Workforce Management (WFM) encompasses all the responsibilities for maintaining a productive and happy workforce. Sometimes referred to as HRMS systems, or even the larger ERP systems. Specifically, these areas may include:

§ Payroll & Benefits

§ HR Administration

§ Time & Attendance

§ Career & Succession Planning

§ Talent Management and/or Applicant Tracking

§ Learning Management and/or Training Management

§ Performance Management

§ Forecasting and Scheduling

§ Workforce tracking and Emergency assist

Strategic Workforce Planning is the business process for ensuring that an organization has suitable access to talent to ensure future business success. Access to talent includes considering all potential access sources (employment, contracting out, partnerships, changing business activities to modify the types of talent required, etc. By talent is meant the skills, knowledge, predisposition and ability to undertake required activities including decisions making. Strategic Planning considers the business risks concerning insufficient, disrupted, mis-deployed talent on the organization's business priorities.

Though there is no definitive ‘Start here’ activity for any of the approaches to Strategic Workforce Planning, there are five fundamentals activities that most Workforce Plan models have:

§ Environment Scan

§ Current Workforce Profile

§ Future Workforce View

§ Analysis and Targeted Future

§ Closing the gaps

Some of the techniques adopted by companies exampled in the study include:

• A workforce analytics approach - mining both current and historical workforce data to identify the key relationships among the variables and between employee and business data. Dow Chemical has used this approach throughout a 10-year evolution of its workforce planning process.
• Forecasting and scenario modeling - using data to create forecasts that incorporate multiple what-if scenarios. These enable executives to evaluate strategic options. The study describes how a "major bank" decides where to locate a new call center based partly on this approach.
• Human capital planning - used by Corning and others to segment jobs on a basis of their "mission-criticality", making different levels of workforce investment in each segment. This approach focuses on broad 3-4 year trends, rather than precise headcounts and short-term plans.

By Priti Shah