Workforce Planning is Your 2026 Strategy
- Brittney Simpson
- Jan 6
- 6 min read
Many CEOs see workforce planning as just an HR responsibility.But that’s not the case.
In reality, it’s the most important strategy you have.
You may have a strong product roadmap, big sales goals, and an impressive five-year vision. But if you aren’t sure who will do the work, when you’ll need them, or what you’ll do if someone leaves, your strategy isn’t complete. It’s more of a wish list.
I’ve watched many founders go through this over the past year. They’re smart, run good companies, and genuinely believe they’re being strategic. Their goals, plans, and board presentations all look impressive.
And then someone quits.
Or they land a big contract and realize they can’t deliver it.
Or they spend six months trying to hire for a role that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
Then the strategy falls apart, because it was never linked to the people needed to make it work.
This isn’t just a people problem.It’s a planning problem.
What workforce planning actually is
Forget what you think you know about workforce planning for a moment. Put aside the spreadsheets, org charts, and HR dashboards.
At its heart, workforce planning comes down to one question:
What do we need people to do, and do we have the right people for those tasks?
That’s it.
But for most founders and CEOs, this question is harder to answer than it seems.
Often, workforce decisions are made quickly and under pressure, without time to see the bigger picture. You’re constantly reacting to turnover, sudden growth, team members feeling overwhelmed, or realizing you need a skill that’s missing.
You tend to:
Hire only when it’s urgent
Promote someone because they deserve it or because you’re out of options
Reorganize only after things have already broken down
That’s not planning.That’s managing crises with a big budget.
True workforce planning is about making thoughtful decisions before a crisis happens.
It means looking at your goals for the year and asking:
Do we have enough people?
Do we have the right people?
Are they in the right roles doing the right work?
What happens if someone leaves?
Where are we going to hit capacity constraints?
What skills will we need that we don’t have today?
And most importantly, it means actually making decisions based on those answers—something many people skip.
Why this matters more in 2026 than it did last year
There’s less room for mistakes.
If you run a small or mid-size company, you already know this. Talent is expensive.
Competition for good people is tough. Training takes longer than expected. Bad hires cost more than you can afford.
You can’t afford to just improvise anymore.
This isn’t about being negative about the economy. It’s about the reality of running a business. Your company is only as strong as the people doing the work. If you don’t plan for that, you’re leaving success to chance.
Here’s what I notice with founders who don’t treat workforce planning as a key strategy:
They’re chronically understaffed—not because they can’t afford to hire, but because they don’t realize they need to hire until someone is already burned out or a project is already late.
They depend too much on a few key people. One person often holds all the knowledge or is the only one who can do a certain job. If that person leaves or even takes a vacation, everything slows down or stops.
They hire reactively. They post a job, hope for the best, settle for someone who’s “good enough,” and then spend the next year working around that person’s weaknesses.
They’re stuck just getting things done. The founder is still doing the work instead of leading, because there’s no plan to shift responsibilities or build a team that can operate without them.
Does this sound familiar?
This isn’t really a people problem.It’s a strategy problem that only looks like a people problem.
What workforce planning looks like in practice
Here’s a real example.
Last year, I worked with a founder at a small professional services firm of about 30 people. The company was growing quickly, profitable, and doing good work. But the founder was exhausted—constantly putting out fires, scrambling to cover client work, and worried about whether the team could handle the next project.
When we mapped out the workforce, the issue was clear immediately.
He had:
Three senior people already at capacity
Five junior people who weren’t fully utilized because no one had time to train them
He was planning to hire two more senior people to relieve pressure.
That hire would have created more problems.
Not because the senior hires wouldn’t have been good, but because the real issue was structural. There was no clear understanding of who should be doing which work and no system for developing junior staff.
So we didn’t hire anyone for three months.
Instead, we:
Clarified who owned which client relationships
Created a structured training plan so junior people could take on more work
Identified which tasks could be delegated and which actually required senior expertise
Built in capacity buffers so people weren’t operating at 110%
Six months later, the team was running smoothly. Client work was getting done, junior staff were stepping into bigger roles, and the founder was no longer overwhelmed.
Then we made a hire—but this time it was strategic. The role actually moved the business forward instead of just filling a gap.
That’s workforce planning.
It’s not an HR task.It’s a strategic decision about building a team that can bring your vision to life.
How to start
You don’t need fancy tools or complicated models. You need better questions.
Look at your goals for 2026. Whatever you’re aiming for—revenue targets, product launches, market expansion, operational improvements—ask:
Who needs to do this work?
Not in theory.In practice.With actual names.
Then:
Identify your gaps. Where don’t you have enough people? Where don’t you have the right skills? Where are you over-reliant on one person?
Make a decision. Will you hire, train, reorganize, outsource, or stop doing certain work altogether?
Include that decision in your operating plan.
Don’t treat this as an HR task to handle later. Make it part of how you run the business.
Here’s the truth:
Your workforce is your business.
The people doing the work, the structure they work in, and the clarity they have about their roles aren’t just supporting the strategy.
They are the strategy.
The hard part
The hardest part of workforce planning isn’t the analysis.
It’s honesty.
It’s being honest about whether you really have the team you need, whether people are in the right roles, and what you can realistically accomplish with the people you have.
Most founders avoid these conversations because they’re uncomfortable. They can mean admitting you made a bad hire, that someone you like isn’t performing, or that you’ve ignored a structural issue because fixing it feels overwhelming.
But avoiding the conversation doesn’t make the problem disappear.It just makes it more expensive.
Workforce planning forces you to face reality and make decisions based on facts, not hope.
It’s not comfortable.But it’s what separates companies with real strategy from those operating on the edge of chaos.
What happens if you don’t do this
You’ll survive. Most companies do.
But you’ll spend the year reacting instead of leading. You’ll make rushed decisions you wouldn’t make with clarity. You’ll risk burnout by being understaffed or misaligned. You’ll miss opportunities because you don’t have the capacity to follow through.
At the end of 2026, you may look back and wonder why you missed your goals—when the answer is obvious.
You didn’t plan for the people you needed to reach them.
Here’s the opportunity
If you treat workforce planning as your main strategy in 2026—not as an HR task, but as a core business decision—you gain something most competitors don’t:
Clarity about what you’re building and who’s building it.
That clarity brings stability.It builds capacity.It gives your team confidence that you know where you’re going and how you’ll get there.
It also gives you space to lead instead of constantly scrambling.
That’s what separates founders who run their companies from those who are run by them.
The real question isn’t whether you need workforce planning.
It’s whether you’re willing to treat it as the strategy it truly is.
Visit us at savvyhrpartner.com and follow us on social media @savvyhrpartner for expert tips, resources, and solutions to support your business and your people. Let’s bring savvy thinking to your people strategy!
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