You already know how important your staff is. They are the lifeblood of your company, whether they are fulfilling orders in your warehouse or dealing with customer queries. However, retaining your brightest and best talent has always been an issue, and with 51% of workers saying they are open to changing jobs, it’s perhaps never been more important than now.
One thing to consider, and this doesn’t devalue other roles in any way, is that there are some job positions you’d worry about more than others. If someone in a crucial role leaves, it could have a knock-on effect on other areas of your operations.
IT is one such role, with staff responsible for many areas such as your computing and communications. How do you manage your tech talent to plan for shortages or gaps?
What is your IT Workforce?
The size and roles of your IT workforce are going to very much depend on the nature of your business. They could be anything from software developers to network maintenance operators. Put simply, they will be staff who work in any area of your business to do with computers and, with the tech advancements surrounding it, communications as well.
They may work with hardware or software (or both). Your IT staff could be responsible for installing or maintaining servers or ensuring that CMMS software works as it should. Smaller businesses may have IT staff who wear several hats while an enterprise-level organization may have dedicated teams working in different areas.
What is Workforce Planning?
As the name suggests, workforce planning is about finding a balance that will ensure your future labor needs are met. As well as analyzing your current workforce to gauge employee satisfaction levels and any skill gaps, you also look at your business operations and what labor needs you will have in both the short and long term.
You also need to consider any natural turnover due to things such as staff reaching retirement age. As well as looking internally, you would also look at market trends such as staff turnover. You may operate in the call center sector which can see average staff turnover rates of 30-40%.
Your industry’s average turnover rate can be one of the crucial factors when it comes to workforce planning, and a business offering outbound call center solutions would have to look at both the industry rates and the needs of the business, particularly during busier periods.
It also takes into consideration skills gaps and training needs. For example, your manufacturing plant may be looking at installing new, more efficient, machinery in the next year. You need to identify all the staff in a resilient workforce who will work with these new machines and who will need training to operate them efficiently.
One of the primary goals of workforce planning is to ensure that you have the right staff in the right place at the right time (and with the right skill sets) to meet your business goals and to ensure effective workflows are in place.
The Benefits of Workforce Planning
Good workforce planning can benefit your business as a whole and can also help with HR-based initiatives:
- Identify changes in customer needs and respond to them.
- Improve your staff retention rates.
- Highlight technical skills gaps and inefficient practices among your technology professionals.
- Reduce the costs of external recruitment by identifying staff that can be promoted or trained. This will reduce recruitment costs such as onboarding and training.
- Build and implement robust career progression and development programs that recognize an employee’s chosen career path.
- Boost productivity levels.
- Find ways to improve the work-life balance of your workforce.
- Help HR develop their recruitment policies and to improve onboarding and staff training.
- See what staff may be leaving due to natural turnover and plan succession.
- Build a pool of potential talent that can be recruited in the future.
- Better define job roles and areas where staff could fulfill more than one role.
- Build reward and recognition programs that can boost employee satisfaction and retention rates.
IT Workforce Planning Stages
So, you can see the benefits that efficient workforce planning will bring. Good planning can be especially useful when it comes to your IT staff as you need to ensure that any talent shortage will not cause a decrease in operational efficiency or adversely affect other areas of your business. It can also help you respond to any changes in tech workforce trends. What stages should you move through to build a plan?
- Plan and Define Goals
To implement a successful plan, you need to fully understand your organization as well as the sector and environment it operates in. You need to be able to clearly define short- and long-term challenges your business faces, as well as the business needs over those same timeframes.
Those challenges may be operational or regulatory. For the former, you may want to increase productivity by introducing automation in different areas. For the latter, you need to be aware of any legislative or regulatory changes that may affect your business and the knowledge base of your staff such as the DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act).
- Understand your Workforce
The next stage involves analyzing and understanding your IT workforce. You should build a talent profile for each member of your IT team. This should cover everything from basic info such as age and how long they’ve been employed by you, to more technical information such as their skills, qualifications, and experience.
By having a comprehensive profile for each member of your IT workforce, you can better highlight any skills gaps that could be filled by training or knowledge sharing. You can also identify individuals who can fill other roles if there is a talent shortage for some reason. It can also help to survey your IT staff to get their views on factors such as job satisfaction, progression opportunities, and intent to leave.
It may help if you apply segmentation to your IT workforce and look at the data to see if analytics tell you any different stories when it comes to demographic factors such as age, gender, and even geographical location.
