Optimizing Strategic Workforce Planning

Your Partner for Effective Workforce Management

Rethinking Strategic Workforce Planning – Ensuring Performance, Shaping the Future

The future viability of banks is increasingly becoming a personnel issue.

While revenues, costs, and risks in banks and savings banks are intensively managed, personnel often remains the most inadequately planned resource. Demographic change, skilled labor shortages, increasing regulatory requirements, and artificial intelligence are fundamentally altering capacities, role profiles, and competency requirements.

The central management question is no longer: How many employes do we need? But: Which competencies and capacities will keep us efficient and future-proof?

Strategic workforce planning is thus evolving from a classic HR topic to a central control discipline for performance, transformation, and sustainable business success.

With our approach, we connect:

- data-based transparency about personnel structures and capacities
- robust personnel demand and scenario forecasts
- transparent gap analyzes between actual and target consistent action planning and implementation control

This way, personnel risks become visible early, critical competencies are specifically secured, and transformations can be implemented sustainably.

Strategic personnel planning requires more than personnel processes

Many institutes have established processes for recruiting, personnel development, and succession planning. Nevertheless, there is often a lack of transparency regarding the impact of demographics, turnover, digitalization, and artificial intelligence on the future performance of the institute.

The challenge is not to fill open positions reactively. Crucial is to recognize early:

where future capacity bottlenecks will arise which competencies will be needed in the future which areas are particularly affected which risks threaten strategic initiatives
which measures need to be initiated today

Strategic workforce planning makes personnel an actively manageable factor – and creates the foundation to specifically secure future performance capabilities.

The six basics of successful workforce management

• Staff becomes the limiting factor: The availability of staff is increasingly becoming the limiting factor for growth and transformation.
• Demographics are predictable: Retirement waves and skilled labor shortages are predictable – and thus manageable.
• Competencies ensure competitiveness: What matters is not the number of employes, but the availability of critical skills.
• AI changes personnel needs: New technologies alter job profiles, role models, and skill requirements.
• Risks arise across departments: Bottlenecks rarely occur in isolation – but rather between functions, roles, and clusters of competencies.
• Control beats planning: Impact is not achieved thru analyzes, but thru consistent decisions and actions.

FROM TRANSPARENCY TO ACTIVE CONTROL

Successful institutions manage personnel with the same consistency as costs, revenues, or risks. Our approach creates the necessary transparency to identify and effectively manage future capacity and competency risks at an early stage.

Our approach model in four phases

HR Analytics as the Foundation for Effective Management

Well-informed HR decisions require reliable data.

Many organizations have extensive HR data—but make only limited use of it to actively manage their workforce. As a result, critical trends often go unnoticed until bottlenecks become apparent.

Using the Horn & Company HR Analytics Dashboard, we quickly consolidate existing HR data into a consistent basis for management and decision-making. 

The dashboard provides transparency regarding the key drivers of future performance:

• Demographics: Age structure, retirement waves, and succession needs
• Turnover: Departure patterns, tenure, and high-risk areas
• Workforce Capacity: MAK forecasts and workforce trends over various time horizons
• Competency Clusters: Analysis of critical functions and role profiles
• Scenarios: Simulation of strategic developments and the impact of measures
• Management Reporting: Executive-level visualizations for management and decision-making processes

In this way, strategic workforce planning transforms from a reactive administrative task into a data-driven management tool.

STRATEGIC WORKFORCE PLANNING IN THE AGE OF AI

Artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing job descriptions, capacity needs, and skill requirements. Above all, AI is transforming role profiles, skill requirements, and capacity needs. It is shifting tasks, creating opportunities for efficiency gains, and increasing the demand for analytical, technological, and managerial skills. 

This presents a two fold challenge for banks and savings banks:  

• Identify future bottlenecks early on and secure critical skills in a timely manner
• leverage the potential of digitalization and AI in a targeted manner to utilize capacity more efficiently. 

Strategic workforce planning creates the transparency needed to actively manage these changes and ensure the institution’s future performance.

ENSURING LONG-TERM PERFORMANCE

Strategic workforce planning lays the foundation for identifying workforce risks early on, building critical competencies in a targeted manner, and ensuring sustainable transformation.

Together, we create the transparency and control necessary to ensure sustained performance, transformation, and future viability.

Let’s discuss which risks, opportunities, and areas for action can already be identified at your institution today.

OUR EXPERTS IN STRATEGIC WORKFORCE PLANNING

Dr. Martin Hesse

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Dr. Ludwig Lütkes

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Nicolas Dahm, LL.M.

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