Align people practices with business priorities

Strategic workforce planning provides a rational business basis for prioritising, developing and funding the people practices needed to support key business objectives. In times of uncertainty and transition, your workforce plan is fundamental to the creation and delivery of your business strategy. Proactive strategic workforce planning will enable your organisation to create clarity from the chaos of constant change.

For more than 20 years, Mercer has provided analytics and insights to help clients persevere through market crashes, rebounds and pandemics. Our methodology and tools have enabled these companies to align their people strategies with their business strategies and to achieve their goals.

When corporate says, “we need to invest in digital transformation.”

Workforce considerations:

• Where are the best external sources of tech-savvy talent?
• Which members of our existing workforce have skill sets that can be transferred easily to the development of new technologies?

When corporate says, “we need to respond to broad-based economic shocks.”

Workforce considerations:

• Should cuts be made to high-volume employees and managers?
• If we rely on natural attrition, how will our organisation structure change?
• Which skills are the most critical to retain and which can we easily source?
• Can we redeploy our existing employees?

Mercer’s workforce planning process will lift you up along the curve, moving your organisation from short-term operational planning to long-term scenario-based strategic planning.

To ensure success, our integrated strategic workforce planning model covers five key areas. When disruptions, growth or even steady progression compel businesses to fundamentally reconsider their staffing and workforce continuity, our data-driven approach to strategic workforce planning provides insights, actions and plans to drive businesses forward.

Taken together, these elements will create a lasting, adaptive and tailored strategic workforce plan for your organisation: a framework to identify workforce gaps, assess the business risks these gaps pose and then solve the challenge of future workforce needs. This forward-looking, data-driven approach will provide your organisation the time to address risks in an informed, cost-effective manner. Rather than waiting and reacting to events, control them. Organisations that leverage proactive workforce planning will better position themselves to adapt and succeed in an ever-changing business environment.