Strategic Workforce Planning

Aruspex Workforce Planner – now in French

2011-07-12T16:29:00.001-07:00

Today at Aruspex we are celebrating our first foreign language edition – key elements of Aruspex Workforce Planner are now available in French. We are thrilled that we have been able to successfully harness the capability of the localization engine that we have built over time – for many years we have supported both US and International English language files, but this is the first time that Aruspex has been available in a language other than English.

Software Localization is about much more than just converting text from one language to another – there are cultural differences to be aware of including the type of workforce data that is gathered and reported in different geographies; and differences in the formatting of numbers and dates.

We are very excited about this new phase in the evolution of Aruspex and are already looking for opportunities for further international editions, including a Spanish edition for our existing client base in South America.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us, in the meantime I’m off to have some Champagne and Camembert with the team!

Lies, Damned Lies, and Correlation Analysis

2011-06-16T04:03:00.000-07:00

There are three kinds of lies - lies, damn lies, and statistics - Benjamin Disraeli

Aruspex uses a number of statistical techniques in its' strategic workforce planning software, one of them is correlation. Correlation explores the strength of a relationship between two set of data - price and sales, for example. It is a fascinating and useful tool when done the right way, but it can be fraught with danger for the uninitiated, particularly when applied to workforce data. Today I'm going to cover a little bit about how we use correlation, and some of the traps.

Aruspex has used correlation to forecast the future workforce requirements for its' clients. We do this in some cases by finding relationships between the size of a workforce and how much that workforce produces. Once we've identified a relationship, we can then apply the formula to identify the size of the future workforce required to be to meet production forecasts. One of our clients used this technique recently to forecast a 10-year staffing plan in a complex environment. The approach worked well for our client because they had variable production levels, and needed to minimize the inefficiencies of being understaffed (the opportunity cost of not being able to meet demand) and its' opposite, the "bench" cost (having a workforce that was too large and could be better utilized in other parts of the business).

Despite its' uses, however, correlation does have its' limitations and traps. Some of these are illustrated by the latest offering from Google Labs, Google Correlate. (The service builds on the technology used by Flu Trends, which analyses what search terms are being run at any moment and can detect possible flu epidemics as they happen). By loading data sets into this service, you can find correlations between your data set and what people search for on google. The results are interesting, but not always useful, for the following reasons:

1. Small data sets lead to a lower degree of confidence in the results.

Intuitively, we know that flipping a coin once and getting a "heads" does not mean that we should expect that coin to always return heads. Similarly, insufficient data points in correlation analysis can lead to useless - or worse, misleading - results.

2. Even with large data sets, correlation can be a coincidence.

It turns out that the workforce participation rate in Australia for the past 10 years, has been highly correlated with google searches for "Portland Craigslist". It's fair to say that this is likely to be coincidental, despite the correlation being very high. Most Australians have not heard of Craigslist, and would wonder what shape an Oregon was. Sometimes correlations will occur that don't meet the common sense test.

3. Correlation is not the same as causation

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics releases a quarterly Employment Cost Index. It turns out that the change in this index since 2000 highly correlates with search terms including "appreciation" - that is, an increase in employment cost coincides with an increase in google searches for the word "appreciation". What this analysis doesn't tell you is whether employees "appreciate" higher remuneration, or whether the higher remuneration is because employers "appreciate" the efforts of their employees. It certainly doesn't explain why either employees or employers would bother to google "appreciation".

4. Sometimes co-correlation is due to a third factor you haven't considered

The Employment Cost Index also correlates highly with terms including "House of Pizza" and "Asian Buffet". You could infer that an increase in discretionary income leads people to have celebratory dinners (in which case, Dominos and Pizza Hut could consider a marketing campaign to the "just got a payrise" market, because the House of Pizza seems to have that market all sewn up. Maybe an adwords campaign where their ads are triggered on searches for "appreciation"?). Alternatively, it could mean that there is a third factor that drives both wage rises and discretionary spending on restaurants - such as economic sentiment.

5. Just because you find a correlation that makes sense, it doesn't mean you can or should use it.

You may find highly correlating factors that do make sense, but aren't helpful or usable. For example, increasing wages correlated with searches for dentists and child support. You can draw some conclusions from this, but those conclusions are not very actionable.

6. Finally, you'll get some gems.

Often, once you sort through the factors above, you will find some things that are relevant, and of more than academic interest. The relationship between voluntary turnover and reducing salary increments that we found for one of our clients, for instance. The relationship between commute times and divorce is an interesting one for consideration in work design (once again, it's not clear whether the long commute is cause or effect). Peaks in voluntary turnover at certain Length Of Service Intervals can be identified via correlation, where this relationship exists in your data. Optimizing productivity by aligning work hours to employee's biorhythms is an interesting field of research that uses correlation.

So if you're looking to identify useful patterns in your data, remember that correlation analysis can be useful where:

You have a significant amount of data points (a lot of employees, a long history of data, or a combination of the two);
You have one or more variables that you want to explore (what are some of the factors related to voluntary turnover, high performance, etc; and
You keep front-of-mind that correlation never tells you what is cause and what is effect.

P.S. It turns out that the shape of Oregon is almost an irregular trapedoid, in case you were wondering.

Delayed Retirements – a pending exodus or a structural change?

2011-05-26T21:46:00.001-07:00

It's nice to get out of the rat race, but you have to learn to get along with less cheese. - Gene Perret

Retirement at sixty-five is ridiculous. When I was sixty-five I still had pimples. - George Burns

The Conference Board has this month published a new report “U.S. Workers Delaying Retirement: What Businesses Can Learn from the Trends of Who, Where and Why” which highlights the need to pro-actively quantify future retirements and create a strategic workforce plan to address long-term issues.

Median retirement ages have been trending upwards for many years, and the report attributes this trend to several factors, including:

people are living longer and require more wealth to be accumulated before they retire;

changes to social security such as increasing the minimum age for receiving a full pension from 65 to 67 are forcing workers to delay retirement (increasing pension ages by 2 years seems a popular trend – both Spain and France have also done this in the past year)

the removal penalties for collecting benefits while working has enabled workers to continue working beyond their nominal retirement age; and

systemic shifts from defined benefit plans (employers bear the investment risk) to defined contribution plans (employees bear the investment risk) have made retirement intentions more responsive to economic conditions.

The report also finds marked differences in retirement rates and ages across industries and geographies. As a whole, the report raises some interesting points for Strategic Workforce Planning:

a) Planners should identify which of the changes that are delaying worker retirements are permanent, as opposed to temporary – temporary changes such as workers delaying retirement due to stock-market performance may lead to a glut of retirements when the investments recover. Multiple scenarios should be modelled – at a minimum, consider a scenario where retirements revert to pre-recession levels; and another where the current retirement rate (or median retirement age) is now a permanent attribute.

b) Some industries, such as Health and Construction, have had a more significant drop in retirement rates than others. States suffering from the largest house-price slumps tend to have more workers delaying retirement. It’s important that planners model figures relevant to their industry and geographies, rather than generic economy-wide figures.

c) As with any trend, there are opportunities as well as threats. Some of the retirements that are occurring are involuntary retirements, meaning that there is a pool of highly-skilled workers who may be looking for work on a temporary basis or outside of their traditional industry.

Aruspex Workforce Planner helps organizations plan for the future with scenario planning (including quantifying retirement risk) and modelling the effect of strategies to deal with future challenges. Please contact us if you’d like to talk about how we can help your organization forecast and plan for the future.

Telling the story behind the data

2011-02-13T19:30:00.001-08:00

Here at Aruspex, we often talk about the story behind the data. To me, there are two reasons why this is so valuable:

Firstly, it allows the observer look deeper into patterns and trends – not just recognising that they do exist, but gaining an understanding of why they exist. Without going through this process, it is easy to jump to the wrong conclusions and make disastrous decisions about your workforce – as outlined in an earlier post in this blog. Looking behind the data gives you actionable insight.

Secondly, creating a compelling story can help you to engage others in the practise of Strategic Workforce Planning. Data without a story often doesn’t compel. The data is important - but the story is what brings it alive. Recently I stumbled across this video from Hans Rosling, who I’m sure you’ll agree is excellent at bringing the story alive. His site GapMinder, by the way, is an excellent source of global economic data and visualizations.

New Year’s Resolutions for Workforce Planners

2010-12-21T19:14:00.001-08:00

Well, it’s that time of year again where many of us reflect on the changes we want or need to make in the coming year. Each year at Aruspex, we publish the top 10 New Years’ Resolutions for Workforce Planners. We encourage you to pick at least three for 2011!

I resolve to take achievable, pragmatic steps toward workforce planning. Workforce Planning is a journey which you must travel one step at a time, rather than attempt to implement a fully fledged approach on day one. You might start by introducing environment scanning, creating the right people metrics, or even building a forecast of your "no change future state". Whatever you choose, take the step, and then you can take the next one.
I resolve to look outward and forward, not just inward and backward. Many workforce planning and analysis efforts focus on what has happened in the past inside our organization. Looking at external factors and looking into the future is becoming more important. Ensure that your workforce planning and executive reporting includes these vital aspects.
I resolve to learn Strategic Workforce Planning techniques. Adding skills such as scenario planning, forecasting, and gap analysis to your current skill set might be the most important step you can take in preparing your organization for the future.
I resolve to treat the talent market as a market, and apply marketing techniques to it. The talent market is becoming increasingly challenging, and we need to start competing in it just as we do in the markets for customers and capital - that way we will be competing to win!
I resolve to be willing to forecast the future. Forecasting the future is an inexact art, but many disciplines, including finance and marketing, do so - with varying degrees of accuracy, but almost always with value gained in the process. Remember, all our knowledge is about the past, but all our decisions are about the future.
I resolve to filter data and convert it to information and insight. While a lot of data can be interesting, very little of it is normally useful. Data becomes information when it is positioned in context, and is insightful when it relates to your organization and the executive can easily understand and interpret it to take action.
I resolve to make Workforce Planning a priority in my organization. Can you imagine hearing "it's not a priority" for business planning? With the economy providing brand new challenges and changes, failure to workforce plan could prevent you from achieving your business plans, and the return on investment in workforce planning is usually compelling - make a real business case for your executive!
I resolve to stop letting today's issues make me stop planning for tomorrow. Think of Workforce Planning as the ounce of prevention you need to prevent the pounds of cure you are spending putting out the fires of these burning issues. Look to the future and phase out this fire fighting!
I resolve to share my experiences with other workforce planners.
I resolve to say "why?" and "what if?" at least three times a week!

Please feel free to share with us in the comments section what's happening with you and resolutions for 2011; how you went with your goals for 2010; and/or whether you think there are any more we should add to the list!

From all of us at Aruspex, happy holidays and best wishes for 2011.

Aruspex wins best Workforce Planning Software award

2010-12-08T21:07:00.001-08:00

Today at the HR Demo Show in Las Vegas, Aruspex won the “best in class” Workforce Planning Software award. The first conference of its kind, the show does not include trade show booths on an exhibit floor, but live, 1-hour software demos. A demo under those conditions (live audiences, live demos) shows what the market really wants to see – the software, not the spin.

A number of comments in the twittersphere were the speed of implementations, the flexibility of the interface, the integrated methodology, and predictive analytics, and capacity to deal with contingent workforces.

Other comments included reference to the company culture that showed through in the demos – the CEO’s passion, that it was an “exciting” and “fun” demo with a “sense of humor”.*

We’re truly honored and would like to congratulate other winners and thank the judges!

* I was in Vegas with our CEO in August and trust that it was a different sense of humor today!

