Global businesses need alternatives to sticky workforce planning models

Abstract

The fluidity and responsiveness of global business planning has outstripped the adaptive capacity of traditional workforce planning models. This separation leads to unrealistic forecasts and missed business outcomes. This article examines ways that the stickiness of workforce planning models can be reduced. Specifically, workforce planners are challenged to track and assess differences in employee cohorts or alternative work forces across countries, multiple sub-optimal alternatives outside the traditional boundaries of the firm, and to incorporate shocks associated with innovation peaks such as those associated with Web 2.0 technologies.