The right team members, in the right place, at the right time. Strategic staff planning ensures your team's size and composition align with the expected workload over a longer period. Strategic staff planning is part of the strategic WFM cycle (workforce management).
Strategic staff planning gives you, per store, insight into the ideal staffing level in required hours and labour costs, and your long-term target. It also provides insight into your current and expected workforce (and its flexibility). This lets you take timely action. Strategic staff planning therefore forms the basis for realistic labour cost budgets and high-quality schedules.
Strategic staff planning with Workforce Planner
Workforce Planner is the tool for working on your team's ideal staffing level at a strategic level. We look at, among other things, the workload, the standard contract structure and the workforce per store, so you gain and maintain control over the affordability of your formula. Workforce Planner also lets you run simulations to analyse the potential effects of, for example, formula choices on labour costs. This gives you a clear view of where things stand, now and over a longer period. Working more strategically on staff planning happens in five steps.
1. Define formula policy
It starts by adding a qualification level to every activity. This determines who can carry out which task and what an activity is allowed to cost. Other elements of formula policy include setting up the store management model, defining contract types, formulating principles around time-for-time arrangements, and the rules for a surplus of hours (the so-called waterfall principle) or a shortage of hours (temporary staffing).
2. Calculate workload and annual budgeting
Workload Planner gives you a tool to calculate the week-specific workload per location for a longer period (for example, a year) as the basis for your budget. Once the annual hours budget has been calculated, you can plan proactively in Workforce Planner and ensure you have the right capacity and team composition in place. Whether you always achieve this is, of course, another question, but you'll spot it in good time either way.
3. Determine the ideal staffing level
What does your ideal staffing level look like? Which hours do you want to fix in which departments, and at what cost? Separately from workload, you may have specific staffing requirements for a particular department, such as management hours or a specialist you always want present during certain time slots. This can apply equally across the whole formula, or you can vary it for certain store types (for example, by revenue class, whether a store carries a particular module, or specifically for high-traffic locations).
4. Release formula principles
The hourly standards and the corresponding ideal staffing level per location are now ready. Adding the current workforce to this gives a clear picture of where things stand, allowing you to:
- Determine the standard labour costs for all stores as input for the budget.
- Make the Workforce Planner end-user screen available to the retailer, store manager and/or operational management, so they can actively manage staff composition and build a solid strategic staff plan.
5. Analyse, simulate, adjust
Workforce Planner lets you actively manage team composition, both centrally and locally. This safeguards the quality level that fits your formula principles and keeps a firm grip on labour costs.
At central level Stakeholders: operations, HR, formula management, commercial and finance.
- Build a thoroughly substantiated labour cost budget and give stores the insight to actively manage it locally.
- Generate a realistic weekly labour cost budget for the WFM system.
- Determine the impact on labour costs of, for example, collective labour agreement changes or developments within the formula.
- Gain insight into flexibility, over- or undercapacity across the formula or a cluster of stores, and actively manage it.
At local level Stakeholders: retailer, store manager, operational manager and HR.
- Carry out a thorough analysis of the current workforce and its development relative to the ideal staffing level for the location. Do you have the right people on board, or does new talent need to be attracted?
- Simulate changes to the team's contract structure.
- Translate the impact of market developments and/or formula changes into a concrete action plan at location level, covering training and development as well as recruitment and selection.
Workforce Planner: the foundation of your strategic staff planning
In short: strategic staff planning ensures your team's size and composition per store align with the expected workload over the long term. This lets you deliver quality while keeping a firm grip on costs, now and in the future.
Workforce Planner lets you thoroughly substantiate your strategic staff planning, making it possible to actively manage your ideal staffing level and build a labour cost budget from it. It brings focus, insight and overview to your organisation. And that brings peace of mind.
Curious how you can structurally improve efficiency in strategic labour cost and capacity management, and how Workforce Planner can help? We'd be happy to talk it through and make it concrete for you during a demo. Get in touch with one of our experts, no obligation.
