Your guide to human resources planning processes with Teambook

Your employees are at the heart of your business. And just like the impact of an earthquake, the repercussions of poor human resources planning are felt throughout the organization: missed deadlines, stressed employees and unhappy customers.

A human resources planning process can prevent these problems by helping companies to anticipate and balance their staffing needs with customer demands. In short, you need sufficient cover for the projects you have planned.

Effective human resources planning enables your employees to perform at their best, while stimulating company growth and profitability. Anticipation ensures that you have the right people, at the right time, for the right tasks. What’s more, your employees are in control of their workloads and deadlines, which helps them feel relaxed and motivated to give their best. This improves productivity and job satisfaction.

What is a human resources planning process?

Human resources planning involves analyzing your staffing needs and anticipating how they will be met. It involves assessing your current workforce, their key skills, your recruitment budget and your growth plans, in order to accurately forecast future needs in line with your company’s objectives.

The main objective of human resources management is to ensure that you have the right number of people with the right skills. By making strategic use of your organization’s talent, you can achieve the best possible return on investment.

For example, if your project pipeline includes 20 design projects and two application infrastructure projects, you’ll need more designer hours than developer hours.

But someone in a key position might be on parental leave, or have a vacation planned during your project. In another scenario, you might need new skills for a project and need to hire someone with those skills, bring in a freelancer or train an existing employee. Planning ahead enables your HR department to identify skills gaps so that you can respond effectively to a project’s needs.

Without strategic human resources planning in place, your company’s business operations are in trouble: you risk exceeding hiring budgets or hiring the wrong people, burning out existing team members, or losing customer confidence through an inability to adapt to demand.

Customer testimonial

“Thanks to Teambook software, we have better visibility over our daily planning. It’s a great tool and easy to use.”

Bertrand Carcel – Director, Infologo

5 steps to strategic human resources planning

A step-by-step approach to your HR planning process is the key to adequately covering your staffing needs and keeping your iron triangle (budget, scope and deadline) in balance.

Step 1: Assess your organizational goals and plans

A thorough analysis of organizational objectives and growth plans will help you understand the company’s direction. This will enable you to define human resources initiatives that are aligned with the company’s overall objectives and generate increased profitability.

Ideally, your assessment will answer these questions:

• What are the company’s objectives for the next quarter or year?
• What specific skills and tasks are needed to achieve the objectives?
• Which roles will be at the forefront of advancing the company’s objectives?
• Do human resources plans take account of existing talent and training, or will they require something different?

Step 2: Assess employee skills

To start your workforce planning, get complete visibility of your current talent pool. Often, HR managers are unaware of the skills that employees possess, but are not using in their current roles. This represents a waste of your existing corporate knowledge and, consequently, of the budgets you invest in training and recruiting new employees.

A key task here is to create a skills inventory for every full-time and part-time employee, so you can make the best use of the talent you’ve worked so hard to hire and develop.

One way to do this is to ask each employee about their skills, certifications and experience. For larger companies, this could involve sending a questionnaire to current employees and asking them to list their skills and experience, which could then be applied to the company’s needs.

A resource management tool like Teambook allows you to easily manage customized tags and quickly compile an updated list of key talents. You can then filter your planning and reporting by skills.

If you don’t have such a tool, performance appraisals or managers’ reports can also tell you about each employee’s skills and expertise. They will usually tell you what areas they excel in, as well as some of their characteristics, such as their ability to manage time or lead teams.

As part of your assessment, look at the current tasks of each position, and each employee’s ability and experience to perform them. For example, if your customer service department is responsible for responding to service requests, how many requests can they handle on average per day?

Step 3: Anticipate your future HR needs

You need to anticipate the impact of company growth on the requirements of each position. You don’t want your employees to be overworked and regularly working overtime; this would have a negative impact on the quality of work and employee morale.

With capacity planning, you can assess whether your employees have enough hours to take on new tasks. This enables you to develop realistic growth plans and make better recruitment decisions. Workloads are manageable and employees are able to produce quality work on time.

Your forecasts must cover both supply and demand. Forecasting your future needs enables you to identify potential staff shortages and determine whether you need to increase your overall workforce through new hires, optimize the use of your current human resources, or develop your current employees. If none of these options is viable, you may need to consider alternative sources of skills, such as outsourcing.

