Companies need to plan for the long term

Consultants make a case for strategic workforce planning so that firms can make optimum utilisation of the available talent.

If Anita Belani, head of Watson Wyatt India is to be believed, then human resource management in the country still hasn't reached a strategic level. Having set up operations in India in 1996, the consulting firm provides advice on human capital and financial management.

But, she laments, till date companies haven't approached it for anything close to strategic workforce planning.

Workforce planning is not a new concept. It enables a company to take stock of its existing and future competency requirements, involving participation from all lines of business"" training, HR and other key enabler functions. But Indian companies are waking up to its importance, according to HR consultant Hema Ravichandar.

"Companies are beginning to include workforce planning in their annual strategy and budgeting exercises," she says. "Mature organisations that have moved up the PCMM value chain are aggressively following this trend."

However, Belani doesn't share the optimism: "The current economic buoyancy has made companies concentrate only on immediate needs. Attraction and retention are all that they are focusing on. These things are important, of course, but they don't look at the big picture." It's a trend that she finds missing even in larger organisations. "By and large, companies are still fixated on the budgetary aspect."

Workforce planning involves taking inventory of the existing skill base in an organisation, collating the business plans of various departments and drawing up the human capital strategies and roadmaps to ensure competency availability to attain defined targets.

Ravichandar, who offers Strategic HR Advisory, affirms: "A supplier's market, expanding organisational requirements and the ever increasing employee retention challenges make it essential for organisations to have a clear-cut workforce plan."

Workforce planning is the science that helps companies to zero in on the right people with the right skills at the right place at the right time. The planning sets the base for all downstream activities like internal job movements, recruitment planning and channel management, infrastructure planning and financial management to ensure a continued cost arbitrage.

"Robust workforce planning, which factors in bench and attrition, helps lay out the roadmap for all departments in the organisation, enabling it to be more proactive in management," Ravichandar notes.

Line gets to know the ready availability of skilled manpower and can thus plan for projects better. HR maps out its recruitment, training, visa, internal job movement and compensation strategies, and infrastructure management works out the resource requirements.

Belani argues that workforce planning helps companies contain costs by predicting the number of people needed and charting the recruitment course.

"But it transcends mere cost factors, as it links the company's manpower plans to business strategy," she says. Based on workforce planning, companies can identify what kind of people, skills, location and training they require in what time frame.

Workforce planning broadbases HR's role from an administrative to a strategic one by clearly defining the manpower and competency needs of an organisation, including positions for which people need to be hired and positions that they can be trained for.

"Based on this, recruitment resources can better plan their channel strategies to ensure an inflow of good quality talent at controlled recruitment costs," stresses Ravichandar.

In parallel, the other arms of HR, based on the skill inventory, can gear up for training internal resources (technical, behavioural and leadership), or the movement of internal resources into available job roles.

"Right now companies are simply firefighting to meet immediate needs, but they need to plan for five years in advance, which is not a long time for a company," Belani concludes.