Keep Your Capability Up
Whether they’re operating machinery, making deliveries, on the tools, supervising teams, wrangling administration, managing safety, or making decisions, people are powering your organisation. To optimise the performance of your operations, you need the right people with the right skills in the right roles.
Good workforce planning can look like achieving the perfect capability distribution across your company. However, things change and so do people, so it must also look into the future. Planning for a sustainable workforce means loading up your bench with capability so that you’re not left in the lurch and are able to navigate change. It is creating pathways that allow your people room for growth.
You’ve almost certainly seen this in action at the 2011 Rugby World Cup Final. Dan Carter, Colin Slade, and Aaron Cruden were out due to injuries, so third choice Stephen Donald stepped up 34 minutes into the game and converted the penalty kick which secured the All Blacks’ win over France.
Perhaps above all, effective workforce planning is proactive, not reactive. This is the only way to create true resilience. It must also be aligned with how work is actually carried out, not what is represented on paper.
The risks: fail to plan, plan to fail
Where workforce planning is not present, or not aligned to how work is actually carried out, risks can emerge across all aspects of a business. Physical safety, performance, HR, quality assurance, continuity, and other key governance categories suffer from a lack of oversight or forethought.
In the health and safety arena, having capable and knowledgeable people in place is crucial to prevent serious incidents. On the quality assurance side of the coin, capability reduces errors and minimises time required to fix them. The work of HR is made easier when people are clear on their roles and what is expected of them, reducing the risk of conflict.
The risk of single-person reliance is a big one for any business, and can be heightened for an SME. A lack of planning for continuity can see too many junior staff without supervision, or insufficient pipeline into key roles. Over time, reliance on a small number of highly capable people can create hidden risks. These individuals often become the solution to every problem, carrying critical knowledge, relationships, and decision-making responsibility. While this can keep operations moving in the short term, it can also mask capability gaps, create bottlenecks, and place unsustainable pressure on the very people the organisation depends on most.
An unbalanced workforce might look like:
- too many apprentices or junior staff without sufficient supervision, or vice versa.
- a gap in newly qualified or mid-level capability to step into senior roles.
- over-reliance on a small number of experienced individuals.
Benefits of a well-planned workforce
Taking a proactive, structured approach to your workforce planning pays off in many and varied ways! You can achieve:
- Capability clarity; a good understanding of what is required for each role.
- Consistency of delivery (and therefore QA outcomes) due to reduced variation in how work is performed.
- Resilience for your organisation! A well-planned workforce has less reliance on individuals and improved coverage of skills and knowledge.
- Workforce confidence thanks to clear expectations and pathways for development.
- Commercial performance, with improved efficiency and less of a need to re-do tasks.
One major benefit has been played out time and time again on the sports field, as we mentioned above: creating depth of talent guards against gaps in critical places!
When capability is understood and built across the workforce, performance is not dependent on one or two individuals. Organisational resilience is not simply about how well individuals cope under pressure. It is also influenced by how work is distributed, whether capability is concentrated in a few key people, how decisions are made, and whether teams have the capacity to adapt when circumstances change. Good workforce planning helps create the conditions for sustainable performance rather than relying on individuals to continually absorb pressure.
How to plan for a successful workforce
The basis of good workforce planning is to truly understand the capability landscape in your business. The following are some questions to ask yourself as you approach the task:
- What work is actually being carried out across your business?
- What capability (skills, knowledge, experience) is required to deliver this work?
- How consistently is that capability applied across teams?
- Are roles clearly defined and understood in practice?
- Where are you reliant on specific individuals?
- If a key person was unavailable tomorrow, who steps in and would they be ready?
- What does your current workforce mix look like across experience levels (e.g. trainee, developing, experienced, leadership)?
- Is that mix appropriate for the work being carried out?
- Where are future gaps likely to emerge (e.g. lack of progression into key roles)?
- What will your workforce need to look like in the future (growth, change, risk)?
It’s a lot, but lending some consideration to each of these questions puts you at a great starting point. From there, you can:
- Align roles with actual work. That doesn’t just mean polish up your job descriptions. Take a look at what is in each description and whether it truly matches the work being done.
- Clarify expectations. This includes specifics about what an employee is responsible for, what decisions they are authorised to make, and what tasks they must complete.
- Establish a competency matrix. Where there are levels of training for a role or different PD opportunities attached to it, create a matrix to track which people have completed what.
- Plan training and development based on real operational needs. Training doesn't have to be expensive and outsourced - many businesses successfully draw on expertise that already exists within their teams for internal training.
- Build depth and coverage. This takes time, but start by putting a plan in place to work towards lessening reliance on specific individuals.
- Check in with the stakeholders! Positions can change over time, and management may not be aware. Even with the same title, the weighting of the competencies can be very different based on the organisational context or wider market influences.
Sustainability is key for quality workforce planning, so it’s important to always look ahead. Having an accurate map of your workforce and the levels of capability and experience in any team or department (entry, developing, experienced, leadership) is a very solid base. From there, you can monitor the balance across those levels and plan accordingly.
To maintain sustainability, it’s important to identify and anticipate pipeline gaps, building up capability at entry level to bridge them. The goal is clarity and visibility. Capability should be determined and planned for, not assumed.
Profiling can be a very valuable tool for workforce planning. We don’t just profile a person, we profile the role and even the organisation. This helps to determine good fit by informing better impact representation across the organisation, influencing questioning for interviews, and contributing to development of competency pathways from induction to promotion.
TL;DR: Plan your people power
Failing to consider the spread of capability across your workforce now and in the future is a risky way to operate. Your physical safety, performance, HR, quality assurance, continuity, and other key governance categories will suffer.
On the flipside, quality workforce planning will help you to create an efficient, high-performing, and sustainable business. Sweet! To achieve this, you need to:
- Align roles with actual work.
- Clarify expectations.
- Establish a competency matrix.
- Plan training and development based on real operational needs.
- Build depth and coverage.
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Seek help from the professionals
Workforce planning is unique to each organisation. You have your own philosophy on hiring and training, a unique culture, tailored pathways of progression, and different capability needs. A templated method is never going to be very effective, and that’s why the Emendas approach works.
We can help you to plan for your unique workforce and put systems and scaffolding in place to keep you on track as your business grows. Get in touch with the team today.