How to start Strategic Workforce Planning: build a complex database and produce a detailed report, right?

Blog posts

30 Apr 2025

Dan Lucy, Director, HR Research and Consulting 

Follow @DanLucyIES

With increasing labour costs, continued skills shortages and significant uncertainty in the business environment, many organisations across sectors are having to reconsider what skills and capabilities may be needed now and in the future in order to continue to be successful. This is where insights and practices from Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP) can be helpful. We at IES have recently concluded research for a government agency looking at how organisations across multiple sectors are approaching the question of how to ensure they have the right workforce in place now and in the future. From that work, some key insights emerge.

Don’t call it Strategic Workforce Planning!

Labelling an exercise as SWP is likely to disengage senior leaders and prompt thoughts of long, drawn-out exercises of extensive and detailed data gathering that leads to nowhere particularly useful. What perhaps has more traction is to frame a conversation with senior leaders about ‘future people requirements’, often as part of existing planning exercises and not as a separate standalone HR exercise. Most senior leaders, one would hope, have a view on the capabilities of their workforce, the things they are struggling to do and the gaps in capability that hamper the meeting of their objectives and ambitions. They also likely have a view on where they would like to get to. Even if the situation is in flux and the broader strategy vague, directions of travel may be clear or at least emerging, and in surfacing the conversation there could be more opportunities for action.

Don’t wait until you have the perfect data to have the conversation

Data and evidence are important within SWP. They are useful for understanding what is really happening with the current workforce, for checking assumptions, for highlighting what you don’t know and probably should find out, and also what you may need to do to improve the data in order to answer the kinds of questions that are being uncovered. Improving the data and evidence on which SWP is based is critical in the medium-term. In the short-term, however, and in a fast-moving environment, more can be achieved more quickly through carefully constructed dialogue with the right people in the room. IES has previously produced guides to holding such conversations and the types of questions it is useful to ask. HR leaders and those responsible for SWP should have it in mind that asking the right questions is more important than having all the right answers, and that productive ways forward can only really be identified once you have successfully managed to describe the gap between where you are and where you are going in people and skills terms.

Position SWP as business-led rather than HR led

To be effective, SWP has to be supported by HR but not owned by it. It needs to be integrated with strategic planning activities and governed by a group of senior leaders from across the business. This can simply mean that representatives from HR are involved in strategic planning conversations and are armed with the capability to ask useful people-related questions. If, for example, there is an emerging capability that the organisation needs to be good at in the next 3-5 years, how are we going to deliver that capability? Will it be something we buy in? Will we recruit? Will we develop staff internally? And if so, which part of the business will those staff come from and how long will it take to train them? The action of asking the question is important, irrespective of whether there is a ready answer. Governance can simply be a case of having ‘workforce requirements’ as a regular agenda on senior leadership team meetings, or if more work is needed, a working group to task project leads with the development of plans, monitor progress, and take corrective action where needed. The working group should be chaired by a business lead and not HR.

Plans do and need to change as circumstances change

The purpose of SWP is not to create a plan, but to engage in the act of planning to ensure your organisation has the workforce it needs. A plan will never be, and is not intended to be, set in stone. It is rather a guide to action that needs to be continually revised in the light of changing circumstances and evidence. Aim for a planning approach that is agile enough to cope with change and is not so granular and detailed as to be ‘out-of-date’ the minute it is produced.

Learn as you go

It is clear from the research that no-one has the perfect solution and everyone feels they are on journey of developing their approach, piloting and adapting their methods in light of their experiences.

From our experience what practitioners find helpful in getting planning off the ground is not the same as the images of dense reports and data analysis that generally springs to mind when the words ‘strategic workforce planning’ are used. Keeping the above tips in mind might help in brokering a more forward-looking approach to planning the shape of the workforce and all the benefits it brings - from fewer retention challenges and skills gaps, to better wellbeing and productivity.

For more information on how we can support you with Strategic Workforce Planning, click here or drop me a line: dan.lucy@employment-studies.co.uk