Workday helps organisations with workforce planning by bringing workforce data, headcount planning, skills planning, financial information, and scenario modelling into a connected platform. Its workforce planning capabilities are designed to help HR, finance, and business leaders understand current workforce needs, anticipate future requirements, and make decisions about hiring, development, and organisational changes.
Rather than relying on disconnected spreadsheets and manual calculations, organisations can use Workday to model different workforce scenarios and connect workforce plans with business goals and financial considerations.
1. Plan Headcount and Workforce Costs
Workday helps organisations plan how many employees they need and understand the associated workforce costs. Headcount plans can be connected with financial models, allowing HR and finance teams to consider the cost implications of planned hiring and workforce changes.
For example, if a company plans to expand into a new market, leaders can model the additional positions required and assess how those positions could affect workforce costs.
2. Forecast Future Workforce Needs
Workday can support workforce forecasting by allowing organisations to create workforce models based on different assumptions. These models can help organisations estimate future headcount requirements and identify potential workforce gaps.
Workday describes its workforce planning capabilities as supporting hiring plans, gap identification, business alignment, and what-if scenarios.
3. Model Different Scenarios
One of the useful features of workforce planning software is the ability to consider different possibilities before making a decision.
Workday allows organisations to create what-if scenarios involving factors such as hiring, transfers, retention, workforce capacity, and organisational changes. Leaders can then compare potential workforce structures and their financial or operational effects.
For example, an organisation could compare the impact of hiring 50 new employees against developing or transferring existing employees.
4. Identify Skills Gaps
Workday can also support skills-based workforce planning. Organisations can model workforce capabilities and identify gaps between the skills they currently have and those they may need in the future.
This can help leaders consider whether a gap should be addressed through hiring, upskilling through formats such as Microlearning, reskilling, or other talent strategies.
5. Connect HR and Finance
Workforce planning often involves decisions that affect both people and budgets. Workday brings HR and financial planning closer together so that workforce decisions can be considered alongside their financial impact.
This can help HR, finance, and operations teams collaborate around headcount, workforce costs, hiring plans, and organisational changes.
6. Support Organisational Design
Workday also provides organisational design and scenario modelling capabilities. Organisations can model potential changes to reporting structures, positions, and organisational hierarchies in a separate environment before implementing approved changes.
The capability allows planners to examine potential effects on headcount, FTE, and workforce costs before changes are executed.
7. Use Workforce Data From Workday HCM
Workday Workforce Planning can integrate with Workday Human Capital Management (HCM), allowing workforce planning models to use HCM data. Workday documentation states that the integration can continuously feed updated HCM data into Adaptive Planning and can also support publishing approved plans back into HCM.
This creates a closer connection between workforce planning and workforce execution.
8. Turn Plans Into Actions
Workforce planning is most useful when organisations can act on the decisions they make. Workday supports publishing workforce planning actions into HCM, including creating positions or job requisitions from approved workforce plans.
This can help reduce the gap between planning and execution, allowing an approved workforce plan to feed into actual HR processes.
9. Monitor and Adjust Workforce Plans
Workforce needs can change as business conditions change. Workday supports continuous planning and allows organisations to monitor workforce information, open positions, costs, and talent needs so plans can be adjusted when necessary.
This makes workforce planning an ongoing process rather than something that only happens during an annual budgeting cycle.
Why Is Workday Useful for Workforce Planning?
Workday can help organisations bring together workforce data, financial information, skills planning, headcount forecasting, and organisational modelling. This gives HR and business leaders a more connected view of their workforce and allows them to test different options before making major workforce decisions.
In simple terms, Workday helps organisations understand their current workforce, forecast future needs, model different scenarios, identify skills and headcount gaps, and turn approved workforce plans into HR actions.
The exact capabilities available can depend on the Workday products, configuration, and licences an organisation uses, so not every Workday customer will have the same workforce planning functionality.
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