- Determine IT Needs
How will your IT needs change over the coming year? Two years? Five years? You need to look at different scenarios for your IT team and what other factors, such as reducing technical debt, might affect those needs. By identifying different needs over different timeframes, you can better formulate effective contingency plans that will mitigate any adverse effects.
What new IT needs might arise? Again, this will depend on the nature of your business, but identifying future needs can better help you plan for them. There may also be special projects planned such as the migration or modernization of your legacy system.
You can also consider cross-training your existing IT workforce so that if talent shortages arise, you have staff in place with enhanced employability who can fill any gap either long-term or until a suitable candidate can be found.
- Build Action Plans
As the saying goes, expect the unexpected. Good workforce planning will look at these unexpected scenarios as well as likely ones that have been identified by date analysis. You should have different plans that can act as a contingency in case something unexpected, such as a competitor headhunting your best staff, as well as live action plans that can deal with factors such as natural turnover.
Your IT workforce plans need to be ready for expected events. For example, your analyses might show that four of your IT team will be retiring next year. You can look at internal succession or cross-training or see if there will be a need for external recruitment.
For example, let’s say you currently have a single staff member responsible for customer success operations. What would happen if that person suddenly left for some reason? Are there other members of your IT team that can step into the role, or would you have to look externally to find a replacement?
Any action plan you create has to be flexible and ready to adapt to any change in circumstances. Those could be market changes, operational changes, or budget changes. Anything that may have a direct effect on your IT staff has to be factored into your plan so that you have a proactive and change-ready organization.
5. Evaluate
While some envisaged scenarios may never happen (hopefully the worst-case scenarios), others are for very real events that you know will happen (such as natural turnover). As with other plans, the reality is that you won’t see how effective a plan is until you have to put it into action. Some plans, such as training to fill skills gaps, will be implemented ASAP, so these may set a benchmark for other planning.
Where possible, include SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) goals in your plans so you can evaluate effectiveness once you have had to use that plan. As well as the usual metrics such as staff retention, monitor and evaluate any effects in other areas such as business value streams.
Once the effectiveness of a plan has been evaluated, you can return to any other plans you have made to see if adjustments need to be made based on how well that first one worked. Constant and ongoing evaluation of your plans – and adapting them to any changes – can be crucial factors in successful IT workforce management plans.
Implementing IT Workforce Planning
So, you now know and understand the needs of your IT workforce and your business. When it comes to implementing your plans, you need to be aware of issues or steps you have to take.
- Consensus. While much of the work involved in workforce planning will come from your HR department, any plans need collaboration and consensus across your organization.
- Define roles. Who will be involved in implementing any plans? For each plan you create, you need a clear definition of who is doing what. Ideally, you should have one person who is overseeing all your workforce planning efforts.
- Learning. As part of your workforce planning will involve identifying skill gaps and filling them, you need an idea of which learning programs to use. Will you use in-house training, external learning providers, or a hybrid of both?
- Create support networks. Workforce planning can be complicated and can be organization-wide. You need to create support networks that can provide advice when needed to every level of your organization. That can include comprehensive support for any line managers working in IT.
- Good communications. Not only is it essential that you tell your workforce what your plans are, you also need to let them know why you are doing it. For example, if the business plans to change any e-commerce frameworks it operates, you need to let employees know why you are making changes and what those changes will entail in terms of training, etc.
- Reviewing. If you have any live plans, then it’s essential you constantly review how effective they are. As well as tracking any relevant metrics, ask the IT staff involved or affected for feedback too.
- Data collection and storage. Any workforce plans will generate a lot of data. That can include data from the business effects of the plans to how the plans affect your staff. Be sure to collect, store, and manage data from each plan so you can make comparisons over time. That data can also contribute to predictive analytics in the case of new plans.
The Takeaway
Businesses face challenges on a daily basis. Some of those are short-term and also easily solvable. Others can affect a business in the long term and need careful consideration and planning to solve them. Facing a shortage of IT talent could have a negative effect on an organization if it’s not been planned for. Effective IT workforce planning can mitigate any potential risk.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution to this problem. A lot will depend on the nature of your business and the size of your IT workforce. You need to consider all factors and then formulate a plan that best suits the needs of your business. With careful planning, effective collaboration, and good communication, you can find ways to navigate through the talent shortage sea.
