What is workforce planning and why is it important?

Do you know what workforce planning really means? We explain what workforce planning is, and how it will support your organisation to succeed.

What does workforce planning mean?

For care providers workforce planning means making sure that you have the necessary people in your team to meet your business objectives now and in the future.

This means that you have a workforce of the right size with the right attitudes, values, behaviours, and skills doing the right thing, in the right places within the available budget.

The seven rights of workforce planning

One simple way to summarise what needs to be considered as part of your workforce planning is to remember ‘The seven rights of workforce planning’. These are the seven elements you need to ensure that you have in place so that your organisation can run effectively now and is prepared for the future.

Right people: ensure you have people with the right values, attitudes, and behaviours to meet the needs of the people who draw on care and support services.​

Right culture: ensure you have an environment in which staff feel valued, safe, and confident to raise questions, express concerns, talk about their experiences and make suggestions for service improvement.​

Right size: ensure you have the right number of people in the right roles spending the right amount of time to deliver effective care and support. ​

Right shape: ensure you have the right balance between different types and levels of roles, and between experienced staff and new starters. ​

Right place: ensure the right staff resources are available in the right location to meet needs​.

Right capability: ensure that staff have the skills and competencies needed to deliver the care and support required​.

Right cost: think about value for money.

Why workforce plan?

Workforce planning is important for providers of all sizes, and people who employ their own care support.

Adult social care is constantly changing and is impacted by external factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic, new technology, and political changes, so it’s important for organisations to plan ahead to ensure they have the workforce they need to keep pace with changing requirements and ways of working.

It’s also important to analyse your own workforce and how it may change; for example, are a high portion of your staff likely to retire within the next 10 years? If so, what plans do you have in place for successors to take over their role?

Workforce planning covers a large range of activity for the short and long-term, from managing safe staffing levels, to recruitment and retention, keeping staff updated with the skills required to meet future needs, and developing existing staff to fill new roles in the future.

Data from our ‘State of the adult social care sector and workforce in England’ report highlights the importance of planning for the future right now. We continue to see capacity issues facing the sector, with vacancy rates at their highest on record while the number of roles with a person working in them has fallen. Estimates also show us that we’ll need an extra 480,000 people working in social care by 2035 to keep pace with demand, and to replace the 28% of the workforce aged 55 or over who may retire in the next 10 years.

That’s why it’s so important to think not only about how to boost short-term capacity but how to sustain your workforce in the future to meet the needs of people drawing on care and support.

Examples of workforce planning

It’s likely that you’re already doing many elements of workforce planning day-in-day-out, though you might not refer to it by that phrase. Examples of this could range from creating your weekly rotas to preparing your winter contingency plans and introducing new roles to meet demand.

Here are some examples of ways you might already be workforce planning, whether you’re a registered manager, deputy manager, or individual employer.

• Organising staff rotas.
• Keeping a record of staff training and making sure to fill any gaps.
• Discussing learning, development and wellbeing needs with staff.
• Analysing your recruitment process to attract different people.
• Leading staff meetings on ideas for improvement.
• Using feedback from the people you support to provide learning sessions for your team.

Support for workforce planning

Workforce planning can be broken down into four stages – analyse, plan, do, review.

We have a ‘Practical approaches to operational workforce planning’ guide which can take you through each stage.

The guide features useful hints and tips with recognised business tools and templates to take you through a practical approach to operational workforce planning. It includes tasks to help you to pull together a clear picture of what your organisation looks like now so you can think about and plan for the future.

We also have nine templates which you can complete to create your own workforce plan. This can be either informal notes or a more formal plan depending on your organisation’s requirements.

Find out more about workforce planning and how to get started or build on what you’re already doing with our #PlanningForSuccess spotlight.

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