Determining the ideal workforce size is a critical challenge for modern corporations. It demands a careful balance between maintaining productivity and controlling costs, while avoiding the dual pitfalls of human resources shortages and inefficient overstaffing. The following guidance offers a strategic path to identifying the optimal size for your organization.
How to Determine the Ideal Size of Workforce in Your Company?
First, Through Proactive Workforce Planning – via an internal professional Human Resources management that bases itself on this planning and collaborates effectively with external employment companies.
A long-term strategy can be determined based on three pillars: Who are you? Who do you want to be? And how do you get there?
- Assess the Present: Stand on your current capabilities, resources, needs, and pinpoint critical skill and administrative gaps.
- Define the Future: Create a clear vision and set strategic goals, outlining the key competencies required for success.
- Bridge the Gap: Build a plan detailing the strategies, investments, and changes needed to move from your current reality to your target state.
This framework provides a foundational overview. It is also essential to consider the emerging changes in technical, market, and economic variables, as well as skill requirements for some roles. This is to ensure a strategy that remains adaptable to the changes that will inevitably arise during implementation.
Furthermore, HR needs a clear action plan for two critical situations: First, how to manage a shrinking workforce with high turnover; second, how to control the financial strain of an oversized, overly costly workforce.
High Turnover Solutions – Addressing a high turnover rate requires a strategic focus on several core HR duties:
- Employee Experience: Work on the entire employee journey, from a competitive initial offer and effective onboarding to providing ongoing flexibility, career development paths, and extending support through to offboarding.
- Recognition and Appreciation: A system that values employee contributions, both materially and morally, is fundamental. The appreciation culture empowers employees, drives performance, fosters employee loyalty, and encourages innovation.
- Flexible Work Policies: Flexible HR policies, including options for remote work and adaptable schedules, are no longer perks but necessities. These policies significantly enhance work-life balance and job satisfaction, directly reducing turnover.
- Team and Environmental Cohesion: Management must actively cultivate a positive and inclusive work environment. The foundation of this environment is psychological safety, built on respect, trust, and transparent communication, which is paramount for retaining top talent.
Staff Surplus Solutions – Here is advice on reducing workforce:
Downsizing is justified only in two scenarios: first, if certain personnel are proven to cause long-term damage to the organization and its assets; or second, if an individual’s conduct is fundamentally harmful to team cohesion.
However, for cost reduction, we recommend pursuing alternative strategies such as partnering with an external manpower company, like SMASCO, to provide you with flexible manpower solutions, with seasonal or temporary contracts, to increase or decrease workforce without layoffs. Internal restructuring to move employees to roles with shortages. Also, outplacement to sister organizations that require these talents.
Second, Adopting Artificial Intelligence Techs for Workforce Planning and Analysis: What Superpowers Can AI Tools Provide in Human Resources Management and Workforce Planning?
1. Proactive Workforce Planning
AI-powered HR platforms analyze complex datasets, including sales forecasts, market trends, and historical turnover rates, in order to predict future talent needs with remarkable accuracy. This shifts the HR role from reactively filling vacancies to proactively building a prepared workforce, ensuring the right people are in the right roles at the right time.
2. Intelligent Talent Acquisition & Matching
AI recruitment tools automate the screening of vast applicant pools. By evaluating candidates based on skills, experience, and cultural fit, they dramatically reduce time-to-hire, minimize human bias, and significantly improve the precision of matching the best talent to open positions.
3. Strategic Career Development & Mobility
AI techs identify critical skill gaps across the organization and create targeted upskilling and reskilling programs. Furthermore, they can map personalized career paths for employees, recommend internal promotions, and suggest relevant training, fostering growth and increasing retention.
4. Data-Driven Decision Intelligence
AI techs provide HR leaders with real-time dashboards and predictive insights on performance, productivity, and workload distribution. This empowers data-led decisions on workforce optimization, strategic redeployment, and restructuring, enhancing overall agility, operational efficiency, and the ability to navigate market shifts.
