Workforce planning is the ongoing process of achieving optimal use of your company’s most valuable asset – your employees.

 A good balance reduces the risk of stress, exhaustion and frustration among employees. It is therefore more important for you as a manager to succeed in planning your employees’ schedule to achieve just that – worklife balance. There are, of course, more advantages to having good staffing planning, such as being able to prevent staff shortages, avoid costs rushing away and time being lost.

With the help of a well-planned schedule, you can ensure that you have the right people in the right place at the right time.

– Having a good HRP strategy in place can mean productivity and profitability gains for a company, says Päivi Pitkänen, Operations Consultant at SoftOne.

Understand your staff

The first step in workforce planning is to identify the company’s employees. By creating a clear idea of your employees, their skills, qualifications, positions and performance levels, you can more easily match their skills with the needs of your business.

Understand the needs of your business

The second step requires you to review the company’s needs both based on the current situation and what future changes your business has that will affect your need for employees. It is not infrequent that unexpected events can appear, therefore this is a good stage to imagine different scenarios that might arise and how it might affect your business needs.

Find the right tool

Personnel planning requires that you and the other managers can handle many projects and there are often several factors to take into account. It is therefore important that you have a tool that gives you the best solution to succeed in order to avoid stress and frustration. Today, with the help of a planning tool, you can help create smart schedules, get clear forecasts of your needs and get full control over your costs and time.

Analyze your data

Learning by doing – evaluating your existing forecasts can provide you with many valuable insights that will help you create smarter schedules in the future. By using a smart tool where you can see demand curves, clear graphs and tables on your schedule, you will discover greater control over the consequences of your planning.