Workforce strategy underpinning your corporate strategy is essential to success. Like Richard Branson once said, your employees are your most important asset. In other words, a well considered workforce strategy will ensure that you have the right people with the right skills to deliver your business objectives.
Corporate Strategy
Your HR department, or outsourced HR provider should meet with your leadership team regularly to ensure that your workforce is in prime position to be able to execute your goals. Ensuring objectives are specific and written down will help you to focus on achieving them.
HR Strategy
Behind every successful business strategy is a sound workforce strategy. This will focus efforts on ensuring workforce design is right and ensuring you have the right skills and behaviours. In addition, you will ensure that you support your employees to perform the very best they can.
Workforce Design
You should understand and assess your workforce demographics, numbers and job roles. In other words, ensuring that you have the right number of people in the right roles. Do you have the balance right between your sales department and production? Do you need to recruit more employees in customer services?
The Right Skills and Behaviours
Performance management should be an integral part of your HR function. Clearly define standards and expectations and communicate them. High standards are non negotiable. Performance on the job is one important element, but behaviours are equally important.
A well considered workforce strategy and plan will identify where any skills or behaviours are lacking and identify an action plan to address this. If the business needs to adapt to changing markets or technologies, the workforce plan may well concentrate on developing skills or recruiting new skills.
Management Support and Engagement
Employees are unlikely to perform their best if they don’t feel supported and valued. Your workforce strategy should describe how you will improve management support and increase employee engagement. Carrying out an employee engagement survey will help you to identify current levels of engagement which can be used as a baseline. It will also help form an action plan to address areas for improvement which can feed into your workforce plan.
Workforce Plan
Once you have developed your workforce strategy highlighting key areas of focus, you should prepare a workforce plan detailing how each of these actions will be implemented.
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