What is operational workforce planning?

Operational workforce planning is a means for companies to meet their immediate operational needs by adding, removing or otherwise augmenting their workforce. Operational workforce planning is especially helpful when faced with a relatively immediate or short-term business goal. Your company’s human resources department is often responsible for devising and implementing operational workforce planning, but various departments at your company may have input into these processes. Operational workforce planning is especially a focus for seasonal businesses and those in industries with high turnover, given their recurring need to scale their teams up and down.

Operational workforce planning benefits

All businesses engage in some form of operational workforce planning, whether they realize it or not. It is therefore not necessarily a beneficial business activity, but rather an essential one that few businesses can ignore. For example, if a key employee suddenly becomes sick or injured long-term, or your business unexpectedly loses a major client, odds are your company isn’t going to shut down or send entire teams home from work while you figure out a solution.

In the first situation—suddenly losing a key employee—your company will likely have redundancy built in, so a similarly qualified employee can step in and fulfil the employee’s duties on an interim basis. If such backfill doesn’t exist, you will likely need to take action to recruit and hire someone to stand in for them while they recover. In the second situation—unexpectedly losing a major client—odds are you’ll have an entire team suddenly left without work to do. Having a plan in place to redeploy these employees to other clients or projects can ensure you are still utilizing their labour instead of paying them not to work. In more unfortunate circumstances, if you are unable to find a place for them in your organization, you may need to lay them off. Ensuring their departure from the company is respectful and compliant with labour laws (e.g. proper notice and/or severance or pay in lieu of notice) is vital, and there should be systems in place to handle situations like this.

Both of these situations are examples of operational workforce planning in action. Your company should be able to continue operations without too much disruption or downtime. Having proper systems in place can seamlessly take care of many of these scenarios, but it is important to be intentional in your creation and implementation of these systems as part of a formal operational workforce plan.

Related Article:

• 15 Transferable Skills to Look For When Recruiting
• Business Transparency: Importance and Management of Tips to Achieve It

Why is operational workforce planning important?

There are many reasons why operational workforce planning is important. Whether or not it is important to you will depend on your business’ short-term needs and the nature of the industry you operate in. These are just a few of the more major reasons why your company should invest in operational workforce planning.

• Better operational efficiency: As its name suggests, operational workforce planning can do wonders for operational efficiency. You will always have the right number of employees with the skills your business needs, whenever you need them. Should any unforeseen staffing issues arise, you’ll have effective contingency plans in place to ensure the continuity of your business. Unexpected and/or extended business shutdowns can cause immense reputational damage, which alone makes operational workforce planning essential.
• Optimized labour costs: One of the main reasons so many firms focus on operational workforce planning is because labour costs can be a major drag on their bottom line. Having too many employees with not enough work to do, or too few employees to do as much work as your business is able to do, can lead to your company making substantially less money than it could. Operational workforce planning also emphasizes paying the right employees the right amount. Underpaying high performers will cause them to be disgruntled and/or leave, while overpaying low performers will quickly drain your finances. Both can skew your labour costs, eating away at your company’s profitability.
• Flexibility and agility: You’re better equipped to handle unexpected challenges, scale up and wind down your operations if you’ve conducted proper operational workforce planning. Companies without short-term labour plans tend to end up stuck when the unexpected happens, unable to more forward in a proper and productive way.
• Improved employee morale: Companies are always on the lookout to increase retention, boost employee morale, prevent burnout and overall make positive changes to company culture. Making sure your company is adequately skilled and staffed can go a long way towards reaching this goal, by helping to balance the workload and building in redundancy when someone is unable to work. At companies with poor operational workforce planning, there’s often too few people to handle the workload and as a result, it is almost impossible for employees to take vacation time or sick days. Your inability to meet your company’s labour needs can ripple out to affect your employees’ wellbeing, and this can compound over time and cause increased burnout, decreased morale and eventually much higher turnover if changes aren’t made.

How to do operational workforce planning

It’s quite simple to undertake proper operational workforce planning. Begin by looking to the past, perhaps the last financial quarter or two. Consider how your business met its labour needs. Were there times when your company was short-staffed? Were there long stretches where you were paying people to do little or no work? Did you add or lose any employees? Consider how these scenarios have affected your operations, and how your company dealt with them. If few problems arose, you may have the workforce and systems already in place and are already participating in a form of operational workforce planning. If you instead found yourself rushing from problem to problem without solutions in place, consider where you came up short.

If you didn’t have enough employees to handle your operational needs, consider recruiting and hiring more instead of expecting your current workforce to take on more work. Most employees don’t mind helping out in a pinch, but routinely expecting them to do the work of two people (even if they are paid slightly more) is a surefire way to burn them out.

If the issue was one of inadequately skilled employees unable to take on certain jobs, consider investing in their training. This not only helps you meet your immediate operational needs but can help expand the scope of work your employees (and by extension, your company) can take on in the future.

No two companies are the same, just like no two months are the same. You don’t want to be too dramatic in making staffing changes just because of a temporary change in your labour needs. Overcorrecting for relatively minor issues can lead to long-term issues in profitability and operational efficiency, so it’s important to take the time to gain a fulsome understanding of long-term labour trends at your company with an eye to what has worked in the past, and what hasn’t. Good operational workforce planning can help make all of this easier.