Strategic workforce planning is the process of looking forward, assessing how to compete and win in your chosen market or business arena, and linking those insights to your existing and potential future workforce. It is core to any organization that aspires to sustain itself over time. SWP is not a solitary endeavor but a team sport involving experts in the strategic workforce planning process, people analytics, HR business partners, and business leaders. It is a highly analytical and consultative process, requiring a focus on current operations as well as long-term organization and talent development. A key player that is often not actively engaged is the Human Resource Information Professional (HRIP). Our proposition is that HRIPs can play a critical strategic role in the SWP process.
Workforce planning has become more than an annual spreadsheet exercise that anticipates how to ensure ongoing staffing meets budget projections. As companies strive to gain competitive advantage, they look to assess what skills will be most critical for future success, what jobs can be broken into core skills with some skills outsourced and others automated, and what changes in the external world are reshaping the path forward. This comes down to more than opinion or reliance on anecdotes – it requires data leveraged through a planful, structured, capable assessment of the current state against potential business scenarios.
Data as Fuel: Who Decides?
A foundational element of SWP is data. Analyzing people data gained prominence in 2010 with the Harvard Business Review publication “Competing on Talent Analytics” (Davenport, Harris, and Shapiro, 2010). Since then, the field has grown so that most large organizations have some form of people analytics function. SWP is sometimes practiced by people analytics teams, given their expertise in analysis, but in other cases, these are two separate teams that work very closely together.
In either case, they can both be considered “downstream” functions – they currently do not drive the decisions on what data the organization collects but instead rely on others to make those decisions. Historically, data were collected as a function of transactional HR activities such as recruiting, hiring, developing, promoting, compensating, and terminating employees without regard to the needs of people analytics and SWP teams. At best, organizations used this information to track HR processes via metrics such as hire rates and training completions. As people analytics and SWP have matured, the need for all sorts of data to answer strategic business and talent questions has increased.
SWP professionals need data from sources beyond what exists within traditional HR systems. Examples of these new data types include financials, external labor market data, educational attainment data, information on non-full-time employees (e.g., contractors, gig, or other contingent labor), and unstructured data such as sentiment from surveys or written feedback from performance reviews. Skills is an area that has been increasingly of interest to SWP practitioners and HR professionals.
Who is “in charge” of ensuring these data are available to the SWP team? When technology decisions are made in different areas of HR, such as talent acquisition or talent development, not much thought is given to the types of data that will be generated that might be useful beyond that specific function. In many organizations, these decisions are made without HRIP involvement, or if HRIPs are involved, they may not consider how data generated by these tools could be utilized downstream by SWP teams. Lack of ready access to these data makes it difficult for SWP practitioners to answer the business questions executives ask.
Strategic Workforce Planning Technology
While strategic workforce planning is often cited as a top priority among CHROs and other business leaders, SWP teams are frequently hampered by a lack of good technology tools. As Gartner (Kundulli, Poitevin, Stewart, & McRae, 2024) points out, the SWP technology market is immature and evolving, with no one technology solution that can manage it end-to-end. Gartner recommends that SWP practitioners use a combination of technology solutions that address the most critical business needs while considering the maturity of the SWP function, availability of technical expertise, and technologies already in use by other functions within the organization.
Unfortunately, most SWP practitioners are not technology experts and may only become familiar with solutions via other practitioners in the field, vendors, or consultants. They need experts in HR technology to advise them.
Where can HRIPs provide significant value in data and technology decisions for SWP? We need to start with an understanding of the SWP process. The framework commonly used to describe SWP resembles the model in Figure 1.
Figure 1. A Common Framework for SWP
Fundamentally, this mechanistic process is a gap analysis between what jobs/skills the organization currently has compared to what jobs/skills it needs based on the organizational capabilities required by the business strategy. The output is an agile plan of actions the organization needs to take to have the capabilities to achieve its business goals. However, simply applying this framework does not result in a successful plan since, at its heart, SWP is a business consulting activity. Framing the business questions properly and guiding the right discussions, equipped with the right data, can be the difference between success and wasting everyone’s time.
Success depends on approaching SWP from a consulting perspective. We recommend a four-step consulting model, shown in Figure 2, that combines analytic expertise, storytelling, and consensus testing at every stage as the SWP team helps clients assess, imagine, mobilize, and shape the path forward.
Figure 2. A four-step approach to consulting
Combined, these two models can be used to successfully execute a SWP project, as seen in Figure 3 (Tarulli and Sokol, 2024). The first steps of the SWP framework map to the “assess” and “imagine” steps of the consulting model, while development, execution and follow-up of the strategic workforce plan fall within the “mobilize” and “shape” steps.
