Workforce Planning Toolkit

Workforce planning is a continual process that is owned by the whole business and enabled by HR. It is not done in isolation, and it is not rigid.  It does need to be agile, evidence-based, and analytical. By analysing your current workforce and determining your future workforce needs, you are identifying the gap between the workforce you have available now and your future needs.  Then you can look at what solutions are needed to achieve those future workforce needs.  Workforce planning therefore links with several HR activities such as: organisational development, talent management, recruitment and retention, succession planning, learning and development, and career development.

Remember, workforce planning is not a prescriptive process, nor is it intended to be an exact science. It’s about improving business performance and reducing organisational risk by narrowing the gap between a business having the people it really needs and who it actually has.

‘People are a business’s most important asset’ is a well-worn catchphrase, but one that is nonetheless true: ‘The right people, with the right skills, in the right roles, at the right time.’

Strategic workforce planning is an approach which considers our long-term strategy, it is not a linear process and not a one-off event.  The output will be a strategic workforce plan by covering three questions:

1.       What capabilities do we need to meet long-term business strategy?

2.       Which competencies do we need?

3.       When and where are these capabilities and competencies needed?

Workforce Analysis provides information regarding the current people by collecting, analysing and interpreting the current workforce in place.

Workforce Transformation is rethinking how we work to meet the changing demands on our services, improve performance and accommodate different kinds of work, workers and technology.

Why it matters:

• We want a clear understanding of the workforce challenges across the system to decide where best to focus activity.

• We want to avoid organisations inadvertently poaching workforce from one another.

• We know that supply of workforce is limited so we want to be creative about the ways in which we get work done.

• We want to help teams become more confident in workforce planning and act early to resolve issues.
  
  

What we are doing now:

• Sharing access to a Workforce Planning dashboard to share data. 

• Building a system workforce plan through the lenses of organisation/workforce group/service in line with NHSE operational planning guidance. 
  
  

What we will do next:

• Focus on innovative ways of doing our work, including designing new roles.

• Refine our workforce plan to create detailed plans for the area’s most under pressure.

• Continue to build more workforce planning capability and capacity.
  
  

Remember, workforce planning is not a prescriptive process, nor is it intended to be an exact science. It’s about improving business performance and reducing organisational risk by narrowing the gap between a business having the people it really needs and who it actually has.

‘People are a business’s most important asset’ is a well-worn catchphrase, but one that is nonetheless true: ‘The right people, with the right skills, in the right roles, at the right time.’