Word Cloud for Strategic Workforce Planning

2010-11-18T12:20:00.001-08:00

Being such a believer in “the story behind the data”, I love tag clouds as a way to visualize a lot of qualitative information, which is pretty important in workforce planning.

Lexy Martin shared a link to Wordle with me, so I used to analyze this blog…and then saved the results in the Wordle public gallery.

I love it – the four biggest words are workforce, story, planning and sense. What are the biggest words in your word cloud?

Not-for-profit investments in workforce – industries AND cities. Sourcers – pay attention!

2010-10-29T10:09:00.001-07:00

Last week I tweeted on the Gates Foundation investing in skills in the energy workforce, and here is another story on not-for-profit funding in labor markets. In this case, it’s the Living Cities Collaborative investing in five inner city projects, including employment, aka workforce. The cities in the project are:

Baltimore – focus on creating job opportunities and improving neighborhoods in Central and East Baltimore, while preparing residents for opportunities created by the construction of the Red Line, a 14-mile east-west transit line.
Cleveland – implement procurement, hiring, employee incentives and capital investment programs that develop local jobs and businesses that benefit low-income people in the region
Detroit – create a model for older industrial cities of concentrating population and activity in sustainable corridors, expanding opportunity for low-income residents, and reusing vacant land
Newark – integrated investments in housing, public safety, access to healthcare, green space, fresh and healthy foods and employment
Twin Cities – develop frameworks to create and preserve transit-accessible affordable housing and mixed-use, mixed-income developments, catalyze neighborhood-led development, link residents with job opportunities, and establish a more appealing private investment environment in transit corridors

These are very interesting workforce supply opportunities for employers who are in, or could be leveraging, these areas. In a workforce planning sense, they are new sources of supply, most of which may results in lower cost and higher engagement, particularly due to the collaborative, local approaches to the projects. Employers who get involved in these initiatives may be able to create long term workforce advantage in these locations. They are non-traditional, but potentially highly valuable.

Are your workforce planning and/or strategic sourcing teams paying attention to opportunities like these, or are you more likely to be trying to get involved later, when the risks are lower…but so are the potential benefits?

For strategic HR stop quoting and predicting numbers, start telling happy tales?

2010-10-18T11:15:00.001-07:00

Systematic HR’s post today on the art of the story and how it helps us make sense of the present made me think of a Roger Martin post in June, where he showed us that story telling is a vital skill for great strategy development. So, telling stories is great for the past, the present and the future.

Martin’s post “moving from strategic planning to story telling” is about overcoming some of the main roadblocks to good strategy development by creating happy stories instead of focusing on SWOT analyses, spreadsheets and other idea killing approaches:

Think about a strategic options as being just a happy story about the future. It doesn't have to be right and it doesn't even have to be sensible. It just has to result in your organization being in a happy place in the future. In fact, if it were absolutely right and utterly sensible, your company would probably already be doing it.

Then, Martin recommends, look at the stories, and work backward to “what would have to be true?”

When you have assembled the happy stories/options, you can then begin to deploy the most important question in strategy: what would have to be true? For each individual story, what would have to be true for it to be a terrific choice? Work backward from an attractive possibility to see what would have to be true to make this a feasible and attractive option.

The story, of course, is also necessary for making sense of the present and past for, or as Systematic HR put it:

HR is comprised of quite a few random pieces of data, from technology enabled analytics, process outcomes, talent data, HR transactional data, etc. HR outcomes and strategies are usually aggregations of each of these areas as individual data points combine to create overall direction and outcomes – formulating the data in such a way that it can actually give us a sense of place, direction and story is more important in HR than any other function that I can think of

Couldn’t agree more. Place is today and the past, direction is your trends, the story creates your future, which is why these two posts with different aspects of story telling make so much sense together. How are you doing with a sense of place, direction and story?

How do you plan for what you CAN’T teach?

2010-10-04T08:28:00.000-07:00

Following on from last week’s post on biology and workforce, here’s a study looking at biological reasons for shyness. It demonstrates a born personality trait called Sensory Perception Sensitivity, which causes

This is all very interesting, but how might it impact talent strategy? It’s basically saying that some individuals can’t be taught some behaviors including rapid decision making. From the article:

Example: Thinkers could survive in a dangerous situation that requires thought, but doers may have better chances in situations that require aggressive action.

Combined with last week’s information on the relationship between biology and work, it means that in talent planning and development one size really does not fit all. Rather, the types of strategies needed for different roles and groups will vary, not just because the nature of the work varies, but because the nature of the people drawn to the work varies. Different strokes for different folks.

Of course, good strategic workforce planning includes this as a fundamentally accepted situation.

Does your workforce planning approach incorporate this reality, or deny it?

Born to the job? How biology impacts workers

2010-09-30T09:56:00.000-07:00

Fascinating article over in The Economist on various research biologist are doing on management and work. The article looks at various studies in genetics, endocrinology, molecular biology and psychology and what the research might mean for business and particularly for their workforces.

There are lots of interesting things in there, including the table I’ve included here which seems to show that we are born to engineering, business, creative arts, etc, but our genetics don’t impact our results in sales, finance and other areas. It also looks at the impact of hormones, nature/nurture..and then the objections and issues this thinking faces. These are mostly ethical issues, of course, but all worth a read.

In a workforce planning sense, this might mean that our build, buy, rent decisions may need to vary according to the particular function – buy scientists, build sales people, for example. The work is all very early, and nowhere near offering conclusions, but the conclusion of the article itself is worth thinking about.

Often, the practical applications of science are serendipitous—and may take a long time to arrive. And even if they never arrive, understanding human behaviour is just plain interesting for its own sake. “We in business schools often act like technicians in the way we conceptualise and teach our topics of study,” he laments. “This owes much to the fact that a business school is more like a trade school than it is a part of classic academia.” Now, largely as a result of efforts by Dr Zyphur and others like him, management science looks set for a thorough, biology-inspired overhaul. Expect plenty more lab coats in business-school corridors.

Classic academia applied to workforce. Hmmm, that could be interesting…

The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. Oh, and some thoughts on what makes a good metric

2010-09-28T01:18:00.001-07:00

At Aruspex, we often discuss what is or isn’t a good measure internally, and with our clients. Generally, those discussions cover these 6 broad categories:

1. The metric must be easily explained

Perhaps the most useless metric ever calculated (although it is fictional), is “The Answer To The Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything”. The computer Deep Thought in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy takes 7-and-a-half million years to calculate the answer as 42, and goes on to explain:

“I checked it very thoroughly,’ said the computer, ‘and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.”

As in the above example, it’s not useful to calculate a metric that leaves you wondering “yes, but what does that actually mean?” Good metrics can be explained, in plain language, in 1-2 sentences.

2. The metric must be actionable

Having metrics that are of only academic interest can lead to analysis paralysis… the benefits of good metrics are not that they are interesting, but that you can use them to assist in the development or monitoring of strategic actions. If they don’t meet that test, then they are better placed in your annual report than in your workforce plan.

3. The metric must be timely

Knowing what the attributes of your workforce used to be is not insight… it’s hindsight. It’s important that you can gather and report on data quickly enough that you can use it to make informed decisions.

4. The metric must be repeatable

If you’ve remembered rule #2 and the metric is actionable, you’re going to want to ensure that you can recalculate the measure on an ongoing basis. Without this, you won’t be able to track whether the actions you put in place are working.

5. More is Less / Less is More

The more metrics you calculate and present, the more likely it is that the most important ones will drowned out by the ordinariness of the others. Focus on the important few metrics that meet conditions 1-4 above.

6. Good context makes a good metric

Well thought-out infographics that give shape and context to your data can make you sit up and pay attention, elevating boring data to valuable insight. Stacked column charts and tree-maps, done well, can identify patterns in data that you just wouldn’t notice in a table.

I would be most interested to hear others’ thoughts about the categories here, and whether there are any you would add?

Where the jobs are today – meh. The real focus should be on where they are tomorrow

2010-08-17T11:29:00.001-07:00

McKinsey Quarterly rightly points out that most US jobs are in retail, financial services and construction; and that cool emerging sectors like biotech are a very small share:

However, when the BLS (the source of the data above) forecast jobs growth, it’s a little different:

Retail and finance aren’t growing too much at all, but, unsurprisingly, healthcare is surging. The first chart above places focus on retail jobs…the second says healthcare. The single biggest growth section isn’t even IN the first chart. Hmmm.

In workforce analytics, this happens far too often – we slice, dice, analyze and even obsess over the past (that’s what all our data represents, after all)…and we might not focus on the future at all. And what a big boat that may well lead us to miss…so why, if that big boat is likely to have the biggest impact on the business, do we keep putting workforce analytics (analysis of the past) ahead of workforce planning (analysis of the future)?

Aside: Each of these charts uses very different industry classifications, so it’s hard to see apples against apples – which is very often the problem with charts and datasets. Take care there

Swarms, weak links and simulations – the future of work?

2010-08-09T12:34:00.001-07:00

Gartner are forecasting ten key trends which will change the nature of work in the next ten years:

De-routinization of Work
Work Swarms
Weak Links
Working With the Collective
Work Sketch-Ups
Spontaneous Work
Simulation and Experimentation
Pattern Sensitivity
Hyperconnected
My Place

Most of them are around the nature of working and team relationships, but some (like the simulation and pattern sensitivity things) are about different ways of operating. Most of them have some impact on the kinds of work, and hence kinds of capabilities, people will be doing. Potentially big impacts for the future workforce, but at different times, in different ways and with different degrees of impact. Some will evolve, some will be “switch on” impacts. But they all need to be thought about. Definitely a good piece of research for a few water cooler discussions with the leaders of critical groups.

Or, to swarm over, I guess…

5 global “crucibles of change” restructuring the economy…and hence the workforce

2010-07-01T13:32:00.000-07:00

Good article from McKinsey about the major global forces impacting business today…and it starts with a great paragraph:

“I never think of the future,” Albert Einstein once observed. “It comes soon enough.” Most business managers, confronted with the global forces shaping the business landscape, also assume that their ability to sculpt the future is minimal. They are right that they can do little to change a demographic trend or a widespread shift in consumer consciousness. But they can react to such forces or, even better, anticipate them to their own advantage. Above all, they ignore these forces at their peril.

The article lists the five forces, and shows some figures on how many executives think that the forces are being actively addressed (funnily enough for four of the five forces, more executives think they are being addressed than think they are important…). But the issue for strategic planning, including workforce planning, is that we accept we can’t predict or quantify the exact impact of these things, but we can explore them, and compare alternative models. As the authors say:

Even the most talented strategists will have, at best, incomplete knowledge of what comes next. But from our experience, we know that an understanding of the forces defining the future will also provide the best chance for seizing it.

It is perfectly ok to resist the urge to quantify this stuff, but it’s not ok to ignore it because it’s imprecise. Introducing this into your discussions about the future workforce can help to inform decisions about all kinds of things – including your numerical models! It also increases your credibility substantially, and helps to dissolve the objections to workforce planning itself. Oh, and it’s very interesting to have these conversations with leaders – which might be the benefit we forget most!

Did Economic Downturn = Talent Upgrade?

2010-06-30T11:42:00.000-07:00

I came across an old article (as you do) from McKinsey in December 2008 which recommended ways that “a downturn can give smart companies a chance to upgrade their talent.” As Jeremy is often reminding me, we usually don’t look back at advice and forecasts and see how accurate they were, but this one is worth a think – how many cases were there in which organizations took up and/or succeeded with this advice?