What exactly are these AI tools and platforms that empower Human Resources management?
Establishments can obtain most of these features from some commonly used technologies in Saudi Arabia, supported by AI, such as: (SAP SuccessFactors) and (Oracle HCM Cloud), as well as some Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system applications that fully support Arabic, starting from the user interface to reports and even menus.
Furthermore, there are even greater superpowers these AI techs provide – (Predictive Analytics):
Which use Statistical Models and Machine Learning Algorithms to analyze historical data and predict future outcomes.
How to apply Predictive Analytics technology in Human Resources?
Through the Predictive Modeling of these AI tools, which requires Human Resources technology professionals to set them up for this modeling. It is built on the company’s data inputs, such as seasonal sales, turnover rate, and the company’s future projects, to give you back an output with the number of employees required in each department for reaching best productivity possible.
Third, Manpower Outsourcing as a Significant Strategy for Managing Workforce Shortage or Surplus – And the most important point here is not just choosing this strategy in itself, but also choosing a professional outsourcing partner:
This is not a new strategy for companies and projects in the Kingdom; rather, it is an established approach that organizations fundamentally rely upon, particularly those ambitious enterprises pursuing sustained growth, which frequently operate new projects.
However, the critical task remains selecting a true strategic partner within a labor market populated by manpower supply companies. Some are trustworthy and experienced enough to serve as genuine advisors on optimal workforce sizing, while others focus solely on profit maximization and expanding their recruitment operations.
Workforce Outsourcing Provides 3 Main Benefits to Your Company:
By selecting a trusted labor supply partner, your company gains significant advantages, including the following:
- This approach allows you to manage the challenges of workforce shortage or surplus more intelligently. This means that laying off permanent employees becomes unnecessary, and disguised unemployment can be avoided within your organization. You gain the flexibility to engage truly skilled and qualified labor for specific periods, whether under long-term or short-term contracts, ensuring tasks are performed effectively without the burden of maintaining a fixed oversized workforce.
- You also secure a partner who assumes the complete recruitment lifecycle on your behalf. This comprehensive service ranges from sourcing suitable candidates and conducting initial interviews to ensuring full compliance with Saudi labor regulations and documentation. Furthermore, it includes managing payroll, renewing essential work permits for specialized roles, and handling all end-of-service settlements, thereby relieving your internal team of extensive administrative burdens.
- Additionally, your access to skilled talent with precise specializations is greatly enhanced at the optimal time. Rather than dedicating substantial time and effort to searching for candidates in niche fields, your strategic manpower supply partner provides a direct pathway to a global pool of qualified professionals. This enables you to rapidly onboard skilled labor in the required numbers, streamlining the entire process of identifying and securing the right talent from around the world.
SMASCO is Your Ideal Solution for External Employment
Not only because SMASCO is the first registered manpower supply company in Saudi Arabia, but also because we have a record full of successes across various business sectors, with extensive experience in attracting skilled and professional labor in the specialties companies need to grow, expand, and achieve their anticipated goals.
Contact the team of the Saudi Manpower Solutions Company now, and request skilled labor in the specialties you need, along with sound advice on the best workforce size for your company.
Frequently Asked Questions
The best way is to combine workload analysis (to determine the number of hours required to complete tasks) and analysis forecasting future business volume. This requires collaboration between Human Resources management and managers of other departments, or consultation with a manpower solutions company specialized in providing you with skilled labor, like SMASCO.
Finding alternative solutions is the choice companies that value their human resources tend towards. This is an organizational awareness of the hidden long-term financial burdens policies like layoffs can cause due to decreased morale of remaining employees and damage to the establishment’s employment reputation. Resorting to alternative solutions preserves institutional knowledge and employee loyalty.
Better flexibility when increasing or decreasing workforce size according to operational changing requirements, saving time and effort for the internal Human Resources management, and access to diverse competencies and experiences that may not be available internally.
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