How to know if you’re planning effectively

Workforce planning means making sure you have the right people with the right skills to meet your organisational needs. We look at how to make sure you’re planning effectively.

When workforce planning, we recommend following a four-step process – analyse, plan, do, review.

We cover each of these stages in our guide to workforce planning, but it’s also important to note that workforce planning is a cyclical process. This means that workforce planning doesn’t have a beginning and an ending, it’s a continuous process of reviewing, refreshing and redefining.

The review stage of workforce planning is an important step in evaluating whether your workforce planning has been successful so that you can continue to implement an effective process, and to make improvements where needed.

So, how do you evaluate your workforce planning? Follow our steps below.

Results and impact

To evaluate the impact of your workforce planning there are key questions to consider so you can understand your results.

• Did the changes you implemented achieve the desired results?
• Did the new ways of working and new roles and skills help to meet your business plan priorities?
• What are the specific outcomes for your organisation?
• What are the specific outcomes for your workforce?
• What are the specific outcomes for the people who you support?

Key achievements and lessons learned

It’s important to consider what you want your key achievements to be right at the start of the planning process, and how you will measure these.

At each stage of the process you can gather evidence to identify your key achievements. This could be feedback from your team, the people you support, commissioners, and other professionals or other success measures such as improved retention, reduced sickness absence, improvement in consistency of care or quality of assessments.

At the review stage you should collate this evidence and ask yourself:

• what went well?
• what will you do differently next time?
• what did you learn?
• what did you achieve?
• what do the improvements look like?
• what have others said about the changes and benefits? What is seen, heard, felt and experienced?
• did the benefits justify the investment?

Report your findings

As part of your review, it’s important to communicate your insights and learnings with others. Think about how and with whom you’ll share your findings. This might include:

• your leadership team
• your wider workforce
• the people who you support and their families/carers.

Keeping people up-to-date with your progress and any challenges and setbacks will enable you to gain people’s trust and keep them feeling part of the process. Use different formats and ways to communicate to ensure you meet everyone’s needs.

Celebrate success

If your planning has helped you to achieve your goals, consider how you’ll celebrate this success. This could include:

• rewarding staff for their achievements
• nominating individuals, the team or organisation for local or national sector awards
• holding your own celebrations.

Rethink, refresh and redefine

The most important thing to remember about workforce planning is that it’s an ongoing process. Take what you’ve achieved and learned and return to the analyse stage of the workforce planning process to rethink, refresh and redefine your plans. Ask yourself what you will do next to sustain improvements.

You can use our template below to help you with each part of this evaluation process.

Download the review and evaluation template.

Find out more about workforce planning with our #PlanningForSuccess spotlight.

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