By anticipating demand, you can identify current gaps within the company. A resource management tool can help you keep track of vacations, retirements, potential sick leave and flexible working hours, so you can avoid having to assign employees to unavailable shifts.

It’s important to bear this in mind, as certain skills are in high demand in companies and can be hard to come by. For example, certain IT profiles are known to be highly competitive when it comes to hiring. By anticipating these criteria, you can start your search early and ensure that your company offers attractive positions to people with these skills.

Step 4: Refine your talent development strategies

Talent development is an essential part of the human resources planning process, as training existing staff is simpler and less costly than recruiting new employees. It is more effective to retain employees who already know the company and the product. On the other hand, finding new talent is difficult, especially in view of the talent shortage facing the business world.

Developing employees not only benefits the company, but also their morale. Employees feel valued when they see the company investing in their careers. Ongoing training, peer feedback and succession planning are essential elements of a talent development strategy.

For each critical role, do you have other people who could take over? If someone were promoted to a management position, who would take over? Does this leave any vacancies at the bottom of the ladder?

Talent development plans are most effective when they are collaborative, clearly defined with milestones for growth, and include objectives and key results (OKRs). Your talent action plan should include: training plans for current employees, job descriptions for each role, recruitment plans for each position, and integration plans for new employees.

It’s important to establish clear milestones for any plan. For example, if an employee’s training plan calls for mastering a particular skill or learning a new technology, what is required to achieve this? What resources are needed, and who needs to approve them?

Step 5: Review and evaluate your action plan

To be effective, human resources planning needs to be an ongoing process that constantly takes into account the company’s workforce, workloads and objectives. It’s important to reassess whether you’re making the most of your human capital. Are you meeting your business objectives, or are there still gaps? Have any problems been encountered that might require an adjustment to the plan?

You can then use the results of the assessment to guide your future planning and iterate the process.

With a solid human resources planning process, you can :

Effective human resources planning delivers key benefits to organizations, helping them to be proactive through a standardized process. It also boosts employee commitment, talent development and company profitability.

1. Prepare for the future by planning ahead

If an organization realizes that it needs a particular human resource immediately, it finds itself in a reactive situation. This can lead to rushed recruitment processes, and potentially difficulties in finding the right person for the job.

A human resources planning system keeps you one step ahead. You can proactively seek out candidates before you reach an urgent level of demand. Or you can ensure that your current employees are trained well in advance. It’s an asset!

2. Set up a standardized system

One of the advantages of a plan is that it allows you to standardize your approach. By standardizing, you create a repeatable process: no need to reinvent the wheel every time a new resource is required. It also ensures consistency in recruitment results, both in terms of the quality of new recruits and the speed of the process.

3. Maintain the commitment of current employees

HR planning motivates current employees and has a positive impact on corporate culture. Having a training plan in place gives them a clear vision of their careers, and shows that the company is ready to invest. Documented plans make sense, because they are transparent and demonstrate commitment: no vague promises of training or development that don’t materialize.

Another benefit in terms of commitment lies in the fact that human resources planning ensures that your current employees are not overworked, while at the same time trying to fill resource gaps. People are happier when they don’t feel overworked.

4. Staying competitive in the battle for talent

Companies with a robust HR planning system are ahead of those without. While others struggle to meet their needs, HR professionals with a plan in place can start the recruitment process early and know how to attract the best talent.

For certain key positions, this is essential. The race for talent is a well-known issue in many areas of expertise. Being ahead of the game means knowing where to find that talent and how to integrate it.

5. Deliver high-quality work and keep employees happy

Human resources planning is about having the right talent at the right time. Projects are completed on time and on budget when the right resources are available. Big accounts are won, business processes run smoothly and companies can grow.

Ultimately, human resources planning is good for your bottom line!

Rely on technology for your human resources planning process

Although human resources planning can be a time-consuming process, it’s well worth the effort. Companies that optimize the use of their valuable human resources tend to enjoy a competitive advantage.

It’s about streamlining your operations and meeting all your skills and talent needs, wherever they may arise. For your employees, it means a fulfilling job where their talents are valued and their workload is fair.

Having the right human resources forecasting and planning software can lighten the workload for project managers. Find out how we can simplify the resource planning process with Teambook.