• Workforce participation of older workers is increasing. By 2028, 1 in 4 employees is expected to be over the age of 55 (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020).
• The number of young adults in the global workforce is decreasing, largely due to increasing rates of educational enrolment (ILO, 2019).

McLean & Company Insight

It is common practice to continually reassess customers, markets, and products in today’s VUCA environment, but there is often no parallel assessment of workforce composition. Leaders need to be planful and develop a strategy that positions their organization to take advantage of change rather than fall victim to it.