We absolutely saw some organizations be selective about cuts – cutting only in areas which were not critical groups, and where longer term workforce projections showed that cutting would not do long term harm. BUT, this was only possible where workforce planning systems were already established (because it is those systems which allows that kind of prioritization and modeling)
We also saw organizations capitalize on looser talent supply for their pivotal roles – picking up talent that others had let go. Again, we only saw this where critical and pivotal roles had been defined, and where tight future talent pools had been identified – workforce planning again
The use of Talent Management systems seemed to grow, which (hopefully) hinted at organizations focusing on identifying top potential and performance – aka focusing on protecting internal supply (the two above are focused on prioritizing by demand)

How about your organization? Any signs that your leveraged the downturn to upgrade talent?

del.icio.us Tags: workforce planning,downturn

The Decade Ahead in US Jobs

2010-06-28T10:40:00.000-07:00

Kind of approaching oldie but goodie, but there’s a nice visualization of the BLS’s projected job growth to 2018 on the NPR site. Some pretty well known megatrends are clear (like reductions in jobs in textile manufacturing and “publishing, except software”), but I also liked a found a few things on there interesting:

Food services and hotels are forecast to grow less than average…but “arts and entertainment” more than avg
State, Federal and Local government all grow <average, NGO’s grow <average
Software grows and grows
Consulting grows most of all

So, based on other recent research, Boise is about to see a lot more consultants on the street….

Of course, that might not be how you interpret this in YOUR workforce planning environment scans, but it’s a nice visual with some independent external data, so it could be very useful to you. Pretty, third party visuals are often a great aid.

del.icio.us Tags: workforce planning,demographics,employment

Workplace flexibility as the new normal? How do we value that?

2010-06-24T15:04:00.000-07:00

Lots of good thoughts in a post on “Inching toward workplace flexibility as the new normal” on SmartPlanet. For workforce planning practitioners, as well as the “soft” benefits of policies like these, there is also the need to estimate/assess the impact of the policy on things like retention, financials, etc, which is a newly rigorous approach to ROI on HR…but it’s a good approach!

If workplace flexibility IS becoming the new normal, how will you know whether the impact on your business is net positive or not? Valuing engagement? Reduced attrition? Higher productivity? More capable employees? A mix of these and a bunch of others? Well, rigorous decision support about the costs vs benefits of initiatives like these is also inching toward the new normal. Are you ready?

Tips to make workforce planning faster and easier

2010-06-22T14:00:00.001-07:00

Last week at the HCI conference in Chicago we heard a wide range of experiences from real practitioners making a real difference in their organizations - so we thought we'd reinforce what you learned with the top six ways you can ensure rapid results from your workforce planning project:

Fast track. Although many of the case studies seemed to take years to be successful, EPCOR (an Aruspex customer) took just three months - so can you! Download the EPCOR "Zero to Sixty in Three Months" paper from our website to see how.
Work with an expert. While one of the case studies presented was successful without help, most companies do better (and faster) when they have expert help from people like our experienced professionals.
Get certified. Become a Human Capital Institute Certified Strategic Workforce Planner and power up your career. With HCI certification, you are learning the Aruspex methodology, so we know it will work for you - and that training will always be available wherever you are - in house, public seminars, or even online
Pick up all the best knowledge. Subscribe to our newsletter and blog, and download our whitepapers...or better still, call us and we'll send them to you!
Don't be sidetracked by HR dashboards and Analytics as a "first step". Great workforce planning solutions like ours will take care of analytics and dashboards for you - but analytics solutions can't take care of workforce planning. Use an approach like ours and you'll make sure you achieve both at once!
Start today. It's not really like eating an elephant...in fact, it's simple if you know what to do, and you follow the tips above. Call us to find out how!

del.icio.us Tags: workforce planning

Workers as Boxer the Carthorse – thanks, recession

2010-06-02T09:11:00.001-07:00

An article in The Economist last week compared the situation of workers in the current climate to those of Boxer the carthorse in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Aside from the obvious irony in comparing a socialist satire to the current state of capitalism, it does make some interesting observations on how overwork of the employed is an impact of increased unemployment, and on some of the bad effects of that – reduced discretionary effort and engagement, increased corporate crime, etc. On the bright side, it also lists some ways that some employers are taking steps to try to compensate this at no cost – reward programs, flexible working hours, and above all empowerment of high potential employees. This is being discussed in the talent/HR press a lot, good to see it make the serious business press as well.

As a wider issue, there are a couple of key points for workforce planning:

Ensure you use both types of segmentation – workforce segmentation for critical groups; talent segmentation for supply side groups such as high potentials
Be ready to include higher turnover and lower productivity in your workforce models. Make the assumptions conservative and have your HRBP’s discuss the potential impact with your leaders
Build a good environment scan on issues like this – using highly credible sources like The Economist! (sorry, but HR press just does not carry the weight with business)
Do NOT base your plans for the future entirely on the past – reduced engagement, differentiated talent strategies and a labor market upturn will mean that your last 12 months are likely to be very different to your next few years
Get out and talk with the business about it. Analyze, discuss, discuss, analyze, discuss. Then target and measure. Whatever you do, don’t just lock yourself in your office analyzing…

Not that you shouldn’t be doing all these things anyway!

del.icio.us Tags: workforce planning,flexible work,productivity

“Segmented” Talent Supply – Competitive, not just “Fair”

2010-05-24T17:30:00.001-07:00

When most people talk about segmenting the workforce, they are only talking about segmenting for organizational demand…but we’ve always said that competitive advantage in talent is found in segmentation of supply as well, and supply segmentation is key to great workforce planning. Diversity Executive magazine is the usual place we find people who support this view, and recently the authors of “Workforce of One: Revolutionizing Talent Management Through Customization” published a brief article there on how supply segmentation is being “fair”. This talks to some of the challenges employers (particularly US employers) face in crafting supply side strategies in a legal and ethical sense…but it also refers to some of the effective strategies:

Companies also are catering to diverse populations within the workforce to find bright and able people off the beaten track, thus getting a leg up in heated talent markets

They cite Jetblue, Eli Lilly and others, and no doubt there are more examples in the book. It’s good to see the talent market being treated as a market, and “segmentation” being applied in the way it was intended by marketing professionals…but we still don’t see much of it.

What other examples are there of talent advantage through supply segmentation?

del.icio.us Tags: workforce planning,talent market

Find the best talent…in Idaho?

2010-05-20T12:20:00.001-07:00

Organizations are getting better at workforce planning with their eyes on decentralized, remote workers…but maybe not as fast as potential talent is! A great post on Smart Planet “Internet spurs new migration wave: professionals seek their own private Idahos” talks about the surge in innovation in cities like Boise, which offer better quality of life and a more affordable lifestyle than some of the more traditional sources of innovative talent (I type, sitting in San Francisco).

Including links to the Economist and references to Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class, it’s a good read for people who are starting to think differently about where and how the workforce can be engaged.

In the meantime, I’m checking house prices in Boise.

del.icio.us Tags: workforce planning,creative class,demographics

Worker shortages hype is back, too!

2010-05-19T09:50:00.001-07:00

Mary Young at the Conference Board sent this one over to me this week…research indicating future labor shortages is back, just as aging workforce press is back! (of course these things are very closely related). In strategic workforce planning circles these issues have sometimes seemed like the Y2K crisis to business leadership, but they are still serious workforce macro trends to be considered.

NortheAstern University has published a report titled “After the Recovery: Help Needed; The Coming Labor Shortage and How People in Encore Careers Can Help Solve It”, which concludes that significant increases in participation rates are needed if the US is to have enough workers by 2018:

According to the report, projected labor force participation rates to 2018 are ok for workers up to age 54, but beyond that we need to increase them by as much as ten percentage points, and increase the overall participation in the labor force from the currently projected 64.5% (down from 66% today), to a total of 66.1 to fill the employment gap - and a staggering 70.4% to fill what they call the “output gap”, which presumes older workers are less productive (hey, not my words, mom and dad, I know the truth).

For reference, according to a 2010 chartbook from the BLS, the two countries with the highest participation rates for ages 55-64 are New Zealand and Sweden – and in ages 65+ are Korea and Mexico, streets ahead of the rest. Maybe the next research will start to look for how we can apply “lessons” from such countries to the US?

Or…maybe not?

del.icio.us Tags: workforce planning,aging workforce,demographics

Let’s get workforce analytics into the garbage can

2010-05-17T09:59:00.000-07:00

Roger Martin has a great post on HBR about the value of outliers in forecasting (well, specifically in economic forecasting, but the principles apply to all forecasting). He points out that no major forecaster anticipated the recent economic situation, yet all are still applying the same models they applied then. Hmmm. Unconvinced by this, he instead asks us to think about the research methods of Dr Steven Scherer, a leading autism researcher, who bases his research on outliers:

"I call it the garbage-can approach. My belief is that answers to really difficult problems can often be found in the data points that don't seem to fit existing frameworks. To me, those little variations are like signposts saying 'Don't ignore me!'"

Workforce planners need to think about this stuff – using the same forecasting models we’ve always used if they aren’t working, relying only on historical data, using only linear methods…these are all things which ignore the likelihood of change. According to this thinking, we need to be prioritizing the data points we find in those garbage-cans, and the “blips” outside the trends we expect…especially when the blips appear only in pockets. But most workforce analytics functions don’t do that – rather they report the same metrics for all groups, and enforce standardization, rather than using different techniques to try to scan for and highlight these “Don’t ignore me!” signposts. There are a range of data mining and other tools to help find these signposts, yet they are almost never key parts of the approach. Why not? Well, because they are harder, and take more thinking I guess. But they are exactly the right thing for the good use of metrics – so get your analytics approach looking in that garbage can, I say!

Martin’s work and thinking have extremely valuable applications to thinking about workforce and talent strategy – the application of his work on reliability and validity, integrative thinking via the opposable mind and a range of other issues. People interested in strategic workforce planning should definitely include him on their blogroll.

Retirements and older workers hitting the news again

2010-05-14T09:30:00.001-07:00

A few years ago, retirements and the aging workforce were everywhere in the HR news (and a lot of the business news!). During the economic downturn, focus faded away, with shrinking investments and economic uncertainty for potential retirees giving employers confidence that this wasn’t an issue. In fact, we’ve heard it referred to as “another Y2K”. Our clients in many industries are coming back to focus on it in a big way.

There’s a good article in this month’s Talent Management Magazine on Rethinking Retirement. If your organization has an aging workforce challenge (even if it’s only in pockets…and it usually is), it’s required reading. Here are some key points:

During the recession workers 55 and older actually added about 1 million jobs in the US, with nearly 500,000 jobs going to workers aged 60-64 – young people bore the brunt of job losses (aside: a fact which probably increases the future risk for many organizations!)
There’s an increasing focus on seasonal work for older workers – more than 1,000 workers took advantage of CVS Caremark’s Snowbird program in 2008
Engagement has been increasing in older workers, but decreasing in younger workers (which might just be related to who bore the brunt of the layoffs…)

And there’s another great article in The Economist on Executive education and the over-55s which talks about the ways in which older executives like to learn…and it’s not by attending classes which they describe as “a repetition of lessons already learned and become increasingly irrelevant in the light of experience and expertise”.

So with comments on engagement, learning styles, work design preferences and a bunch of other things which are very much related to attributes of the supply, and not on the skills and numbers the organization needs (aka not on the demand), it’s becoming increasingly urgent to change the way we think about the future workforce and focus on strategic workforce planning, which factors in both supply and demand aspects.

del.icio.us Tags: workforce planning,aging workforce,retirements,baby boomers

Where is the profit in your workforce? Top, bottom, all over?

