McKinsey point out some techniques and traps for scenario planning this quarter. Scenario planning is a vital technique in workforce planning, one that all workforce planners should get comfortable with…and this article will help you see some of the benefits and traps. A must read!
I keep hearing people say that “A roles need A players”. What a load of piffle. Critical, pivotal or A roles may be performed by B players, or even C players – depending entirely on what the role is. Think, for example, about those famed street sweepers at Disneyland – apparently A roles for the organization (I believe that, I recently bailed Lee Cockerell up at a cocktail party to verify it), but do they really suit A talent? Um, no.
The reality is that the talent necessary for any A role (or B, C, or N role, for that matter) is determined by the role, the organization and the context in which the role and organization are operating (discovered by good workforce planning, of course) – not by some hackneyed cliche!
So that begs the question – do you know what kind of talent your A roles need?
So many times I look at workforce dashboards and they show the mean age, mean length of service, maybe even mean salary. As Good Math, Bad Math and others have often pointed out, using the mean is a bad idea – lazy at best, horribly misguiding at worst. And here’s why, according to Dr Salary:
The median salary is often much closer than the arithmetic mean to what common intuition would give for the typical salary. Strangely, people, political parties, newspapers, even statisticians and (gasp) PayScale continue to calculate the arithmetic mean and present it as a "typical" salary answer, when median salary would be much closer to what people want to know.
Outliers ruin the mean – the mean is really only useful for data which is evenly spread…and very little HR data IS evenly spread. Here’s the example given by Darwin’s Finance:
While the median income for the town remains at $80,000 (because the middle number is still $80,000 as are the other 999, there is only one outlier making a billion), the arithmetic mean income for the town is 1.08 Million Dollars!
Sure it’s an extreme example, but you get the point – one or two outliers are enough to ruin your measure. So, whatever you do, don’t ask the business to make decisions using the mean average – it’s just too important.
At one of our Fortune 100 clients, the strategic planning group have officially merged workforce planning into the organization’s strategic planning process. AND, the strategic workforce plan is officially the foundation of their integrated talent plan.
This organization launched strategic workforce planning less than two years ago, starting from scratch in December 2007. They are pure Aruspex methodology, and Aruspex workforce planning software.
This is a great achievement for HR, and especially for the small workforce planning team. The entire team at Aruspex feel like a proud stage mom!
How close to this fantastic milestone is your WFP effort?
The Economist has a good article this week about the ways different parts of the world are dealing with joblessness – both are using fiscal stimulus, but Europe are directing much more of their spending towards labor market policy. So in the short term, Europe’s joblessness rate is looking better than that of the US (which is a fairly unusual situation).
BUT…then we get to the “short term sense, long term problems” aspect…the lesson for workforce planners. Think about this:
Consider the subsidising of shorter work weeks, continental Europe’s most dramatic innovation…in a vicious temporary slump, driven by a credit crunch and the collapse of global spending, such subsidies make short-term sense. But they prop up demand by fossilising a country’s job structure and preventing the shift of workers from industries with excess capacity (like carmaking) to more promising ones. That ossification will surely come to haunt continental Europe.
It may be difficult to draw a comparison here, but a lot of organizations are putting in short term strategies which may well lead to fossilized job structures or ossified workforces – whether it is voluntary reductions which lose our most employable people, random cuts that lose as much workforce “muscle” as “fat”, shorter work weeks, furloughs, or blanket policies about hiring or promoting – maybe they are going to be beneficial in the long term…but maybe not. The reality is, like Europe’s approach, if we don’t segment the workforce, do workforce planning and think of the long term…we might end up with a workforce that’s ossified. (I’m liking that word)
Are you making short term sense but creating long term problems?
Here are four examples of the ways I’ve seen customers “pilot” workforce planning in their organizations:
So one of them chose a group that (while small for them) is incredibly complex; one chose a group that’s complex and also huge; one a group they don’t know the advantages or challenges of; and the fourth chose to start with a group where the cost of failure is as high as possible! Such courage, but…hey, it’s possible to make life a lot easier for yourself than THAT.
At Aruspex, we recommend that you don’t look for a pilot, you look for LIGHTHOUSE, it will make an enormous difference to the success of your project. A lighthouse is designed not just to be a successful project, but to have the internal marketing qualities to ensure that other parts of the organization will be drawn to it, and will want to follow. We’ve got a pretty serious method of finding one…give me a yell if you need the details
And be really careful not to do any of the four above!
The San Francisco Chronicle (and several other places) have featured an article on Google using an algorithm to predict the people likely to leave. I have been avoiding this post ever since the Chronicle article…because I have such mixed feelings.
Some things I like:
Some things I worry about:
Some lessons for us all:
There is a lot of potential in PA (Aruspex is loving it right now), but it can’t replace human decision making…or can it? What do you think?
