Improving Government Workplace Planning

Government workforce planning is a strategic process of recognizing the gaps and optimizing between today's workforce and future human capital needs.

The workload burden is everywhere, and the public sector is no exception. Workloads are increasing across government businesses, and leaders are locating issues to reallocate resources. Strategic workforce planning is a 5 step process to bridge this gap.

Step 1

Setting Strategic Direction

Setting the right direction is crucial that aligns with the organizational business plan and annual performance. Long-term strategic and short-term performance goals must be set in the same direction.

Step 2

Analyze workforce, Identify skill gaps, and conduct workforce analysis

‍Estimating the current workforce capabilities and resources and how they'll progress in the future—knowing the organization's future requirements and locating the gaps in current workforce capabilities and needs.

Step 3

Develop Action Plan

 It involves developing appropriate action plans to match the decided strategy and fill any workforce working gap. Measuring the strategic working progress is essential. It involves new recruitments, upskilling/reskilling of existing staff, restructuring the organizational workforce, outsourcing work on contracts, succession planning, and handling technological advancements.

Step 4

Implement Action Plan

‍Implementing the actions per the strategic plans and goals to accomplish results is essential. Understanding roles and responsibilities, proper communication, and coordination among the team members to reach a consensus and accomplish the strategic objectives.

Step 5

Monitor, Evaluate, and Revise

‍Measuring progress against the set milestones, looking for continuous improvement in the process, implementing corrective actions, and getting ready to cope with any new issues make organizations thrive.

Benefits of strategic workforce planning

Aligning the right people to the right jobs helps achieve the right results at the right time. Strategic workforce planning can speed up the entire progress remarkably.

Strategic workforce planning helps in:

• Optimizing workforce costs with planning, reduced timing, faster results accomplishments, reducing employee turnover, and enhancing productivity.
• It is challenging to deal with the demographic changes of the aging workforce and match with Gen Z. As each generation has its unique style of working, generation diversity plays a critical role. Strategic workforce planning helps an organization overcome these challenges.
• You can plan to replace retiring staff with new joiners well in advance, either internally with promotions or externally even.
• Align workforce requirements with strategic goals.
• Identifying the gaps between current capabilities and future requirements.
• Structured deployment of the workforce and decision-making.
• Identify and overcome any arising barriers in implementation.

How having a long-term recruitment strategy can bridge the performance gap?

Structured and focused long-term recruitment planning can bridge any lacunas in the system and boost performance 10X. Here are some key factors that need to be kept in mind.

Know your exact requirement

Knowing your demand drivers and what drives demand in the number of employees and the number of work hours required to perform the particular task.

Having a clear decisive goal is what makes informed decisions and well-formed outcomes. When organizations have an open mindset, workload demand estimates can be revised over the years and can be well adjusted to the exact requirements today. Striking a balance as per the demand is the key, along with having a backup for any arising emergencies.

Knowing the flexibility

Knowing the workforce's flexibility and the talent required to perform a particular job is most important. Circumstances play a vital role in determining what to estimate and expect. While scaling needs only a little extra effort to connect with a more prominent vendor and smooth running of the supply cycle, establishing the process of supply for the very first time or a manufacturing process requires more workforce and work hours.

The workload can be divided into categories such as frontload, middle office, backend, and support team; hence, it will be easier for organizations to estimate the required workforce at each category level.

Most public sector/government jobs require front-end roles, which have easy flexibility compared to the demand. As in banks, embassies, hospitals, schools, consumer affairs, regulatory authorities, research scientists, directorates, or other government workplaces, most jobs are customer-facing, and the number of employees required is in direct proportion to the demand or the number of customers the particular branch or office serves.

While middle office roles are strategic and can be managed by a fixed number of employees where only slight flexibility is required, program managers, marketing, accounting, and R&D staff come under this category. They don't need as high flexibility as the front-end roles.

The maturity level of the workforce is also a contributing factor in delivering results. While millennials require more work hours and revisions, experienced talents can perform the same task half the time.

Standardized processes require fewer manhours, while the opposite is vice-versa. Fixed versus variable workload changes the workload estimates. Both quantitative, as well as qualitative data play a vital role.

Identifying the actual task force required:

Outsourcing is done at relevant times. Many times gaps in government offices are filled up by contractors or shifting people from other departments. Assessing well in advance helps mitigate any extra costs.

Reviewing supply-demand gaps and decision making

Any mismatch can be bridged by upskilling/reskilling or hiring the appropriate talent through contract. However, the risk associated with hiring in government departments is high as the jobs last for long durations or even lifetimes. Accurate and appropriate decisions are required to hire the right fitting talent, while planning helps avoid any unusual costs at the last moment.

Conclusion

Strategic workforce planning in the public sector is more about upskilling the existing workforce and helps them to provide an opportunity to learn and grow, which further adds to employee retention

While the future is highly ambiguous, being prepared for unforeseen situations differentiates a high-performing organization from others.

A backup for technological advancements, tech support, and automation drives productivity. HRs must come up with creative ideas that combine dealing with various hiring issues, up-skilling and reskilling of existing staff, attrition, lay-offs, and having a great future vision keeping the company's culture in mind that helps boost productivity and reduces costs to optimize the best workplace strategic planning and implementation.

 For more insightful content, visit the Cogent Infotech website.

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