Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP) is made to bring the human aspects to the company’s strategic thinking and thus guide the major HR programs.
A strategy exercise
It all starts with strategy. Strategy will define the priorities for the next few years and dictate the major changes in the workforce and skills base. SWP is indeed a full-fledged business exercise, even though it is coordinated and facilitated by the HR function. Thus, a significant part of the success of a SWP lies in the active sponsorship by key business leaders.
An equilibrium exercise
Injunctions are numerous in a SWP exercise and can sometimes seem contradictory. Whether it is a question of choosing the right segmentation and therefore analysis granularity. Whether one wants to produce a high-level synthesis for the executive committee or develop a detailed analysis for a given site. Whether you want to deploy short-term actions dedicated to the field or to set up structuring programs at group level. The challenge is to find the most appropriate balance for the considered entity at the time the exercise is carried out.
A ramp-up exercise
Like the strategic plan it complements, SWP is intended to become a recurring process. It must therefore eventually be operated internally and to do so must be facilitated by appropriate tools such as Albert, Akoya’s SWP specialist tool. And this also means that a progressive ramp-up is not only possible but desirable. It is important to keep low the ambitions of a first exercise prior to gradually gaining in analysis granularity, forecast complexity and processed volumes.