2010-05-11T07:52:00.001-07:00

A new book by Jody Heyman (HBR Press) described Profit at the Bottom of the Ladder: Creating Value by Investing in Your Workforce – which includes a bunch of case studies on how employers have become more profitable by improving working conditions. So here we have a focus on investing on the bottom, and historically I’ve usually seen a focus on the top – but where there really needs to be a focus is on the critical groups. These groups might be strategically critical or operationally critical, but they ultimately deliver more value to the business than the average – which makes them worth investing in.

At a high service retailer, the front line may well be critical. At another retailer, say burger flippers, that very similar front line might only be core to operations…it all depends on the organization’s strategy. The important thing is to segment the workforce so you know who the critical groups and roles are…and to focus on how you get the best results from those workers.

If you know that the bottom of the ladder is critical to you, you’d better get this book. If you don’t know who is critical to you, you had better start strategic workforce planning!

del.icio.us Tags: workforce planning,human capital management,workforce segmentation

Information is beautiful - treemap

2010-04-27T10:03:00.000-07:00

We use treemaps a lot in strategic workforce planning and analysis, and sometimes people new to them struggle to understand them at first. They are mostly used in financial analysis, but the Information is Beautiful has a nice one called the billion-dollar gram, which shows how the relative size of issues can be clearly illustrated using a type of treemap:

Note that it uses different colors as well as different intensities to provide a third aspect to the issue. Lovely. Anyone else got some good treemap examples?

Expectations of workforce growth 2004-today

2010-04-21T04:55:00.001-07:00

McKinsey have published an interactive timeline of their executive economic expectations survey results 2004 to today, allowing you to see how responses to individual questions have changed over time…right up to April 2010.

While all question responses are important to strategic workforce planning, the one which is most immediately applicable is “how do you expect the size of your company’s workforce to change in the next six months?”. Here’s a snapshot:

	Mar 07	Mar 08	Mar 09	Apr 10
Increase	46.9%	36.9%	11%	31%
Decrease	18.3%	29.9%	38%	17%
Stay the same	33.7%	31.7%	50%	52%

As with most data, the visualization is better:

The message is still the same though – plans for reductions are back at pre-GFC levels, but expectations of growth have not yet returned there. In the interactive tool, you can look at the results by region, industry, etc – India and Asia Pacific are most optimistic for growth, but all Europe classifications are below the global average.

Where does your organization fit compared to these “benchmarks”? And does your planning fit the context these results show? Vital stuff for your environment scan!

Is it 2001 again? Accenture street hustling in SF for applicants!

2010-04-16T12:31:00.000-07:00

In one of the more colorful signs that the job market seems to be rebounding, several of our San Francisco team were approached by people in red Accenture t-shirts and offered free coffees and an “Accenture is hiring” postcard this week. It reminded me of the dot-com days (well, hopefully not in the long run!).

Wonder if this is a planned recruitment strategy, or an ad-hoc reactive one?

Case Against Workforce Planning Specialization

2010-04-14T12:21:00.001-07:00

HBR has an online article and discussion on “Strategy's Case against Specialization”, that, while (oddly) inspired by a dead poet, makes a good case for NOT developing your strategy in a vacuum by a group of wonks. This reminded me of all the stories I hear about HR leaders doing off-site meetings to develop company HR strategy…entirely removed from business leaders, which makes it at least partially in a vacuum. The article talks about three ways to avoid this issue, which I’m paraphrasing here into strategic workforce planning terms (remembering that strategic workforce planning IS the systematic development of better HR strategy):

Look for the "connection of the week." …At the least, tax yourself each week with thinking up one way, or maybe two, in which seemingly unconnected aspects of your operation just might be connected.

The connections which are most commonly missing or overlooked in workforce planning are data connections which demonstrate the line of sight between HR actions/strategy and business results. If you can think of one per week, you’ll be building a really valuable set of things to measure and align. Our software already has a slew of these defined, but if you don’t have that, at least start building yourself a list! Golden rule: these links are NOT all made of workforce data!

Have a council, a committee, maybe just a standing meeting that brings together different specialties to take action on an issue of collective concern. And not something unimportant, like "Where are we going to hold the company picnic?" Some problem that's keeping you, and possibly them, up at night.

See the key italicization there? DIFFERENT SPECIALTIES. Your workforce planning steering council need to be made up of people who are primarily not in HR. It’s a great opportunity for high-po’s, and for engaged leaders, especially those with lighthouse characteristics.

Reflect on your organization's history, and the possible lessons it contains. Time has a way of suggesting links, forces at work, dynamics that may not have been apparent to the poor souls caught up in the maelstrom of the moment. I know what you're thinking: it's so different today; we can't do things like we used to; and besides, we packaged out all the old timers. Still, your original corporate DNA probably continues to be at work somewhere in there, shaping your response to the fresh hell that confronts you. Try to lift the strands into consciousness, and to put to use any wisdom you find there. It may be preservative, and not for specialists.

So I didn’t even edit this – it’s very true…but we need to also be careful that we don’t live entirely in the past, with historical data and “how we’ve always done it”. Scenario planning and other techniques can help people who aren’t strategy or futuring specialists break the paradigm…but what we do must be squarely rooted in the reality of our organization and history, not some best practice fantasy!

These are only three of many ways to prevent too much specialization. How do you prevent yourself from developing HR strategy in a vacuum?

Building better workforce scenarios

2010-04-12T08:48:00.001-07:00

Scenario planning is a critical part of good workforce planning, but it’s something that people can take quite a long time to master. As well as the usual great books in this area, GBN has a brief article which explains Plotting Your Scenarios more clearly than most (and written by Peter Schwartz and Jay Ogilvy, two of the real leaders in this area). For those workforce planning practitioners building their strength in this area, it’s a must read. When you are ready to be modeling those workforce scenarios using real data, our software is designed to do exactly that – but of course you need the qualitative skills, as well as the online tools. Any other good resources in scenario planning?

del.icio.us Tags: workforce planning,scenario planning

The workforce plan as the HR "central narrative"

2010-03-31T00:35:00.000-07:00

A friend who's a PR and marketing expert has been visiting, and we've been talking about the "central narrative" which drives all PR activity. And of course, that's what the workforce plan is for HR. When we think about talent management practices and how they often lack a single coherent approach, it's because they are often like marketing practices done in the absence of the critical central narrative. In HR, the practice of strategic workforce planning is the development of a coherent, actionable central narrative. Not for the whole workforce, but segment by segment, rolling up into a whole.

Does your HR strategy have a strong central narrative?

How HR sees a resume; how a programmer sees a resume

2009-12-07T13:17:00.001-08:00

Cute comic on how programmers really review resumes – and it’s pretty much on the money from where I’m sitting! BUT, there’s a more serious message going on here, and it’s that often we ignore – how close is HR”s profile match to the one the business really thinks is right?

Often in workforce planning projects we come across organizations who are stuck in a “skills, skills, skills” focus on workforce planning – as though every person with those skills are the same as the others, and nothing else changes the attraction/retention/performance issues. OK, so we might not want to be planning on Facebook pictures, but this illustration is a good one to show what the people in the business might be interested in in their “ideal” employees.

How well do you think your HR profile matches the profile the people who do the work have? And which is more important?

del.icio.us Tags: workforce planning

DOL Data: a lesson in “lost in the averages”

2009-12-03T13:25:00.000-08:00

Jeremy Piven has a great blog today on why the latest Department of Labor unemployment data is misleading us – Simpson’s Paradox:

Simpson’s paradox (or the Yule-Simpson effect) is an apparent paradox in which the successes of groups seem reversed when the groups are combined. This result is often encountered in social and medical science statistics, and occurs when frequency data are hastily given causal interpretation; the paradox disappears when causal relations are derived systematically, through formal analysis.

The paradox example in the DOL data (which Jeremy clearly explains) shows that even though the total unemployment rate is lower than it was in 1983, the rate for some very key groups (including “college grads”) is in fact worse.

This is a great example of why we need to be very careful accepting high level metrics for any critical data, and why segmenting the workforce is critical – if we don’t, we risk losing vital information in the averages. Segmentation is critical to all workforce planning and analysis…are you doing a good job of it, or losing important information to Simpson’s Paradox?

del.icio.us Tags: workforce planning,metrics,analytics

Use and Abuse of Scenarios

2009-11-30T11:14:00.000-08:00

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!

del.icio.us Tags: scenario planning,workforce planning

A roles don’t necessarily need A players

2009-11-23T09:23:00.000-08:00

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?

del.icio.us Tags: talent management,workforce planning

Time to swear off using “MEAN” average in workforce analytics

2009-11-19T07:02:00.000-08:00

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:

You live in a town of 1000 residents who are all earning roughly $80,000 per year.
To keep it simple, the median and the mean are roughly $80,000 give or take.
Your town is real nice and reminds Warren Buffet of his childhood. He decides to move in.
He takes in $1Billion this year.

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.

del.icio.us Tags: Workforce Analytics

Strategic planning adopts workforce planning!

2009-11-17T08:35:00.000-08:00

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?

Short term sense, long term problems – in global joblessness…in your decisions too?

2009-11-13T08:45:00.000-08:00

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?

With workforce planning, don’t do a pilot, build a lighthouse!

2009-11-11T07:52:00.001-08:00

Here are four examples of the ways I’ve seen customers “pilot” workforce planning in their organizations:

“Let’s do Supply Chain – that’s a small group of people"!”
“Four business units in Asia”
“The group that volunteered”
“The critical group with the biggest shortages”

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!

del.icio.us Tags: workforce planning,project management

Google workforce prediction algorithm?

2009-11-03T14:39:00.000-08:00

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:

Google cares this much about the workforce – as we all should!
REAL predictive analytics finally gets a showing! So many people are using the term predictive analytics about things which are really just metrics and reporting…it’s a wonderful thing to see real PA at least being thought about.
This will add value…but maybe not in the obvious way

Some things I worry about:

The algorithm can only use historical data, and given layoffs, Google’s slide from the #1 Best Place to Work spot, the economy and a whole lot of other current and recent change, that might miss some key items
Google searches are great, but they don’t get everything…and if management at Google starts to think that they do, there is a serious risk of complacency and so further loss of focus on the value of human management (“oh, Jane didn’t show up on the output of the algorithm this month, so she mustn’t be about to leave”)
HR data is much more limited than internet data, so there is a serious risk that the model won’t have enough data points to be relevant. Yes, great mathematicians can overcome many shortcomings…but maybe not that one
If we predict individual human behavior, what risks do we open up? Lawsuits, even? What if we get it wrong about Sally and don’t promote her because the algorithm said she’s likely to leave? Sure, we already do that in management heads, but what’s the legal situation once it comes from an algorithm?
Then there are the people worrying about Big Brother: http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/20/internet-behavior-englebart-intelligent-technology-google.html?feed=rss_news

Some lessons for us all:

It’s a good idea to focus at least a part of our organization’s innovative power on our workforce…after all, they ARE our innovative power!
We need to be more rigorous about workforce decisions
Maybe we need to keep our “predictions” to groups, not individuals
Really smart companies are focusing serious energy on doing workforce planning

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?

Will falling fertility impact your global plans?

2009-10-29T15:18:00.001-07:00

The Economist reports that astonishing falls in the fertility rate are bringing with them big benefits…particularly for the economic situation in developing countries:

And falling fertility is a boon for what it makes possible, which is economic growth. Demography used to be thought of as neutral for growth. But that was because, until the 1990s, there were few developing countries with records of declining fertility and rising incomes. Now there are dozens and they show that as countries move from large families and poverty into wealth and ageing they pass through a Goldilocks period: a generation or two in which fertility is neither too high nor too low and in which there are few dependent children, few dependent grandparents—and a bulge of adults in the middle who, if conditions are right, make the factories hum. For countries in demographic transition, the fall to replacement fertility is a unique and precious opportunity.

