How to Leverage Data for More Influential Workforce Planning | Gartner

Although strategic workforce planning and talent management were already a growing priority for many organizations before the pandemic, the crisis has magnified their importance–particularly as it relates to understanding talent risk. Gartner defines a talent risk as the absence, shortage, or misalignment of human capital resources — people, skills, knowledge, and experience — necessary to deliver on strategic objectives and goals. And as HR leaders continue to help their organizations identify and mitigate talent risks, this article offers three steps for doing. 1) Define the talent risk catalog — build a catalog of 20-25 talent risks most likely to affect the business. 2) Use data to identify the biggest talent risks — evaluate the talent risk catalog to determine which are currently risks to strategy execution. 3) Communicate the biggest talent risks to stakeholders — share top talent risks with relevant stakeholders in a visually compelling way to drive action. Regarding Step 1 (defining the talent risk catalog), Figure 1 offers the most common talent risks to executing business strategy in Workforce Planning including a) Internal Mobility Risk – not offering enough career opportunities internally, leading high performers to leave the organization, b) Graduate Risk – not enough students graduating with critical skills to meet the organization’s needs. Several other ideas are discussed, including sample metrics to assess talent risks.