High-Performing Organizations’ Workforce Planning Success Secret

A workforce planning success secret leveraged by high-performing organizations is out of the bag. It emerged as a truly striking “duh” that jumped right out of research conducted for a new report by i4cp—Winning at Workforce Planning: Turning High-Performance Strategies into Action.

The surprising finding was probably the single most revealing fact about behaviors that separate high-performing companies from low-performers when it comes to workforce planning. It became apparent when we asked participants in a survey of business and workforce planning leaders about the range of workforce planning activities they include in their initiatives. See for yourself:

To what degree does your team engage in these workforce planning activities?

Pretty amazing, isn’t it? While high-performing companies include all eight activities in their workforce planning initiatives, lower performers are doing only half. There was a zero response rate from lower performers when it came to reviewing business strategy, building business strategy, action planning, and constructing scenarios to postulate future conditions.

It doesn’t take a genius to discern that the organization doing the full range of planning activities is more likely to achieve greater levels of success. And that’s just what the research showed us. Higher performers give their workforce planning far higher effectiveness ratings.

So the secret is out – higher performers report greater workforce planning success. And they include twice the planning activities in their initiatives. There you have it. They just do it. Duh.