Figure 3. Technical and consulting model for SWP
A narrow view of the HRIP’s role in SWP might be as the provider of workforce data to inform the current state assessment – how many employees are in a specific job title, their skills, the average tenure of those employees, performance ratings, employee location, etc. But we argue that HRIPs looking at this model should consider how they contribute well beyond the initial phase, and beyond just data provisioning. Those who take the time to discover what types of information and trends enable business leaders, HR business partners and SWP teams can expect to be invited to fully participate in the entire SWP process and be invited back to the table repeatedly. Those who can integrate internal with external data to help generate future scenarios may be asked how future scenarios hold up against rigorous testing and variation of the trends identified.
The Opportunity for HRIPs
A 2023 PWC survey indicated that CHROs seek ways to provide greater value to organizations at lower costs. Part of this equation means more surgical hiring focused on the most critical roles, reducing headcount in less strategic roles, developing emerging skills in current employees, determining the appropriate use of AI and other technologies to do tasks better than humans, and utilizing contingent workers when there are not long-term needs for specific skills or tasks. Determining which of these things makes sense strategically for the organization is the core of strategic workforce planning. CHROs will increasingly look to their cross-functional SWP teams to help them make these decisions.
HRIPs can be invaluable strategic partners in these efforts by stepping into the SWP technology and data void described earlier. However, this means expanding the definition of the HRIP role. IHRIM defines the key competencies and knowledge domains for HRIPs through their Human Resource Information Professional (HRIP) certification blueprint. The competencies defined are foundational to being a strong HRIP, but to provide value to strategic workforce planning, HRIPs will need to take a more strategic view of data and its use within HR. This means:
- Think through what data will be collected with every technology decision and consult with the strategic workforce planning team on how the data can be useful to them.
- Considering (often with one’s IT counterparts) how data can best be stored, transformed, combined, and readily accessed, given that they come from various sources within the organization and, increasingly, outside sources such as government databases and labor market data vendors. Traditionally, these data management systems were either data warehouses for structured data or data lakes for unstructured data. More recently, data fabric and data mesh frameworks have been introduced to provide an environment that allows access to various data sources.
- Leading the charge for standardizing how human capital metrics, such as turnover rates, are calculated, stored, updated, and accessed across the enterprise. In many large organizations, human capital metrics are defined and calculated differently in various parts of the organization, making data aggregation and interpretation difficult.
- Staying at the forefront of new technologies and systems and proactively making recommendations to the strategic workforce planning team. To do this, HRIPs need to understand strategic workforce planning fully. This can be accomplished in various ways, but one recommended approach is to be an active team member on a strategic workforce planning project.
- Be open to serving as the fourth leg of the SWP stool, partnering with the business leader, the HR business partner, and the SWP experts. This role will elevate the HRIP’s profile to that of a truly strategic partner in the organization.
Where To Go From Here
To the HRIP reading this, we invite you to consider where you have already been implicitly applying the model, skills, and mindset described above. Rather than having a provider mindset when it comes to SWP, simply providing the data asked for, get involved with the strategic work of HR. Your knowledge and perspective can provide greater value at the front end of the HR data and technology value chain. Consider how the generated data can be used strategically downstream when involved in technology decisions across HR. Be the “go to” expert to the SWP team (and other HR specialist teams) about technology trends that impact them. Be proactive in making suggestions to improve data quality (always a pain point for people analytics and SWP teams) or process improvements. Ask to be involved in the entire SWP process to become seen as an indispensable partner. Finally, look at SWP from an oversight perspective–as you look across the variety of SWP needs in your company, consider how you might structure data capture, storage, analysis, and visualization processes to better contribute to strategic planning in your company.
References
Davenport, T., Harris, J., and Shapiro, J. (2010). Competing on talent analytics. Harvard Business Review, 88 (10), 52-58.
IHRIM HRIP Examination Blueprint (n.d.), https://bit.ly/46za3D3
Kundulli, H., Poitevin, H., Stewart, R., McRae, E.R. (2024, May 27). Innovation insight: Use technology to improve strategic workforce planning. Gartner.
PWC (n.d.). CHRO and human capital leaders: Latest findings from PWC’s pulse survey, https://bit.ly/3yBavUG
Tarulli, B., and Sokol, M.,(2024). A call to action for rethinking workforce planning. In M. Sokol and B. Tarulli (Eds.). Strategic workforce planning: Best practices and emerging directions (pp. 371-387). Oxford University Press.