It’s fascinating that the reduction in birthrates from 5 per woman to 2 took 150 years in Great Britain…but took only 20 years in South Korea…and has fallen even faster in Iran. What this does is increases the earning power and security of people in these countries – and quickly makes them richer, which tends to make them more educated as well as more productive. This changes the amount and kind of work which can happen in that country…which might have serious impacts on where global organizations choose to have work done, and on the global competitive scene in many industries. These things, of course, affect our workforce, and so for many organizations also impact our workforce planning.

Have you thought about how it might impact yours?

del.icio.us Tags: workforce planning,aging workforce,demographics

Management skills as a driver of lower turnover and higher productivity

2009-10-27T15:50:00.001-07:00

Last week I was attending a round-table consultation on the development of Australia’s National Workforce Development Strategy when the topic of conversation turned to the value of good management. A number of people expressed the view that good management held the key to unlocking productive capacity for organizations, industries, and economies.

Then today I was interested to see that the people responding to this web-poll, “Why Do You Stick With Your Employer?” ranked “Good coaching from and interaction with my boss” as the leading factor in retention, rating it more than twice as important as any other factor.

It’s clear that effective and engaging managers can positively impact the productivity and turnover of their departments – but less clear how you enable best practise management.

The Peter Principle, the principle that "In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence", is a humorous idea, but still has resonance 40 years after it was originally described. I wonder if this is because there is often no guidance or mentoring for new managers to acquire the types of skills that good managers need, particularly those skills that can’t be taught in a classroom.

I’d be really interested to hear back from anyone who has experience with mentoring or other programs supporting people in the transition into management roles... and any evidence or anecdotes about the resulting long-term turnover and productivity impacts for their organizations.

Research tools for workforce planners

2009-10-19T09:53:00.000-07:00

I’ve been rabbiting on about them for a while, but in case you haven’t tried them yet, two very useful research websites were quietly delivered in 2009:

Wolfram Alpha, which computes actual answers to questions instead of simply providing a list of sites that may (or may not!) have the answer – we played with unemployment in San Francisco compared to New York City and were instantly provided this:

Then we asked the meaning of life, and were instantly provided this:

Excellent!
Google Public Data gives users the ability to search and compared public data such as statistics provided by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and the US Census Bureau's Population Division. Asked the same NYC vs SF question, we got this:
http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=usunemployment&met=unemployment_rate&idim=county:PS060900:CN360610

Google was quite a lot harder to get, and has a lot fewer data sources (so far), but it’s still worth a look

For workforce planners, this is a big deal as they make the data needed for environment scanning much more easily accessible in a standardized manner. Instead of navigating your way through complex websites, employment rates, population statistics and other information is available at the click of a button...and in the case of our workforce planning software, automatically integrated!

So, how will you be using these new tools? And what IS the meaning of life?

Scenarios: NOT “best, worst, most likely”!

2009-10-14T09:23:00.000-07:00

I presented to a group last week who were a bit sceptical at my assertion that “best, worst, most likely” (BWML) is a really poor substitute for real scenarios. I accept that BWML can be interesting forecasts, but they aren’t effective scenarios Futurist Joseph Coates puts it best:

An odd number with a best case, a worst case, and a most likely case draws the user to prefer or emphasize the middle case. This best, worst, most likely model of the use of scenarios is deficient not only in regard to the tendency to drive toward accepting the middle, but it misses the point that alternative futures are real possibilities

Real scenario planning has very powerful benefits which in strategic workforce planning allow the organization to craft really effective, targeted talent strategies for competitive advantage…usually by enabling managers to suspend disbelief and explore totally different approaches in a non-threatening way. Forecasting from history does not do this. Also, forecasting from history is a lot less fun than scenario planning, and the business value it less. What’s not to love about scenario planning?

Are you developing real scenarios, or only BWML-ing?

del.icio.us Tags: workforce planning,scenario planning,best worst most likely

Social Networking Data in Workforce Planning

2009-10-11T20:38:00.001-07:00

Steve Boese has an interesting post about some research done inside IBM on internal Social Networking, why people participate and how they behave. Essentially, users are either Caring, Climbing or Campaigning, which really starts to get at how social networking data can indicate all kinds of talent segmentation indicators – take a look at what the research says about what these different user types actually post:

Think about the cool uses for this in analytics, or in segmentation, or in all sorts of other interesting workforce planning software uses? Very, very cool…but also challenging in terms of privacy, stereotyping, etc. I think that this kind of data is essential for “predictive analytics” to be really useful in workforce applications…are you using any of it??

Technorati Tags: workforce planning,predictive analytics

Using historical data to predict the future workforce

2009-10-08T13:19:00.001-07:00

Forbes wants us to learn an important history lesson:

History cannot be used to reliably predict the future, and data-driven extrapolation from past trends or 'analysis by analogy'--practices rife in the business and financial sectors--are particularly hazardous because they can give decision makers an unjustified sense of confidence. However, history is vital to understanding present conditions; without such knowledge, strategic policy planning efforts are likely to go awry.

Unfortunately, a lot of workforce planning software does exactly that, which is dangerous.

However, the main part of the article talks about how historical data is very important in making future policy decisions (the article means government policy, but the same applies for HR strategy and policy of course – workforce planning), provided it’s done right. For me, this means mixing it with other futuring techniques and not using historical data alone…and then measuring progress so you can respond when you are inevitably incorrect in some of your assumptions…

Use historical analysis…with care. Nice article – thanks to Katherine Jones for sending it over!

Technorati Tags: workforce planning,future workforce

Business Techniques Applied to Workforce Planning

2009-10-07T08:41:00.000-07:00

With the surge of interest in Strategic Workforce Planning we are seeing, it’s not a surprise that so many models and approaches are being brought into the workforce planning sphere. So I thought it was a good time to do a few notes on how these models are being used…and what the strengths and pitfalls of using each in WFP is.

Supply Chain. A perennial…slightly bad penny. Yes, I know it’s very trendy in workforce planning to say that optimization and supply chain approaches will provide the most efficient approach to the workforce, but let’s be honest…humans aren’t quite the same as the planning units used in supply chain. David Learmond at The Conference Board said it best, some years ago: “a tonne of pig iron doesn’t tend to have a spouse and children”. Look, there are definitely aspects of supply chain planning which are relevant to workforce planning, but never EVER lose sight of the human aspects…or you will lose relevance and effectiveness. We are not machines, and we should not plan as thought we or the workforce are machines!!! Hmmm, maybe one day I should write an article on this…with David Learmond!
Prediction Algorithms. OK, I confess, this one moves me a bit (I am a serious nerd deep down), and Aruspex does do quite a lot of stochastic and other predictive modeling. BUT, there’s a limit! Maybe the key here is not to believe that the outcomes of the predictive models are the answer to your problems…rather that they can help lead you to the real question?
Kano Models. This one was mentioned at the Human Capital Institute Event, and is based on an 80’s customer satisfaction model – essentially the practitioner was using it to determine if the services (which were metrics and reporting services, not really SWP services) were valuable to the business. This model is usually used in product management, and as SWP should be thought of as an internal product (as should all change initiatives), there is some value…but don’t get lost in this model – the other models described on the wikipedia page probably provide as much value, if rather less potential to confuse! Choose the one that resonates with you.

These are just a selection – what “non traditional” approaches are you seeing in use?

del.icio.us Tags: workforce planning,supply chain,hr planning

HR.COM research on workforce planning

2009-10-05T09:09:00.001-07:00

You can never know too much about a good thing, and so I’d like to encourage workforce planners to participate in HR.COM’s research on the state of workforce planning in 2009. Please, take the survey, share your wins and challenges, and look forward to the results of the research soon.

Talent Segmentation finally gets some press!

2009-09-30T08:52:00.000-07:00

For years we have been saying that organizations need to segment the talent market just as marketers segment the consumer market – not for organizational demand (which is critical groups), but for SUPPLY! And the latest issue of Diversity Executive magazine has someone else talking about it too! In his regular leadership column, Robert Rodriguez (the director of the Kaplan Center for Corporate Learning at Kaplan University)talks about Talent Segmentation:

I recently attended a marketing conference and was amazed by how sophisticated sales and marketing professionals are in segmenting their consumer base. By dividing their market into segments, marketers are able to better meet the distinct needs, wants and behaviors of those with similar characteristics, which ultimately influences their buying preferences.

Of course, if you’re in HR, instead of “buying preferences”, substitute “attraction and retention”, because that’s the HR equivalent. While Rodriguez’s article talks specifically about diverse segments, the principles are true for all talent, just as they are true for all consumers.

Talent Segmentation is one of the techniques which really differentiates strategic workforce planning from the operational kind – but HR are often uncomfortable with it. How about you? Ready to treat the talent market as a market, and be truly competitive in it?

del.icio.us Tags: workforce planning,talent segmentation,talent strategy

Workforce Planning Online Resources Example – NHS UK

2009-09-29T08:16:00.001-07:00

We work with a lot of organizations who are putting “centers of excellence” for strategic workforce planning online, and they are always looking for examples. Of course, most organizations keep their CoE’s private, but the UK’s National Health Service has their Workforce Planning Development Menus online for everyone to see and leverage. It might not exactly match your framework (the SWP framework should always be tailored for your organization), but there are some good examples of “how to”, elearning, solutions and tools in there. Check it out!

del.icio.us Tags: workforce planning,nhs

The Challenge of “Green Talent” and why you shouldn’t limit your Workforce Plans to Organizational Strategy!

2009-09-18T06:22:00.001-07:00

Accenture have posted a very interesting article on the emergence of “green talent”, and how organizations can take lessons from the internet boom on how to integrate these new talent pools.

Companies are seeing a rise in both the supply and demand for “green talent”—employees with the mindsets and skills to drive sustainability in an organization. The authors explain how executives can draw on lessons from the Internet revolution of the late 1990s, when they also had to learn how to integrate new talent pools into their workforces. They also reveal how some leading companies are using a framework to define, discover, develop and deploy their talent to advance sustainability strategies.

We’ve been talking about “green talent” and the impact of sustainability requirements on organizations for a while. It is a great example of an external trend – beyond the organization’s control – which impacts both the supply of and demand for talent. So, it is also a great example of why your strategic workforce planning methodology and software should not be limited to determining what you need for your organization’s strategy…because some really big trends aren’t included in that. It seems counterintuitive, but your examination of strategy should be part of a wider environment scanning approach that also considers external social trends…like “green”.

How are you incorporating trends like these?

del.icio.us Tags: workforce planning,labour planning,hr

Workforce planning on the highline

2009-08-24T11:09:00.001-07:00

I spent last week in NYC, and a highlight was having breakfast with Don Ruse and Mary Young…which we ended by a stroll down the highline, a wonderful new urban park. Wow, what a great community feature that is, and a great way of making advantage out of what you have. I’m sure somewhere in there is a good analogy for workforce planners, but the truth is I forgot to focus on that, what with the concept, the garden and the views all being so wonderful. If you haven’t been there, go!

This is one of those situations where we managed to combine some serious and not so serious discussion on workforce planning with good company and a great location…almost the perfect workforce planning networking group, if a very small one. How are you going about building your SWP networking groups? Any highlines out there?

