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Strategic workforce planning (SWP) is a priority for many organizations, yet SWP practitioners often struggle to implement SWP in their firms. According to a Boston Consulting Group (BCG) study of 32 HR practices, SWP is among the top three practices with the most significant gaps between the importance organizations place on the capability and their ability to deliver it effectively. At the same time, HR Teams are increasingly encouraged to leverage data to inform their talent and workforce strategies, including SWP. This 16-page Gartner reference provides three steps for how HR Leaders and their teams can effectively use data to assess talent risks to business strategy and use the findings to guide SWP: 1) Build a catalog of talent risks most likely to affect the business. 2) Evaluate the talent risk catalog to determine which are currently risks to strategy execution. 3) Share top talent risks with relevant stakeholders in a visually compelling way to drive action. Table 1 on page 5 shows 11 of the most common talent risks to executing business strategy in SWP. For example, Development Risk is when not enough internal talent is developing critical skills to meet the organization’s needs. Pipeline Risk refers to not having enough engaged talent in the recruitment pipeline to meet critical skills needs. Table 2 on page 7 shows the top metrics to use as key risk indicators for each of the 11 most common talent risks. The reference provides examples for communicating talent risks to stakeholders.
