6 Things You Didn't Realise Are Strategic Workforce Planning

Most organisations already make decisions all over the place that impact workload and workforce — recruitment, organisation design, technology, service delivery and transformation all affect what work exists and who must do it.

Strategic Workforce Planning is the point where those decisions become deliberate and connected instead of accidental, isolated, or after the fact. So, let’s talk about 6 things you may not have realised are Strategic Workforce Planning!

1.      Talent Acquisition

A live SWP process in your organisation lets you sense-check your planned recruitment

activities.

You could wait for a notice of resignation to be tendered, let your Recruitment teams know, and instruct them to fill the vacancy based on the same Job Description which might have last been looked at a few years ago.

Or, with SWP you could have a plan of which roles are crucial to your organisational future, have a set of metrics designed to predict and signal attrition in those roles, and take actions to see far fewer of those resignations in the first place. Meanwhile, you can use attrition in non-crucial areas to pivot into the future roles and skills your SWP has identified when vacancies become available.

Recruitment in an SWP-enabled environment builds your organisational strength in exactly the way your future needs it to.

Recruitment problems are SWP problems too. If you rely on recruitment for critical skills and roles, do you know what your time to hire is? What do you do if you need a critical role in 3 months time, but your recruitment activity takes a minimum of 6? SWP looks at your Time to Hire and Time To Skill problems, builds around them where necessary, and solves them at source where they hinder your agility.

Recruitment in an SWP-enabled environment prioritises for speed when necessary, and actively manages the trade-offs of cost/quality/time.

2.      Organisational Design (OD)

Organisational Design is usually brought in when something no longer works as intended. Decision-making slows. Work collects in certain roles. Accountability blurs, or financial pressure forces a rethink of structure.

Without an SWP approach, structure can only express the work the organisation understands at the time. When demand, services, or capability expectations continue to shift, the new structure gradually comes under strain and another redesign follows. From the employee perspective this feels like a cycle of restructures and contributes to change fatigue.

Org Design in an SWP-enabled environment allows decisions to be made with an explicit understanding of future demand, capability, and sequencing - helping to determine what shape the organisation needs to be before friction appears, and identify which levers can be pulled to achieve that shape. Restructuring need not always be the way.

When form (Org Design) follows function (SWP), structure stops being a big-bang corrective action and becomes an agile delivery mechanism.

3.      IT & Automation

I share a trait with my mother, who I love to bits – we are both almost completely, irrationally, light-blue-touch-paper-and-retire infuriated when our technology doesn’t work. The reason, we both say, is because technology has one job – to make our lives easier.

No man is an island, and nor is technology – it is used, maintained, and depended on by our entire workforce. Its purpose is to make work easier and faster, make our people more productive, keep our business secure, and enable us to provide better goods and services to our customers.

When technological changes don’t consider the needs and skills of the workforce, or capture the full uses and workarounds that those creative humans silently have under the surface, the whole system can break down. New systems can change the skills the organisation needs to operate safely and effectively, and this goes beyond just user acceptance testing and training.

IT in an SWP-enabled environment starts from the problem to solve, ensuring that all technology investments provide a meaningful and measurable ROI that includes human factors across the workforce.

We’re beginning to see some strong questions being asked about how realistic the predictions that automation via AI could replace our workforces. Some organisations who released staff ‘due to AI’ have subsequently had to hire them back again.

Without an SWP approach, automation removes effort in one place but creates judgement, exception handling, or oversight demand somewhere else.

Automation in an SWP-enabled environment allows for the identification of tasks fit for automation, preventing unintended loss of critical skills while unlocking meaningful value creation through uniquely human creativity and skills.

4.      Service Design, Process Design and Design Thinking

In many ways, this is the Holy Trinity of organisational transformation. All three are iterative, human-centred, and evidence-based, just like SWP.

Design Thinking seeks to identify which problems truly exist in an organisation, before the rush to build things that may not be needed. Design Thinking reduces uncertainty, but when used alone can become unfocussed and never get to the solution to the problem.

Service Design seeks to understand and improve the experience that people have when obtaining a service, usually from a public sector body. Outside of public sector bodies, you might see Customer Experience and Employee Experience as parallels. Service Design reduces friction, but used alone creates beautiful but expensive services that customers might love, but service providers cannot staff and afford.

