Short-term or strategic staff planning?

Many companies are increasingly relying on short-term staff planning. The importance of strategic and long-term staff planning is often underestimated. It’s time to dive deeper into this topic so you don’t compromise your competitiveness.

What exactly is meant by short-term staff planning? What is strategic human resource planning?

Die short-term staff planning aims to optimally meet current employee needs. The premise is the ready supply of skilled workers to efficiently support ongoing operational processes. Contextual factors such as short-term market developments and seasonal fluctuations are crucial. By reacting quickly to sudden bottlenecks, unexpected events or increased rates of illness, effective short-term workforce planning ensures a company’s flexibility and competitiveness.
Under the strategic personnel planning On the other hand, it refers to the planning of quantitative and qualitative capabilities of employees with respect to corporate strategic planning. The goal is to have the necessary collaborators at your side in the short, medium and long term, taking into account the company’s political objectives. The objective is to be able to employ employees in the required quality and quantity, at the right time and in the right place. When it comes to strategic personnel planning it is necessary to take into account several contextual factors because the world of work is constantly evolving. This means that possible trends must be observed and, if necessary, taken into account. Trends that are already playing an important role are demographic change, technological and social changes, the acceleration of innovation processes and globalization.

Why it’s worth not just focusing on short-term staff planning

Personnel planning is primarily understood as operational, short-term and quantitative personnel planning. This type of workforce planning makes sense even if nothing changes in the company or market events. Rather, no changes in the internal and external environment are an exception. For this reason, strategic personnel planning plays an important role. Optimal planning means, among other things, that a company can survive in the long term, maintain competitiveness and meet future needs. For these reasons it is worth examining the aspects of strategic personnel planning in greater depth.

Four planning aspects of strategic human resource planning

Strategic personnel planning can be divided into four planning aspects: on the one hand quantitative and qualitative and on the other hand inside temporal and local staff planning.
Die quantitative staff planning aims to ensure that the necessary number of human resources is available.
Die qualitative staff planning aims to ensure that available staff are adequately qualified or possess the appropriate know-how.
It is possible to ensure that the necessary human resources are available at the required time staff time planning assign.
Die local workforce planning ensures that employees with the right qualifications are placed in the right place at the right time.

Worryingly: Most companies rely solely on short-term staff planning

A 2022 study showed that generally 74% of companies carry out staff planning in their company. A closer look at these companies shows that 51% carry out operational or short-term staff planning. The focus is mainly on quantitative forecasting of personnel needs, personnel costs, personnel procurement planning as well as personnel deployment planning and succession planning.

Qualitative personnel planning is not included in even half of companies. As a result, the quality of employees needed in the future has little importance in planning. In most cases, when this type of planning is done, it is done once a year.

However, among companies that carry out personnel planning, only 28% implement strategic personnel planning with a period exceeding 5 years. The content and topics vary greatly from company to company. 79% of companies care about the number of employees. Furthermore, long-term succession planning is also taken into consideration in 71% of cases and the future qualification structure of employees in 55%. In few companies, employees’ professional and personal skills are integrated into strategic personnel planning. Furthermore, consideration of career planning and future environmental changes affecting quality requirements is integrated rather moderately into the planning.

The five phases of strategic personnel planning

1. Formation of working families
   Composition of positions based on comparable functions, qualifications and tasks. The goal is to examine employees in professional families.
2. Determination of the current workforce
   Employees are assigned to a job family in a personnel master list to get a better overview of human resources.
3. Determination of strategic personnel needs
   The necessary capabilities should arise from the business strategy. This helps you determine staffing needs to meet company goals.
4. Analysis of future workforce variance
   Assumptions are generated regarding inventory development and simulation, allowing capacity, age and qualification risks to be derived.
5. Derivation of the fields of action
   The analyzed risks are assessed and possible action options are then collected. The objective is to evaluate appropriate measures.

Conclusion

Short-term staff planning is important, there’s no doubt about that. However, to remain competitive in the long term as a company and achieve your business goals, you need to pay even more attention to strategic staff planning and make predictions for the future. This offers the company real added value and allows for greater possibilities for action.

Our WFM One Feature workforce deployment planning software creates the basis for strategic workforce planning

With our personnel deployment planning software WFM One Feature you can individually optimize your deployment planning.

The basics of the software list the first necessary elements such as “absence management” that you need to be able to plan strategically. You can define jobs, add qualifications, workloads, staffing requirements, as well as cost and functional positions. This makes planning detailed and tailored to your company. Individual employees can be grouped into different workplaces or employee groups. Trends that require, for example, the adjustment of qualifications can be adapted directly in WFM One to be integrated into further planning. By defining the various aspects that need to be taken into account when planning operations, demand-oriented planning is created. Precise shift planning, for example, has never been easier