NEWS WORTH REVIEWING

Strategic Workforce Planning A Key To Driving Business Growth In 2010
As the recovery progresses, employers will shift their focus from cutting labor costs back to preserving talent and investing in key segments of their workforce — issues at the very heart of strategic workforce planning (SWP).

"Employers who've been forced to focus on reducing headcount will return to deciding whether to buy, build or rent the skills necessary to meet future business needs," says Mary Young, principal researcher at The Conference Board. "The economy's impact on SWP is likely to be moderated by the level of credibility, acceptance and integration that SWP had attained before the economic crisis turned things upside down," Young says.

"In companies that were just getting their feet wet with SWP, the global economic downturn may have put a halt to these efforts, although only temporarily," she adds. "The same is true in companies where immediate financial pressures required that SWP shift from long-term planning to short-term problem-solving. But in companies where SWP was well established, SWP served as a critical tool for managing through the economic crisis."

The Conference Board defines SWP as the formal process that connects business strategy to human resource strategy and practices, and ensures a company has the right people in the right place, at the right time and at the right cost. SWP and its attendant investment plans take into account such factors as which skills will be critical to business success and which roles will be hardest to fill, as well as regional variations in human capital quantity, quality and return on investment.

"Strategic workforce planning enables companies to make these decisions based on sound data and analytics," says Young. "Business leaders can use strategic workforce planning to evaluate a variety of options, such as, for instance, the costs and feasibility of building a new plant in Russia, Brazil or India, based on the local skills supply, infrastructure and labor laws."

 

RecruitSmart Insider, March 4, 2010

 

Joseph Daniel McCool

 

Smart Work | Network provides Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP). Contact us to see how we may help you plan for your business recovery.