Job and career planning skills is above all a strategic approach to managing the company's human resources. It provides management with the tools to measure and plan quantitative and qualitative variations in human resources.
What is the Strategic Workforce Planning ?
The Gestion prévisionnelle des emplois et des skills (Strategic Workforce Planning) is an approach to human resources management that consists of collecting quantitative and qualitative data on these resources in order to evaluate the organization's needs. This provision ensures that its needs are anticipated and that the skills are better placed to serve the organization's strategic orientations.
- From a qualitative point of view, the skills currently available within the organization in order to cross them with the present and future needs of the company.
- From a quantitative point of view, the Strategic Workforce Planning involves a set of analyses of the workforce within a company in order to evaluate it in the light of its strategy. The aim is to identify any gaps that may arise, either through attrition or because the company intends to expand its field of skills.
The Strategic Workforce Planning has been replaced by the Jobs & Skills Management since 2018, learn more about this development: the Jobs & Skills Management replaces the Strategic Workforce Planning.
Is the Strategic Workforce Planning mandatory?
Because the conclusions of the approach sometimes involve a profound change in the company's human resources, the employer is obliged to conduct negotiations with a view to reaching an agreement between the management and the social partners. This obligation comes from the programming law for social cohesion of January 18, 2005.
Under what conditions is the Strategic Workforce Planning is it mandatory?
For any company with at least 300 employees and for community-based organizations with more than 150 employees. This obligation leads to the conclusion of a negotiation to formalize an agreement every three years, it is a triennial negotiation.
Decisions made during the agreement Strategic Workforce Planning :
- Recruitment: in the event that the current staff is insufficient, aging or in the event of foreseeable attrition. We also resort to recruitment when the matrices Strategic Workforce Planning indicate the need to acquire a skill necessary for the company's activities.
- Internal mobility: the quantitative analysis of the staff sometimes reveals a destructuring of the staff, an inefficient distribution of personnel or the need to reinforce certain services, to the detriment of others.
- Updating the training plan to ensure that employees' employability is enhanced.
- Redundancies: when certain positions must be eliminated and it is not possible to redeploy the employees occupying these positions.
Themes of an agreement Strategic Workforce Planning
The legislator provides for mandatory and optional topics for these negotiations. The mandatory topics are intended to readjust the skills and the number of employees. The optional topics are intended to resolve questions of overstaffing, with the result that there are plans to cut jobs, dismissals or internal mobility.
What are the mandatory topics of an agreement Strategic Workforce Planning ?
- Conditions for professional and geographical mobility
- The main 3-year orientations of continuing education
- Prospects for the use of different employment contract formats
What are the optional topics of an agreement Strategic Workforce Planning ?
- The implementation of mobility leave
- Qualification of job categories threatened by economic or technological changes
- The conditions for the company's participation in specific actions at the level of the territories where it is located
- Specific measures for senior citizens (part-time work, transmission of skills)
Finally, for a negotiation to be successful Strategic Workforce Planning successful, it must take into account all the strategies that the company is developing and which are likely to influence jobs (workforce or skills) over the next three years. If the analysis is not exhaustive, these projects that are not taken into account could later be a source of tension and discontent within the company.
Negotiating the Strategic Workforce Planninga participatory approach
Negotiations are conducted with the employee representatives and should therefore not only involve the members of the works council. The agreement on the system Strategic Workforce Planning is to be considered within the framework of collective bargaining and social dialogue in general. Consequently, it is up to the trade union delegates to discuss with you the system that you wish to put in place, particularly with regard to the action plan resulting from the discussions.
During the discussions, it is essential that each party clearly expresses its stakes. As HRD, you will therefore have to assess the impact that each measure to be taken could have, from a strategic, human and financial point of view. The unions, in turn, will be able to raise the issues that the decisions to be taken in this process represent for them. It is important that each party be open to debate and not just try to make the other party comply. And since you represent the employer, it is essential that you set an example of this availability for dialogue. You will have to demonstrate an open mind and agree to really collaborate in all transparency with the union delegates, who should not feel any desire to force the issue.
What are the tools for implementing an agreement Strategic Workforce Planning ?
As you can see, the central issue is skills. Here is what you should be looking for in your tool Strategic Workforce Planning :
- An interconnection with your existing HRIS.
- Retrieval of the training catalog.
- The integration of job opportunities open to internal mobility.
- A powerful semantic matching tool.
- A structured repository of skills .
- An intuitive interface to involve employees in the evaluation of their skills
If you enjoyed this article, please check out our article on the essential tools of the Strategic Workforce Planning!
