Workforce Planning: A Beginner's Guide to Strategic Success
Once upon a time in an Australian People Analytics and Planning Consultancy, a CEO said “If you can afford to advertise and pray, then don’t bother with strategic workforce planning”. That CEO was Peter Howes, of Infohrm. While amusing at the time, it’s a poignant thought today. I am often reminded of the sentiment, as I speak with HR and business leaders about their own workforce planning efforts.
Future-Proof Your Workforce
It seems that in today’s world, a prayer doesn’t go quite far enough to get the right people, with the right skills, at the right time, in the right place and at the right cost for many companies. Joining Insight222 in November of 2023, I was privileged to both co-host The Workforce Planning Institute SWP Conference in London, and spend quite a bit of time speaking with clients about their approach to strategic (and other) workforce planning, as many of them approached planning season with their leadership teams. For leaders starting out on the workforce planning journey, there are many practitioners in the space to learn from, many of them on stage at said conference. Here’s my round up of tips and tricks for new players from some industry experts.
9 Dimensions to Master Strategic Workforce Planning
It's safe to say that there’s no single way to get started with workforce planning. However, there are consistent themes that you need to think about. At Insight222, we like to think of them as the 9 Dimensions for Excellence in Strategic Workforce Planning. In order to be successful in strategic workforce planning, you need to consider each of the decision points that the model presents in terms of getting the foundations right, ensuring your resources are fit for purpose and that you deliver value out of the cycle for the business and employees.
Workforce Planning Essentials
Jonas Ottiger of ICRC tells a tale of decision making to build the organisation’s workforce planning muscle.
Creating the process - Tell or Ask?
In an organisation that is disaggregated and collaborative, deployment by “command and control” may not be as effective as co-creation.
Delivery model - Centralise or Distribute?
Understanding and mirroring the operating of the organisation is critical to workforce planning success. Without intimacy with the business leaders involved, getting to meaningful outcomes is difficult.
Forecasting Supply & Demand – Mind or Math
As an analytical leader, it’s easy to slip into quantitative modelling to understand the supply, demand and consequent gaps in the workforce. Not every stakeholder in strategic workforce planning will be as enthusiastic about statistics!
Finding Data – Challenge or Opportunity
You will never have perfect data, so there’s not a good reason to not start being opportunistic with the data that you have. It’s important to understand the value you seek, in order to ensure that the critical data in the process is of sufficient data to create confidence in decision making.
Technology – Off the Shelf or Custom
As with all tech, you can choose to move your technology solution to meet exactly your organisation and process, or you can move your organisation and process to meet an off the shelf solution. It’s critically important that you’re clear about which way you will move.
Whether it’s 4 dimensions, or 9 – these are incredibly important decisions to make as you create the case for workforce planning. Ensuring that the process works in and for your business, that the right people are involved, and in such a way that they are sufficiently comfortable with the outcomes to set and execute strategy from them, that you have the data to lead the process with evidence, be that data about jobs, people or skills, and that you’ve got the right tools for the job are critical inflection points to fuel your workforce planning success.
Building Skills-Based Workforce Planning
Gergo Safar of BT speaks of a multi-year journey to build a skills based workforce planning framework, and the enablers and skills that his team needed to get there.
The enablers:
A well-articulated vision.
A plan for how to make skills meaningful in the business and the workforce.
Methodology.
Common Planning Language.
Success Measures.
Tools.
Building from a strong foundation, it’s interesting to learn that tool selection comes last on that list, and is driven based on decisions made across the rest of the enablers. A tool is only as useful as the outcomes that the people who use it create!
Like many leaders building a strategic workforce planning capability for their organisation, Emanuele Poletti of Campari tells a story of purpose aligned development as the way to make workforce planning work. With an ambition to anticipate the broad talent needs of the organisation, workforce planning is a critical enabler of business execution. Business leaders engage when it is clear that strategic workforce planning can inform talent sourcing strategies, embed key strategic drivers (like D&I) in long term talent decisions, align talent locations with the corporate strategy, orient the HR agenda to support the execution of the business plans, as well as measure progress against workforce indicators of business success. Understanding and articulating that this is the purpose of strategic workforce planning is what buys you your licence to operate.
Start Now, Embrace Data & Impact
A message that I took from the SWP Conference in November last year was to be bold. Getting started with workforce planning is just that – making a start. Understand your business strategy and get your hands on the data that tells you about how the workforce will affect it. Not all data is quantitative, so starting qualitatively in discussion with stakeholders knowledgeable about how their workforce affects their outcome counts! Being clear on why you’re doing workforce planning, and how you and your stakeholders will know you’ve been effective is important, so ensuring that you’re able to point to the impact of what leaders do with the plan – being it in executing a build, buy borrow etc strategy, or in targeted workforce interventions to change the gap is important.
Beyond all, and as parting words – It’s so important to remember that a workforce plan is just that. A plan. Not a crystal ball. We are strategic planners, not clairvoyants. Plans change. In the immortal words of John Maynard Keynes…. “It's better to be roughly right than precisely wrong”, and that’s what workforce planning enables.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jordan Pettman
Jordan joined Insight222 in 2023 to be directly involved with client engagements and the Insight222 People Analytics Program®. With degrees in psychology and business, Jordan has worked in HR for two decades. Over 15 of those years have been dedicated to the field of people analytics. He has been based in Australia, Switzerland, and UK, with experience as an external consultant and in internal functions.
Jordan has seven years’ experience leading people analytics practices globally with Nestlé and London Stock Exchange Group, with the full scope of analytics responsibilities: data governance, reporting and business intelligence, advanced analytics, workforce planning and strategy, organisation design and employee listening. When not working, Jordan enjoys the theatre in London’s West End with his husband, and spending time with his Chocolate Labrador. Jordan is also pursuing an MSc in Career Coaching at University of London.
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