Many executives still think about workforce planning as a “project or bolt-on event” or perhaps a “mad scramble every Friday morning to put together headcount numbers” and deal with short-term planning; basically managing the tactics of ebb and tide. Historically workforce planning was something that was working fine when business was humming along. The challenges with workforce planning typically arose in “change.” We now live in a time when change is pretty much the constant.

In a discussion with a couple dozen of my HR Executive Forum HR leaders last week, there was agreement that workforce planning, if done right, is a process and an integrated way of doing business and managing the business of people on a continuous basis with a long-term perspective. It is a way to start a very important leadership conversation, generating insights and informing strategic decisions about the organization’s future shape, location, size, structure, roles and fulfillment of core capabilities. This kind of workforce planning adopts a long-tem perspective and engages leadership in exploring scenarios such as:

• What if the geo-political environment that emerges is such that we can no longer do business in Russia? Where do we move manufacturing instead.
• What are the new roles, skills and proficiencies a new and emerging business model will require in order to succeed 3-5 years from now?
• How aligned are our current employees with our business strategies? Where do we get new talent? Home grown or imported?
• Is our ratio of contingent workers right? What are our core business capabilities and what are contingent workers doing? Are we outsourcing knowledge we should have internally?

The answer to these kinds of questions will be different for different businesses, but they are applicable and useful across the board-with variations, whether you are for profit or not for profit. In order to see the similarities you just need to focus on overarching organizational goals and how they link to strategies? For example, while a Gates Foundation goal might be to eliminate polio, a for-profit company goal may be to increase revenue.

In order to win over our executive teams and help them see how today’s workforce planning can help our organization’s succeed, HR executives need to reduce complexity, focus on the vital few metrics and understand how analytics and technology can propel the process forward and hone in on what is important. Above all, the focus of HR leaders needs to be on establishing ownership of the process with the executive team –avoid the HR project and most recent flavor approach – and realize that much of the value lies in the dialogue that is generated.

Do you agree?