Flexible Working- a Crucial Addition to Workforce Planning

Workforce planning refers to the process of ensuring that the right people with the desired skills and competencies are available at the right time to take care of the organizations requirements. Although it is a crucial decision for an organization, yet it is sometimes taken very lightly by them. The result is that the company is not able to achieve it long term goals due to a dearth of talent in its human resource.

The first step in planning for the future workforce requirements of a company is the needs analysis. In this step, the organization needs to identify its future human resource requirements and match those requirements with the present skills and competencies of its employees. If any discrepancies are found, then a proper training plan should be prepared to fill up that gap in the skill levels of the employees. All this needs to be done keeping in mind the goals and objectives of the organization and it should be kept as the framework for all the policies and decisions taken by the organization.

One of the recent additions in the process of workforce planning has been the need to consider the occupational health of employees while planning for the future. Occupational health refers to the working condition which an employee has to endure, which includes physical as well as mental and social conditions. If an employee is unable to strike a balance between his personal and professional life and feels that his professional life is adversely affecting him, then his occupational health is said to be adversely affected as well.

Flexible working is an essential element of occupational health, which enables employees to work as per their convenience without following a rigid time and location regime. Some examples of flexi work includes annualized hours, telecommuting, job sharing, flexi time, etc The attrition rate these days has increased tremendously and it is becoming increasingly difficult for organizations to retain the right talent. Flexible working is helpful in this regard because it allows the employees to strike a balance between their professional and personal life, thus enabling them to enjoy the benefits of both.

Thus we can see that the concept of occupational health plays a crucial role in retaining the right talent in an organization and helps in the process of workforce planning. It is in the interest of an organization to adopt measures such as annualized hours, flexi time, and job sharing, etc to improve the workforce planning process and achieve the long term goal of the organization.

The authoress is an experienced Content writer and publisher for Business Development. Visit at www.softworks-workforce.com/ to know more about Workforce planning, skills and competencies and annualized hours.