Is it time to break workforce planning out of its silo?

Expanding workforce planning horizontally

Research from the American Productivity and Quality Center suggests that 49% of strategic workforce plans are either designed to be top-down or are not integrated across divisions and regions within the enterprise.¹ But shifting to a model that extends horizontally means fostering collaboration across multiple areas.

• Strategy and operations, where business unit leaders play a key role in assessing talent supply against projected demand, using operational plans and financial forecasts to help ensure the right capabilities are available at the right time, and workforce planning informs and supports strategic shifts
• Human capital management (including HR, procurement, and more), to drive execution through reskilling, hiring, and sourcing external workers
• Financial performance management, to model and consider impact on costs and finances. Scenarios, for example, can be integrated into profit-and-loss forecasting, and cost modelling of the workforce can be integrated into financial planning.
• Technology, recognizing that work increasingly involves AI, either by working independently or alongside people

This integrated approach helps ensure workforce planning is connected, agile, and aligned with the broader business ecosystem. Some leading organizations are paving the way in creating horizontal synergies, illustrating how workforce planning can be expanded to improve human and business outcomes.

Network Rail, for example, which operates Britain’s railway structure, expanded workforce planning horizontally to include multiple functional areas when it needed to solve challenges in attracting and developing train signalers. The fact that it was taking 12 months to recruit and train signalers, combined with high turnover rates, was creating serious talent gaps. The organization began diagnosing its issues by integrating multiple qualitative and quantitative data sources, involving managers and signalers in the process. It then established a cross-disciplinary team—one with representatives from HR, operations, finance, training, and local and national trade unions—to develop a workforce planning approach that better anticipated talent requirements. The result was a 50% drop in the end-to-end time required to attract, recruit, assess, and train new signalers. Further, the company expects the reduction in turnaround time to minimize the need to pay “premium hours” to cover gaps, generating anticipated savings of £1.2 million over three years.²

When one biotech company, coming out of the pandemic, realized that it needed to reduce its general and administrative expenses, a strategic workforce planning team deployed an app that allowed a wide range of stakeholder groups across the organization to systematically understand underlying workforce planning issues. The app prioritized the organization’s talent during a period of headcount control through process integration, role clarity, training, and targeted communications. Ultimately, this collaborative, tech-forward approach to workforce planning saved the organization around US$94 million.³

Although finance, HR, and business strategy and operations are the most common sides of a three-legged stool when it comes to strategic workforce planning, a fourth new vital partner is increasingly coming into play: information technology.

Consider Salesforce, which has been working to embed AI in its customer-focused mission for nearly a decade. The company has expanded those efforts to help its own workforce harness AI’s power. With 74% of its employees expressing confidence in using AI tools for productivity, the company is demonstrating how the technology can heighten the value its teams deliver to customers.

Seeing the information technology function and business leaders spending a great deal of time manually trying to figure out the impact of AI through spreadsheets and frameworks, the company leveraged an AI-powered tool to quickly evaluate the technology’s effects on various roles and tasks; identify areas of potential disruption; and develop strategies to enhance productivity, manage costs, and foster innovation. It also helped develop scenarios to optimize workforce structure, aligning talent strategies with AI integration to support growth and innovation. At the Unleash Conference, Ruth Hickin, vice president of workforce innovation and transformation at Salesforce, said, “We showed them the data and they were blown away by the insights. We can say, ‘This is what’s possible now, and not possible now.’”

According to Hickin, “Business leaders will say: We are concerned about what will happen to my people in the wake of AI. And now we can give them options, like reskilling, redeploying them to existing or altogether new jobs, and more. At Salesforce, we’re working cross-functionally to provide an end-to-end package of how we support our businesses.”⁴

Driven in large part by its need to rethink workforce planning in light of the growing capabilities of AI, Moderna likewise made waves when it merged its tech and HR functions in 2025, creating the new role of chief people and digital technology officer. One of the top priorities of this new role is redesigning teams across the company with an optimal mix of humans and technology.⁵

Expanding workforce planning vertically

The future of workforce planning isn’t just about it expanding horizontally, however. It’s also about expanding vertically in a way that democratizes workforce planning. This creates a fairer, more collaborative and data-driven approach that empowers a broader range of leaders and employees to participate in not only shaping the future of the organization, but also in making decisions about how to resource work on the ground informed by data, insights, and future workforce plans.

Democratized workforce planning is a practice that gives managers and workers direct access to data and analytics to help them make decisions about the workforce. While top-down workforce planning led by a centralized team isn’t going away, organizations are increasingly adding bottom-up practices to increase agility and relevance. Enabling this is augmented analytics that integrates natural language processing, allowing anyone in the organization to query the analytics platform in plain English, making valuable data insights accessible without requiring specialized skills. For example, to democratize workforce planning and share insights and data more broadly at Roche, the organization is expanding beyond traditional dashboards. The organization offers an open database that can be used by anyone in the company to generate their own insights from the sourced data. The company is exploring how to use agentic AI to make the queries easier without requiring technical expertise for someone to obtain the information they need. Leaders are also exploring other potential use cases of agentic AI to both embed the data in the flow of work and provide greater context for the data.⁶

