The Five-step Workforce Planning Process

Planning how to maximize your workforce in the construction industry has now become a much simpler process thanks to advances in construction management software.

Construction businesses can now be confident that they have the right people in the right jobs at the right time with systems like the Procore workplace planning software.

What can workforce planning achieve?

By planning your workforce, instead of reacting to market events, you put yourself in charge of your future, allowing you to focus on:

• reducing labor costs in favor of workforce deployment and flexibility
• responding to the needs of your customer base
• identifying skills gaps and areas of succession risk
• relevant strategies for talent management and people development
• targeting specific and identified inefficiencies
• employee retention initiatives
• improving the quality of outputs
• recruitment and training responses to changes in the education system.

Labor costs can account for up 70% of total business costs. Workforce planning allows you to map talent to value and ensure you are getting the best results for the costs.

The five core workforce planning steps

Successfully implementing new workforce planning strategies is an extensive procedure that can be broken down into five steps.

1. Deciding strategic direction and goals

Begin by seeking answers to these questions:

• What direction do you see your business going in?
• What are you hoping to achieve through workforce planning?
• What are the primary goals/milestones you are targeting?
• Why does your business need new workforce planning structures?

Use a collaborative approach and generate a consensus with all parties. When the entire organization buys into the new strategies you are sure to reap benefits.

2. Analyze your existing workforce

Examine these issues:

• Demand Planning – Determine the number of employees needed for each role to reach your goals. This requires accurate business forecasts to determine your workforce’s future number, structure, and composition.
• Internal Supply – This needs accurate talent evaluations, an understanding of the expected employee turnover, and the design of training and professional development programs.
• Gap Analysis – Identify gaps in your workforce and make plans around recruitment, redeployment, and training.

3. Develop your plan

Now plan your workforce to reflect the value and revenue it produces.

You might consider two types of work your business does. If one type makes more money per employee than the other, you might plan to upskill more employees to work on the more profitable work.

With more workers able to do the more profitable work, you can take on more of the profitable contracts and fewer of the less profitable contracts.

Of course, this is not something you can implement immediately. Instead, the business should put redeployment, hiring, and training plans in place to produce the workers with the skills required for more profitable work.

4. Implement workforce planning

Implementing the plan may require:

• HR personnel who understand the new roles and responsibilities.
• Strategies and processes for recording all relevant data and information.
• Effective communication channels between all parties to support the plan.
• Defined measurement and evaluation criteria to assess the plan’s success.

These future HR plans for managing your workforce will involve some or all of the following:

• Recruitment
• Onboarding
• Training
• Retention
• Redeployment
• Outsourcing
• Succession planning
• Deploying new technology

With all these processes to be implemented, workforce planning will take time to transform the business. Be patient.

5. Monitor results

Workforce planning is a process where progress must be monitored and measured against specific milestones and long-term goals.

After it is implemented, the processes may need adjusting due to various factors, many of which may have occurred after the original plans were set.