How Workforce Planning Supports Succession Planning

Having a strategic workforce plan in place is an important part of helping a business grow and thrive. It serves as a blueprint for staffing your company to stay ahead of the competition and move toward continued success. And having a strategic workforce plan in place can help point your succession planning in the right direction, too.Your workforce strategic plan can give you insight into how to approach your succession planning process, especially at the beginning. One way to create buy-in is to align succession planning to something bigger, such as your company’s strategy or mission or vision. When you tie that to succession planning, it helps people focus on business’s long-term success.The steps that go into putting together a strategic workforce plan are similar to those used to create a succession plan. As you move through them, use your company’s culture as a guide to help you through the process. For example, an organization that’s comfortable with risk will likely have a more aggressive strategic workforce plan than a conservative one.

Define Your Business Goals

Knowing your company’s strategic business goals is essential to workforce planning.  Leaders need to examine key indicators that match strategic objectives and develop a process that incorporates action steps. Some of the steps will involve quantifying the human resources needed to achieve growth as well as any anticipated loss of knowledge through employee exits, and the knowledge and expertise you’ll need to sustain and grow the business in the future.

Look at the Data

Do you have the people in place to reach your business goals? What kind of knowledge and expertise will you need to fulfill your strategic plan? This is where succession planning comes in. Knowing your critical positions as well as which people are on specific developmental career paths will help you identify gaps in your strategic plan and show you where you may need to provide additional training or coaching, or seek out new hires.Things to consider include:A supply analysis, or profile of your current workforce, including:

• Key positions/divisions.
• Number of employees currently in each position/division.
• Number of employees needed for future growth in each position/division.
• Existing skills and competencies in the employee population.
• Employees’ average age.
• Hiring patterns.
• Employee turnover rates.
• Retirement patterns.

A demand analysis, or profile of your future needs, including:

• Anticipated growth (categories, markets).
• Technology.
• Economics.
• Labor market.
• Skills and competencies you need, but lack.

Identify the Gaps

Next, compare your current workforce to your short- and long-term workforce needs:

• Where will you need more  resources as the company grows?
• Which high potentials/emerging leaders will need more development in order to step into new roles to lead the company toward its goals?
• Do you have talent  inside the company for certain positions, or will you need to recruit outside talent?

Close the Gaps

Close any gaps you’ve identified through recruitment, retention, career and leadership development and knowledge transfer. This may include hiring people from outside the organization, increasing employee value proposition to increase retention rates, developing and educating people in key positions, and mentoring or shadowing to pass on essential information.

Evaluate and Adjust

As you put your strategic workforce plan into action, measure your progress, evaluate and adjust for a continuous process.. Are people developing more or less quickly than you expected? Is your organization growing at a faster or slower rate than expected? Tweaking the plan will help keep it relevant as your business reaches its goals.A workforce strategic plan can help you manage the talent that will help your organization grow as well as give you direction for your succession plan. Putting them into action can help your business thrive in the long-term.To learn more about succession planning, read our new white paper:Success Labs is a leadership development and management consulting firm in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. For more than 25 years, our expert team of consultants has worked with hundreds of companies to explore their business potential and improve their company and cultural performance. Contact us to get proactive about your people strategy.