The Conference Board Model of Strategic Workforce Planning in Action

2009-08-03T13:48:00.001-07:00

As well as releasing their recent research report Implementing Strategic Workforce Planning (in which Aruspex and our clients are featured – of course!), Mary Young has added another excellent free resource to that page – a Flash presentation of “The Conference Board Model of Strategic Workforce Planning in Action”. Mary talks through some key findings of their research, both recently and over the past several years, and discussed their illustration of the relationship between HR strategy and business strategy (left). It’s quick, impactful and well worth a look – and also well worth including in your business engagement activities. More great work from Mary.

Does anyone else use this model, or a similar one, to help others understand what strategic workforce planning actually is?

del.icio.us Tags: workforce planning,hr strategy

Opportunism for Workforce Planners – helping with turnarounds

2009-07-17T12:59:00.001-07:00

I saw Jim Holincheck in Chicago this week, and a group of us were talking about how we do change management for initiatives like strategic workforce planning. I’m a big advocate of the lighthouse approach, but Jim also suggested that leaders who are working to turn around their own business unit or group – they are a group open to creative new approaches to challenges. I think it’s a great point, and an option that all opportunistic workforce planners should remember. Any war stories of successes with workforce planning (or other workforce/talent initiatives) as an aid to business turnaround?

Why Statistics are like a Bikini

2009-07-09T15:55:00.001-07:00

The Conference Board has recently released a Research Working Group Report “Implementing Strategic Workforce Planning”. It notes that one of the indicators that Strategic Workforce Planning is reaching maturity within an organization is that organizational boundaries disappear or become less important:

“there’s a movement to capture workforce data across lines of business and geographies so talent and skills can be utilized as a shared resource and managed more efficiently.”

Looking at averages or summaries hides opportunities and risks that can only be seen with the ability to drill-down, or to “slice and dice” data. A great example is in the share market – people often rely on the “average return”, but this does not paint the full picture. Between 1900 and 2008, the average return of the NASDAQ was 6.94%, but only 2 out of the those 108 years, 1913 and 2007, returned anything within 10% of that long-term average. And in between, there were returns ranging from –54.13% to 81.66%. Aaron Levenstein once summed up the problem of aggregation nicely:

"Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital."

Relying on aggregation is equally problematic in Strategic Workforce Planning. If you are looking at what is happening at your workforce only within the framework of an Organizational Structure, you may miss critical insights such as:

The voluntary turnover of high performers may be higher than, and for different reasons to, the general workforce.
There may be key capabilities possessed only by a section of the workforce that is rapidly approaching retirement, even though the ageing profile of each department is sustainable.
There may be vital differences in the length of service and performance of Full-time employees, Part-time employees, and contractors.

Each of these insights would be missed if your Strategic Workforce Planning is by department only – sometimes you need to see the trees as well as the forest!

Economic Impact – Population Ageing is a lot worse than “The Crisis”

2009-06-28T22:27:00.001-07:00

We’ve been talking about it for a while, and now The Economist is discussing what impact aging populations will have on the world – what The Economist describes as “a slow burning fuse”. Even though the economic crisis has taken focus of aging as an issue, the article clearly paints the major challenge looming for countries and organizations, especially in the developed world. The image at left shows clearly just how much more economic impact this demographic change has than the current “crisis”.

During discussions at the HCI Workforce Planning conference recently, one attendee stated that the economic crisis makes things riskier from a retirement perspective – now, rather than seeing older worker retirement patterns steadily impact as though down a sloping hill, the practitioner expressed concern that many would stay until an economic uptick, and then organizations would see exits more like plunging off a cliff. This is a real threat to knowledge and skill transition, and to business continuity, especially where the potential retirees are heavily concentrated in management. But still people use the economic cycle as an excuse to not worry…yet The Economist article clearly illustrates why we should still worry:

This is a slow-moving but relentless development that in time will have vast economic, social and political consequences. As yet, only a few countries with already-old populations are starting to notice the effects. But labor forces are now beginning to shrink and numbers of pensioners are starting to rise. By about 2020 ageing will be plain for all to see. And there is no escape: barring huge natural or man-made disasters, demographic changes are much more certain than other long-term predictions (for example, of climate change). Every one of the 2 billion people who will be over 60 in 2050 has already been born.

How far away is the impact of these retirements on your workforce? Are you modeling potential impacts in your strategic workforce planning? What ARE you doing about it?

Technorati Tags: workforce planning,labour planning,hr,workforce in a downturn

HCI Workforce Planning Conference Part 2: Operational vs Strategic Workforce Planning

2009-06-19T15:25:00.001-07:00

It’s clear from the conference this week that the two schools of workforce planning are definitely diverging…

Operational workforce planning, focused on metrics, reporting and forecasting
Strategic workforce planning, focused on developing a measurable talent strategy

Sure, they aren’t mutually exclusive, but they are definitely distinct…so I thought it would be a good idea to remind ourselves what the difference between them are. Besides a pretty good answer over there on WikiAnswers, we have a paper that uses this table to describe the differences between the two. What do you think?

Item	Operational	Strategic
Need	Accurately forecast hiring and/or training needs	Develop the best talent strategies for longer term success
Timeline/Planning Horizon	Usually 12 months with a quarterly focus – matches the yearly business plan	Usually 3 years or longer – matches the organizational strategic plan
Integrated with	Annual or quarterly financial/budgeting process	Strategic planning process
Inputs	Mostly internal data, some management decisions	Wide range of internal and external information including demographics, business strategies, global trends, etc
Outputs	Staffing plans, skill gaps	Human Resource/People Strategies
Scenario Planning Approach	Uses variables to explore different models of staffing	Uses futuring techniques to question current paradigms and explore alternative futures not necessarily based on today’s approach
Forecasting	Key focus	Only part of the process – forecasting is too limited in terms of timeline and scope to be the core of the process
Segmentation Focus	Internal demand	Internal and external, demand and supply are all segmented
Skills	Competencies may be audited or gathered at an individual level	Strategic Capabilities analyzed and gathered at the group level
Performed by	HR or staffing organization with input from the business	Business, facilitated by HR
Focus	Operational Management – Line and BU Managers	Strategic Management – Executive and Board
Aligns to	Business Plan	Strategic Plan
Terms used	“Predict”, “Calculate”	“Explore”, “Design”

HCI Workforce Planning Conference Part 1: Evolving WFP landscape

2009-06-18T17:10:00.001-07:00

I went to the Human Capital Institute’s workforce planning conference this week, and of course that many case studies and practitioners in that place will stimulate a few posts…starting with this.

Wow, how workforce planning has evolved. At this event, people seriously discussed environment scanning, scenario exploration, operational vs strategic workforce planning (more on that next post) and lots of other good things. Workforce planning has evolved so that those terms and techniques have become part of the language of workforce planning, not the exotic new items they used to be. Sure, people are still talking about metrics and reporting, but more and more of the really successful case studies really understand that there are qualitative things in the mix as well.

Exciting stuff!

Workforce Planning in Challenging Economic Times – Free Aruspex Webinar

2009-05-31T12:23:00.001-07:00

I’m holding a webinar on Wednesday June 3 (3pm ET) with step by step instructions on how to model and manage workforce planning in these challenging times. It will cover the three planning horizons that all workforce planning needs to consider:

SHORT TERM – optimizing the workforce to survive the economic challenges and increase efficiency
MEDIUM TERM – ensuring the right workforce for strategic advantage and industry leadership
LONG TERM - designing and building the right workforce for new strategies and accelerated growth

Good workforce planning lets you balance and achieve all of these things…and I’ll have a webinar and whitepaper that can tell you how…in some serious detail! Looking forward to seeing you online on Wednesday!

Technorati Tags: workforce planning,economic downturn,talent strategy

Without workforce planning, “a confluence of troubles”

2009-05-19T09:33:00.001-07:00

Great article in Workforce Management magazine pointing out that many organizations are not really seeing beyond any urgent need to do layoffs…to the bigger, longer term challenges which remain in the global talent market:

Many companies are so consumed with layoffs or with just getting by now that layoffs are behind them, they haven’t begun to address the question of what comes next.

…yet the article goes on to discuss in some detail a wide range of things which are likely to come next, including the increased use of contingent workers, continuing population aging, changing skills needed, etc, etc. Regardless of the length of the recession, this larger demographic and societal changes are taking place – and unfortunately too many organizations are using the excuse of the recession to ignore them! Yet the leading organizations ARE preparing for their post-recession selves, making decisions and proactively recruiting the skills they believe will be critical to their future success. Yes, they might be wrong (nothing is certain, after all), but because they have adaptive workforce plans that have considered other options, they are able to be responsive to future changes.

Accenture recently published quite a bit of research that shows that decisions made during recessions have profound impacts on the difference between winners and losers post-recession. So why are people using the recession as an excuse NOT to make strategic decisions, especially about the workforce? Now is the most important time ever to have a strategic workforce plan in place…because ultimately a strategic workforce plan is the framework which allows you to make better workforce decisions.

How is workforce decision making tracking at your organization?

Technorati Tags: workforce planning

Strategic planning: Three tips for 2009

2009-04-28T15:36:00.001-07:00

McKinsey have recently published a brief paper offering tips for strategic planning in the current environment. The three key tips are:

Be realistic about scenario planning – “In a highly uncertain environment, the advantages of scenario planning are clear: since no one base case can be regarded as probable, it’s necessary to develop plans on the assumption that several different futures are possible and to focus attention on the underlying drivers of uncertainty”
Intensify monitoring – “The company’s strategy, in short, must account for many more contingencies than it has until recently. Since the effectiveness of such a strategy depends on an organization’s ability to adjust rapidly as the fog starts to lift, managers must identify and intensively monitor key indicators suggesting which scenario might unfold”
Look beyond the crisis - “devastating as the current downturn may be, it cannot roll back fundamental market
trends—such as the aging of consumers in Europe and North America or the continued economic development of Brazil, China, India, and Russia—which will continue to create strategic opportunities and threats”

Unfortunately, these are three things that most workforce planning approaches don’t do. All too often we see organizations looking at only one possible future scenario; building a headcount plan they don’t monitor at all; and worst of all, saying that “there’s to much change to look into the future”. As McKinsey points out, these are critical mistakes for people planning right now. And they are avoidable – including these three tips in your strategic workforce planning process is not difficult – and gives you better results. Are you following McKinsey’s strategic planning advice?

Technorati Tags: workforce planning,aruspex

Flaws in workforce decisions part 3 - TARGETS

2009-04-22T14:22:00.000-07:00

The final part of my thoughts on McKinsey’s recent “flaws in strategic decision making”, which reports some findings that those guiding strategic workforce decisions should be thinking about.

Reaching good outcomes had three themes – assessment, process and targets. I already posted on assessment and process, this one is on decision making TARGETS. McKinsey described this theme as “aligning incentives and basing the decision on a mix of financial and strategic targets as well as on a mix of short- and long-term targets.”

Individuals’ incentives were aligned with strategic objectives defined by this decision. Here’s one that’s a big deal for management – aligning goals. What’s critical in the workforce planning process, though, is ensuring that you are clear about what your strategic objectives are. These objectives are not “hire X headcount”, they are a rich picture that define how you will achieve the right workforce for future success.
Based on balanced mix of financial, strategic targets. Wow, that’s one we are seeing more and more – making sure that your decisions AREN’T just based on your workforce budget for the next year, or on short term pressures to save money. Rather, mix these financial targets with analysis and discussion on how those decisions will impact the overall ability to deliver on your strategy
Based on long- and short-term considerations. As with point 2, considering both is vital. We often hear people saying, “Oh, three years is too long, we can’t look that far into the future”, or “there’s too much change happening now”, but the reality is by making the decisions that you are making about what you’re doing today in the context of how you need to be successful in the long term, you simply make better decisions today – the two should not be separated, and planning for the future is vital…even if those plans change

it’s a great paper that can give you some really good insights into what qualities will mean you are helping your organization make better workforce planning decisions. As with all opportunities to be better at workforce planning, the idea with these is to think about which are the most important for improving your process, and tackle improving in one or more of them…taking steps in the journey! Which steps are most important to you?

