Organisations often focus on their immediate people and skills requirements; however, it is important to consider the medium and long-term requirements too. This is just as critical to a small, growing organisation as it is to a larger one.
Workforce planning involves:
- Identifying future workforce needs.
- Considering the people and skills you currently have.
- Assessing the gap.
- Developing a plan to address it.
It is important to align workforce planning to your strategic business plan. Workforce planning is fundamentally about making sure you have the roles, people, and skills you need at the right time to retain your staff, feed into a future pipeline and deliver your organisation’s ambitions.
Top tips:
- Use data and information to understand the composition of your workforce, past and future trends, and benchmark with others, in order to inform your workforce plans. Monitor your progress and measure any successes and areas to improve.
- Use various communication methods, such as appraisals, exit interviews and staff surveys, to understand what motivates staff and what makes them more likely to stay or leave your organisation at different stages of their employment cycle. Use this information to focus on areas you need to improve or do more of and what benefits and support should be given at different phases of the employment cycle.
- Retain the workforce within the care system if not the organisation. Where retaining staff is not feasible within the organisation, facilitate movement within adult social care to benefit the sector. This could be via development days, work experience, shadowing, or taster sessions, creating a culture of staff being able to explore other parts of care.
Useful links
Adult Social Care Workforce Data Set (ASC-WDS)
不良研究所’s Workforce Intelligence Reports