In another example of making workforce data accessible, Tanya Moore, senior managing consultant at IBM, explained that while leading the career and skills function at IBM, she recognized that they did a good job communicating to workers that they needed to continually grow their skills to keep pace with changes in technology. But she also saw the need to improve how clearly they shared which roles and skills were most critical for IBM’s and its clients’ future success, as she describes in the book Strategic Workforce Planning: “We started by sharing a list of roles and skills that were growing in demand. Sharing this data alone was highly impactful,” she said. “Over time, we shared additional information, linking the list of roles and skills to available training offerings and open positions. Sharing this information resulted in a significant increase in the number of employees who sought out in-demand skill-building opportunities.”⁷

Similarly, one leader at a global pharmaceutical company describes the organization’s vision for a new manager’s tool integrated with collaboration technology. This tool would allow managers to easily create new teams or projects by selecting a “create new body of work or resource” option. It would then display visual insights showing how to staff the work based on needed skills, whether through internal or external hires. Dashboards would give managers a clear view of current workloads and opportunities to optimize, highlighting where specific talent pools can be accessed. Their decisions would be guided by factors like skill availability, cost, and future skill demand trends over the next three years.

“This kind of talent intelligence will help us execute the workforce planning vision of whether to build, buy, or borrow skills,” he said. For example, based on an understanding of the availability of certain skills in the external market, managers could fill an open position with a freelancer to respond to an urgent business need or expand searches to different locations in the face of high-cost or hard-to-find talent.⁸

Consider also Google’s HR function (known as “people operations”), which extended workforce planning both horizontally and vertically. The organization saw an opportunity to provide more input into plans and decisions, informing what skills, capabilities, and numbers of people would be needed for the future. HR works closely with the people analytics team to help ensure people decisions are backed by robust data and analysis, with input from multiple functions.

But Google didn’t stop at horizontal expansion of workforce planning; they engaged in vertical expansion as well. With help from the people analytics team, Google provides tools like dashboards that draw on a wide array of data, including employee surveys and workforce planning projections, to help hiring managers make data-informed decisions about resourcing work close to the ground. Managers are provided information, for example, regarding the performance differential between an exceptional technologist and an average one, and predictive models and “what if” scenarios help forecast people problems and opportunities.⁹

Another way organizations are democratizing workforce planning is by establishing new roles dedicated to guiding resource allocation. Some organizations we interviewed are considering roles such as workforce strategists or curators to help allocate the right resources to the work, all informed by workforce plans. As a manager sets up a project and sees various options for sourcing the work—internal talent sourced through a talent marketplace, external contingent workers, hiring full-time employees, or AI—they can call on the workforce strategist to help them chart the best path forward. For some organizations, these strategists are talent acquisition professionals who are being retrained; for others, the role is a new one bringing together talent management, talent acquisition, workforce planning, and procurement disciplines.

In a Bersin survey of around 130 HR executives, only 32% of talent acquisition professionals said they are actively involved in workforce planning processes.¹⁰ Historically, talent acquisition teams were mostly operational, tasked with filling requisitions as needs arose. Legacy technology that offered limited data and insights reinforced this role. But now, these teams can feed workforce planning teams real-time insights into on-the-ground trends when sourcing talent, as well as advise managers on how to fill work needs as they arise based on workforce plans.

Not only can talent acquisition professionals benefit from more democratized workforce planning data as important users, but other HR professionals—from learning and development to career development to promotions—can also benefit from it. And workers can too: Having clarity about an organization’s future needs can help them develop the skills and experiences needed to stay relevant and employable in an ever-changing world.

Moving from silos to synergies

To move beyond isolated efforts and truly unlock the power of workforce planning as a competitive advantage, organizations can consider these practical strategies that break down silos, create synergies across teams, and make the planning process more inclusive and accessible to all stakeholders.

• Make sure workforce planning functions are speaking the same language. If different workers at different levels from different functions are going to come together and solve the same problem, it will be important for them to speak the same language. When one large global retailer tried to solicit input from across the business without standardizing its definitions and terminology, the result was a haphazard process that occurred across a series of isolated pockets.¹¹ Data sources and definitions should be clean and consistent. The more workforce planning expands across functions, the more important standardizing language will become. When working cross-functionally, for example, strategic workforce planners should strive to align financial metrics with people metrics and agree jointly on a set of actions and accountabilities for outcomes.
• Use intuitive technology to help people make decisions based on data. Effectively sharing data and insights is one key to successful democratization of workforce planning. Organizations extending workforce planning vertically can provide support in the form of augmented analytics platforms that help ensure data is not only accessible but also understandable through streamlined, intuitive interfaces. Many managers won’t have a background in people analytics, and they shouldn’t need one to support their decisions with data.
• Provide guard rails and context. Most workers aren’t analytics professionals. Dropping them into an ocean of data is a quick way to get them to sink, not swim. When giving more workers access to data, provide them with the tools to use it effectively and responsibly. Train them to understand what’s relevant and what’s not, and set up dashboards that prevent them from having to dig on their own. Providing streamlined access to necessary insights that inform workforce decisions can help avoid the pitfalls of analysis paralysis.

Talent has become a key differentiator, and the way organizations deploy and develop it often impacts an organization’s long-term success. Reimagined to expand across horizontal and vertical boundaries, workforce planning can shift from a back-office exercise to a competitive edge, aligning talent to business needs and enabling faster, better decisions to drive organizational agility.

The organizations already embracing these horizontal and vertical expansions are demonstrating what’s possible when workforce planning is no longer an afterthought, but a dynamic capability that connects people, data, and strategy in new ways. For leaders, the question is not whether workforce planning can adapt, but how quickly they can shift from silos to synergies—and capture the advantage of a workforce strategy built for the future of work.