This article compares long and short-term term workforce planning, in a light industrial environment. Although the principles can be adapted to almost any other situation.
After you have read this piece, you should have a better understanding of how stakeholders, planning horizons, goals and challenges affect the plan.
An Example
Let’s imagine that we are an electrical contractor on our city’s preferred list of suppliers.
Our main interest lies in repairing and servicing local electricity supply grids. However, on occasions the city also allocates us unplanned breakdown work. This may require additional resources for the duration of the emergency.
These additional tasks intrude into our routine, but we have to take them on to prevent our competition seizing the gap.
This is a dilemma almost every business faces from time to time. It also highlights the key differences between long- and short-term workforce planning, and why both are equally important.
Long Term Workforce Planning
Long term workforce planning helps us ensure that we have the human resources we need to meet our strategic and operational requirements.
However, this is more than just a mere calculation on a spreadsheet, because we are in a dynamic world.
Variables Within Our Planning Horizon
We therefore need to include the following considerations within our planning horizon:
- We have a service level agreement with the city, in terms of repairing and servicing local electricity supply grids. How stable is their strategic plan?
- How stable is our workforce. Are there any key positions that could fall vacant within our planning horizon. Do we have a succession plan in place?
- What other challenges are there in our environment that could affect our work force’s ability to deliver our operational requirements? Have we factored these in?
The outcome of our efforts should be a base-load workforce plan, able to accommodate ‘business as usual’, in terms of our service-level agreement with the city.
Integrating Our Plan With Our Business
Our long-term workforce plan cannot operate in isolation.
It must be compatible with our overall business strategy, and in harmony with our other business goals especially our financial planning and company values.
Promoting a Happy Productive Work Force
Our long-term workforce plan assumes a certain level of employee productivity in our minds. We need to encourage this effort with a number of soft interventions.
The following examples aim to improve our productivity further, and help bring our operating costs down:
- A workforce performance strategy, that optimizes employee skills beyond their current and previous roles. We should help them find ways to harness these reserves, so both they and the company score.
- Pay can be a great motivator to individuals, provided they believe that their remuneration is fair. We should investigate phasing in pay transparency and reviewing our performance-based rewards.
- We should create clear career paths for all our employees. These should make them want to stay with us longer, after we address any skill gaps though mentoring and training.
- And finally, we should encourage a healthy company culture of open, honest feedback. Take time out of routine for employee team-builds, that foster workplace friendships and strengthen our collective energy.
Short Term Workforce Planning
So much for the theory of long-term workforce planning.
We have done our research and forward planning and updated our long-term workforce plan. But this does that mean that we will always have our ducks in a row.
Of course not, because the future will always remain uncertain.
Our electrical contracting business on our city’s preferred list of suppliers, is a great example. We will never know when our phone will ring with an urgent breakdown on the city grid. Or when a key employee has an urgent medical problem that simply cannot wait.
We have to make a plan!
Putting Contingent Plans in Place
Long term workforce planning is a strategic process, that looks ahead into the future. It thinks in terms of likely trends using fuzzy logic.
But short-term workforce planning is somewhat different. It addresses the immediate situation, to ensure that we have enough feet on the ground.
Contingency Planning in Action
Let’s imagine for a moment we get an unexpected call from the city, offering us a lucrative project that could take a month or more to complete.
We are fortunately well-prepared, thanks to our long-term skills development plan.
We put a temporary work team together that is a blend of permanent and temporary employees:
- We source the project leader and technical supervisor from our existing work force.
- Two experienced technicians temporarily take their places under our skills-development plan.
- We temporarily share the technician’s duties among their team, one of whom defers their annual leave.
- We contract the rest of the temporary project work team from a professional agency we have worked with before.
Everyone benefits from our short term workforce plan, making it a winner all round. The city has a worry off its mind, because it knows its stake holders are in good hands.
While our existing project leader and technical supervisor have new challenges that can only be good for their careers.
But perhaps the real winners are our two more junior technicians. They have an opportunity to prove their ability to function at a higher level.
The temporary workers also have a chance to demonstrate what they can do on the ground. This is their opportunity to be on our short list for future vacancies.
The Long and Short Term Continuum
Long- and short-term workforce planning do not exist in neat boxes. In reality, they flow together so we need a blend of the two:
- Long term workforce planning establishes our manpower strategy in terms of business goals within a financial plan.
- Short term workforce planning deals with unplanned events, by rescheduling resources for the duration.
Drawing the Two Threads Together
Long term planning is a management science where we apply established theory. While short term planning is more of an art, where we creatively think on our feet. And fill vacancies, and / or create temporary new roles.
Our job as the ‘captain of the ship’ is to meet the needs of both groups of stakeholders:
- Delivering on time, every time to our client and their stakeholders.
- Ensuring our own work teams are not overloaded, to avoid burnout.
Closing Thoughts to Take Away With You
To be a successful project leader, you need to think on your feet and mould your strategy to suit the present moment. While at the same time you must remember the litmus test of being fair and reasonable, and meeting stakeholder expectations because you are there to serve them.
“There is no perfect plan and no perfect scenario, because life happens. As helpful as it is to be able to plan, it’s equally important to adapt to changing circumstances and problems” (Stephen Guise, How to Be an Imperfectionist)