Process Design makes our internal procedures lean, efficient and repeatable. Process Design reduces variation, but used alone can create mindless obedience to a set procedure, stifling much-needed innovation if underlying scenarios change.

These three disciplines cannot stand alone and need each other for effective, holistic transformation. SWP shares a common mindset with all three disciplines, and can form the mediating party between them.

SWP uses Design Thinking to determine the problem to solve which may prevent achievement of strategy if not addressed.

SWP partners with Service Design to ensure that redesigned services solve for the defined problem; and can be staffed with appropriate, available and sustainable staff roles and skills.

SWP uses Process Design to amplify and streamline those newly designed services, avoiding wasted work effort in poor processes. This maximises the utilisation of the workforce we currently have and prevents unaffordable headcount growth.

5.      Engagement, Wellbeing, and Development

Organisations tend to focus a lot of attention at the beginning and end of the employee lifecycle: recruitment and exit interviews. In the middle, we cluster engagement surveys, wellbeing initiatives, and development opportunities all aiming to prevent attrition.

Preventing unwanted attrition is a key aspect of any SWP, so it’s unsurprising that these activities are of interest to your SWP practitioner – and again, SWPs full enterprise view brings these disparate activities together to address the problem to solve.

Engagement surveys can often become tickybox exercises. Default questions produce very general responses answers, which fail to drive meaningful change. Lack of change in turn leads to declining response rates and less meaningful information.

SWP changes what we use engagement surveys to acheive.

Instead of a temperature check, they become a diagnostic tool — combined with other people data to spot emerging operational problems in specific business areas. Specific questions drawn from the SWP problem to solve allow for the creation of action plans to target root causes. This creates a virtuous circle of resolution, increased engagement and responses, to drive futher meaningful improvement actions

Many wellbeing initiatives default to broad-brush universal solutions. A cursory internet search will return results of how poorly many of these are received by staff – e.g. pizza Fridays, mindfulness sessions, gym memberships.

SWP targets wellbeing interventions to the groups who need it most.

SWP identifies which roles and skills are crucial for strategy delivery, then locates pressure hotspots where workload and workforce demographics signal strain. Interventions become preventative rather than performative — designed to change working conditions, not just offer coping mechanisms.

Development activity often follows employee demand rather than organisational need. Mandatory training consumes most L&D capacity, while self-initiated staff learning requests arrive unpredictably and may build skills the organisation doesn’t actually require in future.

SWP replaces demand-led learning with delivery-led learning.

SWP identifies future-critical capabilities, allowing targeted and measurable development activity. Meaningful career pathways can be built, providing a powerful candidate attraction programme. Managed internal mobility empowers your employees to take control of their career journey with you – building a future that works both for them and for the organisation.

6.      Change/Transformation

Change is the only constant.

But change fatigue is real and very present in every organisation right now.

In large and complex organisations in particular, your Project Management Office is likely balancing almost unmanageable demand from areas across your business seeking their own projects. Some of these projects may overlap, conflict, or have significant interdependencies that your PMO must struggle to balance against stakeholders with strong vested interests in their own local projects.

In my own experience, there are two major components of transformation failure that I see which are overlooked in the literature: an inability to cope with the volume or type of transformation alongside BAU, and an inability or unwillingness to say ‘no’ to projects.

SWP is a change programme in and of itself, and it brings a cool, evidence-based eye to the transformation process. With both an enterprise view on the critical problem(s) to solve and an overview of the skills and capacity of the workforce, SWP shows which changes can coexist, which must wait, and what capability must exist before transformation can succeed and embed.

SWP’s monitoring and review process enables the organisation to take a critical view of projects underway, and a rationale for saying ‘no’ to projects – including those already in flight – which are no longer priority against the problem to solve. It is the balancing metric to ensure the application of resources to transformation projects does not compromise the resources needed to maintain delivery or BAU.

SWP doesn’t own or replace any of these important functions. However, across all of the activities of these functions, workload and workforce impacts are present – which means if SWP is absent, you’re gonna have a bad time.

SWP isn’t a set of tools you pull out of the cupboard to fix things when the system has gone down after it’s been built. SWP is the ‘junction box’ that safely integrates your organisational wiring, making sure communication flows and nothing short-circuits.  

If you need an organisational electrician to fit a junction box to your circuitry, we’ve got you covered at Beyond The 8 Ball.

More soon. Outlook: Clearer.

Jen