Flaws in workforce decisions part 2 - PROCESS

2009-04-20T13:21:00.000-07:00

Part two of my thoughts on McKinsey’s recent “flaws in strategic decision making”, which reports some findings that those guiding strategic workforce decisions should be thinking about.

Reaching good outcomes had three themes – assessment, process and targets. The last post was on assessment, this one is on decision making PROCESS. The McKinsey paper describes this as seeking contrary evidence, ensuring that
decision makers had all the critical information, giving dissenting voices the floor, reviewing the business case thoroughly even though senior executives were strongly in favor, and ensuring that truly innovative ideas reached senior managers. How are workforce decisions doing on that front?

Seeking contrary evidence. If you get the right people in the project this will happen – and if you charter yourself with structured environment scanning, playing the devil’s advocate, and of course using that famed workforce planner tool “why”, you can find contrary evidence. But it may not come naturally – strong voices can overcome dissent AND contrary evidence….unless carefully managed. Our workforce planning workshops can help you with those skills.
Ensuring that decision makers had all the critical information. This one sounds easy, and sounds like reports from our workforce dashboards are all we need – but take care! If you only use internal data, and only use numbers/metrics…you aren’t giving ALL the information – in fact you aren’t giving information at all, you’re giving data. To provide all the information you need to include interpretation, external data and opinion, and also qualitative views on the “story behind the data”. Ask us for our “hierarchy of information” if you want more tips on how to improve in this area
Giving dissenting voices the floor. Another one that’s about facilitation and project management, a lot like point 1!
Reviewing the business case thoroughly even though senior executives were strongly in favor. As well as facilitation and project management skills, think about the level of the organization at which you are working. Are the people you are talking to and working with on workforce decisions senior enough that questioning a case for which a senior executive is in favor? You need to be!
Ensuring that truly innovative ideas reached senior managers. Seems like an obvious one you can help by making sure that your project team has the best mix of resources…but it’s also a wider cultural question. How does your organization fit on this one?

That wasn’t too hard – a good workforce planning process that mixes the quantitative and qualitative, and that is led by someone focused on being a great workforce planner will solve those! Next….how to leverage better TARGETS when making good workforce decisions.

Flaws in the Strategic Workforce Decision Process – Part 1, Assessment

2009-04-16T13:11:00.000-07:00

McKinsey recently posted some interesting research on “flaws in strategic decision making”, which reports some findings that those guiding strategic workforce decisions should be thinking about.

It’s evident from the results that satisfactory outcomes are associated with less bias, thanks to robust debate, an objective assessment of facts, and a realistic assessment of corporate capabilities. A few clear paths to making successful decisions also are apparent. But even when a decision had a satisfactory outcome, executives note several areas where their companies aren’t all that effective, such as aligning incentives with strategic objectives and forecasting competitors’ reactions.

Reaching good outcomes had three themes – assessment, process and targets. So I thought I would post some thoughts on how these relate to good workforce planning (which, of course, IS strategic workforce decision making!), starting with ASSESSMENT. The McKinsey paper describes the assessment theme as “forecasting demand and competitor reaction, assessing their own capabilities, and tailoring the evaluation approach to the specific decision.” Here’s how that works in workforce planning:

Forecasting demand: I think workforce planning already focuses hard on forecasting demand well. Of course, there is variation in the accuracy of those forecasts, but the attention is being paid to improving them. Using some of these tips for better decision making will in itself help to improve them
Forecasting competitor reaction: Hmmm, not so much. In fact, external factors such as competitor behavior are all too often left out of the workforce planning process, and forecasts based purely on internal historical trends, with a few more internal assumptions thrown in. Take it from McKinsey – if you are sticking to the internal, you are missing one of the key behaviors to make good decisions!
Assessing their own capabilities: Most workforce decisions depend on effectively executing management and/or HR programs for their success. McKinsey points out that the most successful decision making companies were very accurate at this assessment – they planned for what would happen in terms of their own execution…not what SHOULD happen. At Aruspex, we call that being “rooted in reality”. Are your organizational self assessments real?
Tailoring the evaluation approach to the specific decision: Oh, here’s a bad one for many workforce planning initiatives. Many organizations continue to use one set of HR metrics built from a cube rather than tailoring the measures (evaluation) they use to the changes they are seeking to achieve…so they aren’t necessarily measuring or monitoring what they should be. Take a look at the metrics your organization has on the dashboard and see if they vary group to group, according to what the group is trying to achieve. If they don’t…that’s a problem for the quality of your decision making, and are reducing your chances of getting those “good outcomes”.

Next…how to leverage better PROCESS when making good workforce decisions.

Workforce Planning Fatal Flaws?

2009-04-13T23:40:00.001-07:00

John Wheeler has a great post where he shares some hard earned experience over at Fast Fission, describing three fatal flaws for workforce planning…which we mostly agree with….

First Fatal Flaw: Reliance on Zealots. Yes, it certainly can be fatal to be point sensitive on such a critical project…do NOT rely on just a few individuals who make things happen. BUT, when I’ve seen this, often it’s because either the process is too analytical and locked behind closed doors…or because it’s just not a very good project. Typically a good workforce planning process takes on a life of it’s own (our clients are beating the business off with a stick)…and remember that a good dose of passion (such as you might get from the occasional zealot) never goes astray!
Second Fatal Flaw: Lack of Line Experience. Yes, you gotta know the business – or at least learn the business, because that’s what it’s all about. If you do not have line experience, focus hard on learning it, and on being able to speak the language. We’ve seen people without direct line experience be fantastically successful, because they learned and focused on the business
Third Fata Flaw: Lack of Skill in Data Analysis. John says “Every workforce planning team must have core competencies in data analysis and statistics, understanding what information decision makers need, and how to effectively communicate to them” – but of course you can also have good access to these competencies if they aren’t in your team directly. Certainly this one featured highly on our study on what makes a great workforce planner – but so too did the ability to leverage skills in others…which will also help you overcome that first flaw!

There is wisdom in John’s warnings, and learning from practitioners is unbelievably helpful in the journey to being a great workforce planner – we actively encourage you to get over and comment on John’s post sharing your own thoughts on what “fatal flaws” there are out there for up and coming workforce planners!

BUT, what you also learn from John’s advice, since you know he is still practicing, is that in workforce planning, you can survive and outgrow a “fatal” flaw if you have to. But of course if you get the right advice on workforce planning in the first place, you won’t have to.

What flaws have you managed to overcome?

del.icio.us Tags: workforce planning

Seeing Past the Economic Downturn

2009-04-01T10:02:00.000-07:00

I was reading some papers from the ‘must read one day’ pile (Yes, I finally got a chance to do that, because after all, that is what long flights are for.) and I came across the inattentional blindness study (I didn’t make that up!). It was a great reminder to keep your eyes open and not just focus on the downturn news.

Here’s a quick background of Simons and Chabris' study of inattentional blindness known as “Gorillas in our midst”. The researchers asked participants to watch a video in which two groups of players pass basketballs. One group wears white shirts; the other group wears dark shirts. When the research participants are told to count basketball passes among people wearing only white shirts, they subconsciously block out the black shirted individuals. Because of this narrow focus, most participants fail to notice when a man wearing a black gorilla suit saunters into the middle of the screen, pounds his chest, and walks off screen. Intense concentration on the counting task causes people to overlook a striking element of their visual world.

The inattentive blindness study shows that goals focus attention, which unfortunately leads to people overlooking other important features of a task. So what is the relevance of this to Workforce Planning and the economic downturn?

Well, when companies are constantly bombarded with news of the downturn, the temptation is to set drastic goals to reduce expenditure, often within a very short timeframe. Think about the study. A strong goal means a narrow focus. You are so focused on cutting costs or other short-term goals that you miss a golden opportunity that would enable your organization to succeed in the long run.

So how can we avoid disaster?

Most of the time, attention is “grabbed” by events (like the bad news from the economic downturn) rather than deliberately directed. As Workforce Planners we need to ensure we don’t zoom in on some things to the detriment of others. We need to stop and take a good look around. Get a fresh perspective. See the big picture. Or as we like to call it, do an Environment Scan.

Yes, there’s some gloom out there, but there are also plenty of opportunities right now, particularly in the loosening labor market. C-Net’s “spreadsheet of sunshine”, which I discussed in a previous blog, tells us that a number of high-profile companies have recognized this, with big names such as Apple, Intel, Cisco, Facebook and Salesforce.com already targeting skilled staff who are likely to be in high demand in coming years. Yes, they’ve got their eyes on the ball like the rest of us, but they’ve seen the Gorilla too! Find our more about workforce planning in a downturn by reading our whitepaper, Making the Right Business Decisions in an Economic Downturn.

Ten Jobs Where Employers Come Looking For You

2009-03-27T09:50:00.000-07:00

As organizations re-evaluate their staff and staffing plans to align with cost pressures and the current economic environment, there is a fair degree of media attention on unemployment and layoffs.

A sampling: C-Net’s tech layoff scorecard, CBC’s timeline of auto sector layoffs, and Federal projections of an overall unemployment rate of between 8.5% and 8.8% in 2009.

However, astute workforce planners understand that now is not the time to become complacent about the workforce and their organization’s future ability to attract and retain quality staff.

In fact, right now is an opportunity for entrepreneurial and insightful companies to capitalize on market conditions and recruit the kind of top quality staff that will be needed in years to come. C-Net’s “spreadsheet of sunshine” makes a great contrast to the layoff scorecard, and tells us that a number of high-profile tech companies have already recognized this. Big names such as Apple, Intel, Cisco, Facebook and Salesforce.com are already targeting skilled staff like software engineers who are likely to be in high demand in coming years.

But it’s not just about software engineers. As highlighted in the “spreadsheet of sunshine” (I had to get that in one more time as it is uplifting), within the next few years demand will outstrip supply in a number of professions. Some employers will also be forced to woo staff with incentive bonuses, well-paid salaries, and good benefits packages. This is the case regardless of current unemployment trends.

It’s interesting to take a quick look at the types of occupations that are on the list. Ok, there are some obscure occupations, but a lot of them are also squarely in the mainstream. We have Accountants, Computer Software Engineers, Dental Hygienists, Elementary Teachers, Counselors, Nurses, Financial Advisors, and Environmental Science and Protection Technicians. Are any of these occupations in your company?

Here at Aruspex we think that the current environment is as good, if not better to get proactive and workforce plan your future workforce. With the right approach and tools, workforce planners can take advantage of the current economic climate to build a workforce that is better aligned to your company’s strategic needs. Our whitepaper, Making the Right Business Decisions in a Downturn, provides more tips about workforce planning in tough economic times.

Advice for University Students

2009-03-24T16:54:00.000-07:00

I recently met a young man who, after hearing what I do, asked what he should study at university. He had been interested in engineering but then was persuaded to apply for law. He was a second year student, doing okay but not great, and was worried what that might mean for future employment opportunities. He was concerned that he wasn’t passionate about what he was studying and was potentially building a career in something he didn’t like.

