Workforce Analysis

What Is Workforce Analysis?

Workforce analysis is the examination of a company’s employee and contractor base, i.e. its workforce, to identify areas of strength and weakness. In essence, it is a process that is used to evaluate how a company’s workforce is performing and see if there’s anything that can be done to improve.

Furthermore, it is also used as a strategic analysis tool to determine how the company should continue to approach its retention, management, and recruitment activities. Overall, a workforce analysis is conducted to ensure that each employee is bringing in a good ROI, that employee succession is smooth, and that staffing levels are adequate and reasonable.

What Is the Importance of Workforce Planning?

Workforce planning is important because it helps you ensure that you always have the right number of staff on hand. It prevents you from being understaffed and working below maximum efficiency and being overstaffed and paying too much on employee salaries.

Furthermore, it also helps you set up the right recruitment and retention policies so you can make sure that you’re hiring people with the right skills and experience. It also helps with employee succession.

How Do You Conduct a Workforce Analysis?

In brief, a workforce analysis can be conducted by collecting and mapping out employee data. The main goal here is to simply get a bird’s-eye view of what your workforce looks like by categorizing employees into different job groupings.

From there, you can start assessing each group’s current performance as well as their potential performance as you perceive it. You can then predict and plan for future scenarios and figure out how issues can be planned for and solved.

How Do You Get the Most Out of Your Workforce Analysis?

When done well, a workforce analysis can help employers reduce recruitment costs, improve retention rates, and better manage employees. For example, employers could decide to look for specific keywords in resumes that have tended to be linked to successful hires, devise new ways of tracking productivity, and provide training to employees based on skill gaps that they identified during the analysis.

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