Workforce Planning: Definition, Benefits, and Best Practices
Effective staffing doesn’t happen accidentally—it results from meticulous planning, forecasting, and analysis. In this blog, we’ll explore how workforce planning can help you increase team productivity, avoid overstaffing costs, and improve employee satisfaction.
What is Workforce Planning?
Workforce planning ensures an organization has the right people in the right place at the right time. It involves forecasting staffing needs, tracking where teams spend their time, identifying training gaps, and monitoring performance. The ultimate goal of workforce planning is to increase overall efficiency.
Why is Workforce Planning Important?
Workforce planning is essential for several reasons:
1. Enhances Team Efficiency: By accurately forecasting staffing needs, you can ensure that your team is well-equipped to handle their workload efficiently.
2. Avoids Overstaffing Costs: Proper planning helps prevent unnecessary labor costs by aligning staffing levels with actual needs.
3. Improves Employee Satisfaction: When employees are neither overworked nor underutilized, their job satisfaction tends to increase.
Without adequate workforce planning, businesses may face significant challenges. For instance, they might neglect succession planning, resulting in a lack of qualified employees when key staff retire. Similarly, failing to anticipate increased customer demand can lead to insufficient support agents, resulting in a sub-par customer experience (CX).
Benefits of Strategic Workforce Planning
Workforce planning can offer numerous benefits to an organization. Here are some of the most impactful:
Get Ahead of Future Workforce Needs
Workforce planning ensures alignment with both your current business situation and future workforce needs. By understanding short-term capabilities and future goals, businesses can maintain appropriate staffing levels to set themselves up for success.
For example, if one of your strategic goals is to improve your customer satisfaction (CSAT) score by 30 percent within 18 months and key customer service managers are retiring soon, a good strategy would involve focusing on employee development to have capable replacements ready.
Optimize Labor Budget
A significant aim of workforce planning is to ensure that the right employees are in the right positions at the right time. By forecasting labor needs and costs, companies can optimize resource allocation. This strategic approach helps CX teams find the financial sweet spot, ensuring adequate agent numbers for effective customer service without overspending on labor costs.
Boost Team Productivity
Strategic workforce planning can enhance team efficiency by ensuring agents have the necessary customer service skills to excel in their roles. Workforce managers can analyze performance data to identify coaching opportunities. This ongoing training and development can lead to increased agent productivity.
Improve the Employee Experience
The employee experience (EX) refers to how employees feel about their jobs, work environments, and employers. Workforce planning can improve EX by encouraging employee development and work-life balance. Organizations don’t want employees to be stretched thin dealing with too much work, and they also want them to grow in their roles for future promotions. Workforce planning helps create a positive cycle of engagement and growth that your staff will appreciate.
Steps for Workforce Planning
When conducting workforce planning, adhering to structured steps is essential to maximize the effectiveness of your strategy. While every organization has unique requirements, here are important steps to consider for success:
Forecasting
Workforce forecasting is a crucial first step in workforce planning and involves assessing workforce demand and predicting staffing needs. It includes:
– Evaluating market trends to anticipate industry-wide changes in customer demand
– Analyzing historical data to identify any seasonal or short-term changes in demand
– Anticipating skill gaps to ensure employees are ready for expanded roles in the future
– Preparing for workforce changes like retirements and unexpected resignations, including having succession plans for both situations
This proactive approach ensures you are always prepared to meet operational needs. AI-powered software like Zendesk WFM can automatically analyze historical data to predict future staffing needs on a given day, month, or season.
Scheduling
Scheduling involves creating efficient work schedules that align with business needs while accounting for employee breaks and PTO. In customer service, optimal agent scheduling ensures skilled agents are available where and when needed to meet customer demand effectively. This helps maintain a balanced workload, improve employee productivity, optimize labor costs, and handle scheduling errors more easily.
Performance Reporting
Performance reporting involves tracking workforce performance to ensure employees are meeting organizational goals. Systematically analyzing workforce management metrics and other important figures helps measure the effectiveness of your strategy. This data can inform future workforce plans and highlight areas for improvement to optimize operations.
Real-Time Activity Monitoring
Real-time activity monitoring entails analyzing how and where employees are spending their time. This step provides immediate insights into employee productivity, attendance, and engagement levels, which you can use to build your workforce planning strategy. With the right workforce management software, organizations can leverage real-time data to quickly identify and address issues, adjust employee schedules, and ensure optimal performance.
Levels of Workforce Planning
The workforce planning process can be broken down into four additional levels to better achieve your business objectives:
1. Operational Workforce Planning: Short-term planning involves day-to-day management, including scheduling, task assignments, and short-term staffing issues.
2. Tactical Workforce Planning: Mid-term planning that lasts roughly one year prioritizes achieving the goals in an organization’s workforce plan. It can involve skills gap analysis, employee development and training, and data analysis.
3. Strategic Workforce Planning: Long-term planning—typically three to five years in the future—anticipates business growth, market trends, and other external factors.
4. Contingency Workforce Planning: These are the “in case of emergency, break glass” workforce plans that cover what will happen in drastic situations like an economic downturn, mass resignations, or other sudden changes.
By following these steps and levels, you can ensure that your workforce planning strategy is comprehensive and effective, helping your organization navigate both present challenges and future uncertainties.
