The Gestion Prévisionnelle des Emplois et des skills is the central approach, it takes place every 3 years and lays the foundations for the adequacy of resources to the company’s challenges.
Made up of multiple human resources management systems, it has become crucial in a constantly changing professional world. The Strategic Workforce Planning not only enables us to anticipate potential economic, sociological and organizational changes, it also assesses the resources and requirements needed to help plan the company’s strategy.
To help you make the most of this provision, we answer the question“Which tools should you adopt to successfully implement your Gestion Prévisionnelle des Emplois et skills ?” in this article. These tools are divided up according to the life cycle of your approach: from the preliminary analysis to its orchestration, via the crucial implementation phase.
Before investigating the instruments used in each step of the process, let’s answer the question:
The Strategic Workforce Planning what is it?
The Strategic Workforce Planning is an anticipatory and participative administration of a company’s human resources. It is as useful to employers as it is to employees, since it promotes both the achievement of company objectives and the professional success of employees. The Strategic Workforce Planning takes into account the company’s ambitions and the employees’ aspirations. This makes it possible to anticipate human resources needs and to support the evolution of employees.
Visual of the tools according to the phases of the process Strategic Workforce Planning :
Preliminary Analysis Tools in Planning Workforce
Before embarking on the process, the project team must establish an overview of the situation, which includes skills . At this stage of your reflection you must gather basic information such as the distribution of the workforce by age, their qualifications, gender, status, levels of training.
What are the tools of the preliminary analysis of Workforce Planning ?
The job description
The job description covers the main activities, responsibilities and interactions with the rest of the company’s business lines. As we’ll see later on, the employee may already have skills available for other jobs. This will provide the basis for bridges to other roles.
The organization chart
The organization chart offers a visualization of the workforce according to the different Business Units. You can also see, for example, the distribution of skills in the major business lines as well as their proximity to other departments. Difficult to update, the organization chart can be fed from the “HR Core” of an HR solution.
The repository of skills
The company is evolving towards an organization centered around skills. Notions of position and role, with their fixed responsibilities, no longer reflect the reality experienced by the company’s players. We need to focus on tasks and the internal skills required to perform them. The library of skills that can be mobilized for each job maps out 5 essential data points:
- Current skill levels.
- The benchmarks required for each trade.
- External and emerging assets to be disseminated within the organization.
- The skills of employees to develop these assets.
- Faculties at risk of desertion or “skills at risk”.
Skills mapping
The repository is a guide that feeds a “mapping” whose protagonists are the employees and the managers. Indeed, the latter will continuously evaluate their skills in order to reveal the faculties that can be mobilized and the skills that are at risk. The HR teams will thus have the tools to analyze the main areas of mastery and the skills at risk in order to make rational decisions.
Here are our additional resources on these analysis tools:
Workforce planning implementation tools
Exchanges with partners take place between the diagnosis and the implementation of the approach. This iterative procedure goes back down to the support of each individual. In parallel with the negotiation of the agreement Jobs & Skills Management, 4 tools are deployed:
The method agreement
Even if it is optional, the aim of the method agreement is to align the terms and conditions of the negotiations: the frequency, the content of the subjects addressed, the terms and conditions for monitoring the commitments, etc. Its objective is to establish a framework so that each party concerned can benefit from the decisions and action plans following the discussions.
Annual appraisal interview (EAD)
During this meeting, managers and employees determine the assets and areas of progress: performance and acquisition objectives of skills. A good practice would be to have this information already agreed upon thanks to the continuous feedback between these two actors. The data from skills , which has been mastered and is being developed, enriches the mapping and is the basis for individual and collective development plans.
The professional interview
The professional interview is mandatory and takes place every two years. Its purpose is to manage opportunities for internal career development. The manager and the employee prepare for the future. This delicate exercise requires the manager to have a clear view of possible mobility and priority jobs within the company. This will enable him/her to provide sound advice and adapt to his/her team member’s expectations.
The Development Plan
The company’s objective of employability for its employees is reflected in its support for the development of its skills. The current empowerment of employees with regard to their professional career path contributes to the fact that they themselves propose training courses. Today, we are witnessing an inflation in the supply of content. The wealth of materials has never been so great, which means that the HR development manager has a lot of work to do in selecting the courses and solutions offered.
For an in-depth understanding of the concept of employability, we suggest our article 7 steps to employee employability.
Workforce Planning Monitoring tools
All of the actions taken and optimized tools lead to an improvement in employability and the adaptation of the company to its market: let’s follow these developments with the appropriate tools.
HR indicators
A reporting based on indicators will validate the relevance of the actions and their communication to the partners. Let’s go back to the objectives of the approach Strategic Workforce Planning Is it a necessity linked to a transformation of a branch of the organization, to identify the emerging skills in order to improve training investments? We recommend several simple indicators to be defined according to the objective of your Strategic Workforce Planning :
- What indicators should be considered in age management?
Choose 2 indicators: trends in at-risk skills, number of employees in reskilling situations.
- What indicators should be chosen to assess the quality of the career offer?
Highlight changes in the number of positions filled internally vs. the number of external hires.
The governance of skills
The rapid evolution of the skills required by teams leads to the creation of a team in charge of updating the skills in the repository. The recommendations of this team, made up of business experts, a business sponsor, etc., are the guarantee of the good adequacy of the approach Strategic Workforce Planning.
Here’s the article that will take you further on this subject:
Conclude on the Workforce Planning main levers
Based on a foundation consisting of the skills repository, the Strategic Workforce Planning This may seem like a simple matter, but we have found that HR data is not always available. This may seem easy, but we note that these HR data are not always available.
At a time of numerous transformations anticipated by the opportunities offered by AI on the one hand, and the impacts of CSR on individual behaviors on the other, the time is ripe for continuous redeployment.
What obstacles must be overcome to ensure a successful Workforce Planning project?
We note 3 main obstacles in the success of a Strategic Workforce Planning :
- The sensitivity of HR data makes its analysis complex.
- Fragmentation of data in several software programs that undermines their reliability.
- The inadequacy of current tools: too dependent on Excel or indigestible Business Intelligence software.
We give you the keys in a Guide realized in collaboration with Reflect:“Unleash the potential of your HR Data“.
The original gaps between the company’s needs and resources must be measured in order to feed the HR strategy: recruitment, recourse to services, mobility, are all alternatives to be considered.
The Strategic Workforce Planning has become Job and Career Management, we explain the evolutions : Jobs & Skills Management the new modalities.
