Why investing in a workforce planning strategy can help your company succeed in the evolving energy and utilities sector

How to develop a workforce planning strategy

A workforce planning strategy involves leveraging data to ensure that your workforce supports the needs, goals, and skills of your organization. Following these steps can help ensure your organization has the resources it needs to succeed in an evolving industry:

Identify your strategic needs

The first step towards developing an effective workforce planning strategy is to evaluate your organization’s strategic requirements. Your organization may be planning to upgrade your grid technology in the next five years, and this will impact the number of employees and the types of skills you will need to achieve this goal.

Evaluate your strategic and long-term business plans to gain insights into how these goals will impact your workforce. Assessing financial forecasts and technology or legislative changes can also help you anticipate how your workforce will need to transform to remain competitive.

Complete a workforce analysis

Conducting a workforce analysis is the next step in the workforce planning process. This includes forecasting your future workforce requirements to meet your strategic and business objectives. Key indicators may include staffing patterns, skills and competencies, retirements, turnover trends, and anticipated workload and business unit changes.

The next step is to analyze your workforce supply — or current workforce and employment trends — to determine workforce availability. Indicators for this analysis may include staffing levels, skills, workforce demographics, and the skills available in the current market.

Conduct a gap analysis between your workforce supply and demand to identify opportunities to optimize your workforce. This may include adjusting staffing levels to match predicted changes to the workload or identifying areas where additional skills training may be required.

Develop a workforce strategy and plan

A workforce analysis will provide the insights you need to develop strategies and plans to target priorities within your organization. These strategies and plans are also crucial to address short-term and long-term demand.

Priorities within your organization may include employment branding, employee recruitment, retention, engagement, or development. Key priorities may include changes in job descriptions or your organizational structure — such as creating a new department for grid modernization or renewable energy storage. It might also focus on optimizing processes within your organization to improve its performance.

Implementation and monitoring

The final step is to implement your workforce planning strategy within your organization and measure its results annually to support continuous improvement. Monitoring metrics such as how much time it takes to fill vacant positions and your employee turnover rate can help you evaluate the success of your recruitment and retention initiatives.

Monitoring your training and development programs can help you identify whether you have closed skills gaps within your organization and surveys can help measure employee culture. Additionally, tools such as performance metrics can help you identify whether the changes to your processes are achieving your desired results.

Take the next steps

A workforce planning strategy is necessary to help your organization adapt to changes in the energy and utilities sector and achieve its goals. However, planning for the future of your workforce is only part of the process. Our next article in this series will explore why investing in your workforce is necessary to keep skilled talent within your organization.  

For more information about developing an effective workforce planning strategy, contact MNP’s Consulting team. We have the experience to help you create an effective strategy to reach your objectives.