So what did I say? Firstly, I commented on his wisdom in recognising that he needed to be passionate about his career. But I also highlighted that a degree in law did not mean he had to practice law, nor did it mean if he started in law he had to stay in law. After telling him he’s only 19 and shouldn’t worry so much, I made the following comments:

Many people change their field of study after their first year at university. They use the first year as a ‘taster’ or, in some instances, to get a foot in the door of the university with every intention of changing into their preferred course in second year.

Yes, there are some careers, such as medicine, law, accounting, engineering and teaching, where you have to have the qualification to practice the profession. However, there are many instances where people study these qualifications and don’t work in the profession. There are also careers that don’t require a specific degree, or need a degree at all—even though it is listed as a pre-requisite—but that’s a topic for another blog another day. The knowledge you gain in any subject will be of merit in your career, even if it’s not directly related. Employers are now looking beyond qualifications and marks when choosing employees, and extra-curricular activities are regarded as a strong indicator of character.

You don’t have to go to university—now or at all. This probably doesn’t seem like ‘good advice’ to many people, but it is an option that should be seriously considered. As potential employers, we should be exploring more options to support people who are exploring careers by entering the workforce while they are still studying, or even to support older parents who never went to University to enter the workforce once their children have grown up.

University teaches many excellent and valuable skills, including self-discipline, time management skills, literacy and numeracy, and higher-order skills like critical and analytical thinking. However, many of these skills are also learnt through a combination of life experience and vocational education. It is all too often employers’ preconceptions and misconceptions that prevent capable candidates from fulfilling important roles in organizations simply because they do not have a degree. Degrees and what they represent are important, but they are not everything. In terms of job satisfaction and turnover, it is important to find a candidate with the personality and interests to match the position.

Designing Job Ads to Attract the Right Applicants

2009-03-18T16:03:00.000-07:00

We recently, and rather excitedly, had to increase our team.

Like most companies, we work very hard to attract high caliber candidates, and we ended up with a great pool to choose from. (And if any of our applicants are reading this, as we said, the decision was hard.)

One of our interview questions was ‘Why do you want to leave your current employer?’ Interestingly, a number of the applicants answered that they had lost the passion for their current work. One even went so far as to say that they didn’t want to get out of bed in the morning and they didn’t like that feeling. They were motivated by doing something that they enjoyed, and they hoped that Aruspex would give them the opportunity to do this.

More than one applicant commented that the words in the job ad really appealed to them; the way in which we ‘marketed’ ourselves worked. This, of course, is not a surprise to us for, as many of you know, Stacy and I subscribe to marketing principles for employment. Employment brand is part of it, but it’s more than the brand. The whole thing has to be marketed, but not in a cheesy sales way. The last thing you want to do is promise something you can’t deliver  all that does is increase first year turnover. You need to recognize the motivators of the people you are targeting, and market these in your ads. Of course, we all believe we do this and we may find it hard to objectively review our own job ads. A technique we use with our clients is to review/critique other people’s job adverts, asking questions. Who is the job targeting? What are the key features being promoted in the job advert? How do the job features match the profile of the people most likely to be available?

This type of analysis can uncover some pretty basic, but recurring peculiarities, particularly when asking that final question about matching job features to the available workforce.

To cite an example, we came across a job ad for telemarketers, supposedly targeted at older mothers looking to re-enter the workforce part-time. I say ‘supposedly’ because the job was not structured to match the target audience. For one thing, training for this part-time role was structured in full-time blocks. But that wasn’t really a major consideration, because the overwhelming majority of applicants wouldn’t even be able to get that far. Why? Before applicants were interviewed, they had to pass a comprehensive computer/technology skills test, and applicants in the target audience were not generally computer-lovers. However, they were good communicators, which is the real core skill required of telemarketers. So the advertisers lost a lot of excellent candidates through the poor design of their ad and the poor structure of the positions.

It always pays to consider your target applicants before you write the ad, then read and re-read the ad in light of the audience. Once you’ve done that, show it to someone else in your organization and see if they have any suggestions. Even better, show it to someone in your target audience and ask for their feedback, not only on the ad, but on the structure of the position itself. What you find out will surprise you!

A Real-World Approach to Planning the Right Workforce for Tomorrow’s Organizations. Part 2: Getting Down to Business: How to Workforce Plan.

Productivity and Workforce Planning

2009-03-12T22:16:00.001-07:00

Since the Carnival of HR will be all about productivity this time, I wanted to share one of workforce planning’s little mysteries….

Why, oh, why do most organizations do their workforce plans based on headcount calculations?

When we do planning based on headcount, we are assuming that productivity and capability will remain the same in the future as it is today…an assumption which is fundamentally flawed. So even though workforce planning is not just about math…the math that it DOES need requires an underlying unit of measure that’s not headcount. Use output instead – that way you can incorporate the impact of your productivity improving programs and really be able to plan for the benefits.

If you are planning using headcount, you are ignoring productivity. Have a look at Eric’s blog and overall at the Institute for Corporate Productivity’s site to understand just some of the reasons why that’s a really bad idea!

Don’t trust HR? OR, have HR apply good workforce planning!

2009-03-11T21:37:00.001-07:00

There’s an article over in CFO magazine called Memo to CFOs: Don't Trust HR – hmmm. Apparently Rutgers University's Richard Beatty, spoke at the CFO Rising conference in Orlando recently, and said that most HR departments don’t have the analytics to support making good decisions. OK, there’s some truth in that, but the assertions it also makes about whether there is evidence to support the value of employee engagement is a little less acceptable. So I kind of went “huh”, then “WHAT?”, but then it took a whole new interesting turn…

“Most companies today spend too little effort on attracting and retaining top strategic talent and too much on satisfying the rest of the employee base”

"If you don't emerge from this market with better talent in the roles that really make a difference, I don't think you're trying."

There’s definitely truth there. Most organizations don’t have any framework in which to target their talent efforts…and the current market is an enormous opportunity for organizations to fix this, and to emerge from the situation in a much better place re talent. You do it through good workforce planning, and the current market is an excellent time to start. Yes, you will need some analytics (there’s a lot of software for that), a proven approach to workforce planning and the right tools to support it, and some techniques to ensure the business in engaged to the process and getting value. And guess what? The spreadsheets you are using today aren’t necessarily helping…nor is the staffing tool you’re having the IT department build. Why? They don’t have “a proven approach and the right tools to support it”…and if you are an HR person who is still taking those unsuccessful approaches even now while organizations are in most need of a better way – you probably will end up being out of the trust loop. BUT, those HR departments who are doing workforce planning well definitely don’t have to worry about THAT!

Technorati Tags: workforce planning,workforce downturn

Employer sponsored childcare and eldercare

2009-03-04T19:49:00.000-08:00

Employer sponsored childcare often comes up in our workshops as a 'solution' to attracting and retaining working parents. Then, in light of the aging population, eldercare is raised and we begin exploring the practicalities—if we were to do this, where should the care be located? Some people want it near the office, some near their home. How can we as an organization know which is best? Can we afford such an investment? (Some even ask can we afford not to proceed.) What are the returns on such an investment?

Here is a slightly different slant on the issue of care as a benefit - emergency care for children or elderly. This refers to those situations when there is an unscheduled, unexpected break down in normal arrangements, requiring an employee to fill the care gap and take unscheduled leave.

I have come across two organizations that are undertaking these programs: Abbey Bank in UK who is using MyFamilyCare and Harvard University’s Parents in a Pinch.

I am sure there are other providers and more organizations with similar programs out there. Do you know of any? Care to share?

Marketing your Organization to Potential Employees

2009-02-24T21:37:00.000-08:00

I recently saw an advert for a Careers fair. It was held on a Friday and a Saturday, and there was an impressive list of organizations participating. I couldn’t manage to make it on the Friday, and as it turns I am quite thankful, as I discovered that schools came on the Friday—by the bus load! However, on Saturday I trundled along to see what it all was about, what materials were passed out, what stands looked like—in essence, how organizations were marketing themselves to the talent market. I learned a lot by attending and I encourage any fellow practitioners to do the same when given the opportunity.

Of the many things I observed the one that struck me the most was that all the literature (brochures, booklets, flyers) targeted youth, people just embarking on their journey into the workforce. And the majority of these were targeting graduates, the only real exception being the trades. I overheard someone inquire at one of the booths about a ‘career change’; the poor person at the booth had no response. (I walked on as there is a line between overhearing and eavesdropping.)

It seemed to me that while it may have been appropriate to focus on youth on the Friday, there was a wide range of ages on the Saturday, and that wasn’t just because there were Mums and Dads attending on behalf of or chaperoning their children. If you reviewed your materials for career fairs, do you have anything for the mature worker (ie anyone older than 23)?

I also noticed that while the literature focused on youth, the giveaways didn’t! Who gets excited about a pen or small notepad with a corporate logo on it? Or, perhaps a more relevantly: a USB key, a sling pak (small promotional messenger bag), a mug with great quote or fun graphic (plus the coy logo of course), traveler mugs, a mousepad or a happy highlighter. The list goes on. . . .

In summary, what an opportunity missed for organizations who could have differentiated themselves by identifying roles that best suited the target audience and promoting career change.

Of course, this all loops back to knowing your targeted talent segment, which is explored in our A Real-World Approach to Planning the Right Workforce for Tomorrow’s Organizations. Part 2: Getting Down to Business: How to Workforce Plan. Perhaps now is a good time to reflect on your collateral and giveaways, and make sure you are aligning them with your targeted market.

Qualitative vs. Quantitative Research

2009-02-15T14:11:00.000-08:00

Once again I find a marketing concept that is beneficial to the Workforce Planning agenda. In a marketing e-letter the following caught my attention: “… a loosely designed program—whether qualitative or quantitative—may not appear as ‘scientific’ at first glance, yet sometimes can do far more to reveal real truths than more carefully crafted and comprehensive research programs.”

My interest piqued, I read on. The article spoke about qualitative research that never deviates from a specific set of questions, and quantitative research that doesn't give respondents an opportunity to expand their answers. This often results in a scientific-seeming, but actually superficial, understanding of your marketplace. It is the stray answer, the unexpected insight, and the uncategorizable response that often creates the greatest opportunity for genuine insight.

The same rings true for Workforce Planning: we can spend a lot of time trying to be accurate about the future workforce but ultimately these results are only possibilities. Subsequent discussions between Workforce Planners and executive are the opportunity to attain insight about probabilities.

Neither is an end unto themselves—you need a combination of the two techniques. Workforce Planning needs to be a menu (a loosely designed program) that allows for exploration and expansion to gain insight about the future workforce. And glimmers of true insight are most likely to be visible via discussions, in between the lines and in the cracks, places where many quantitative techniques don’t go and qualitative approaches scratch the surface of. Our paper, Operational vs. Strategic Workforce Planning: Understanding the Difference and When to Use Each, may help explore this further.

Workforce Planning Research

2009-02-10T09:39:00.001-08:00

Bersin & Associates and The Newman Group are undertaking a study on the critical role of workforce planning in today’s volatile economic climate.

The objective of the study is to identify the current state of maturity in workforce planning processes, level of ownership, range of maturity in audiences served, processes included, and level of integration with other business planning processes.

Here at Aruspex, we believe this study is for the good of all workforce planners because it will validate what those in the workforce planning community have been advocating for many years: strategic workforce planning is a necessity, and current times such as economic downturn is no expcetion.

We encourage you to share your workforce planning insights by taking the survey below:
http://vovici.com/l.dll/JGs8372D7E850ldaD9U279275J.htm

For participating, you’ll receive a copy of the executive summary of the survey results scheduled for release in March 2009, as well as a $5 Starbucks gift card!

Please take action now and complete the survey.

Will the axe be wielded wisely?

2009-02-09T21:17:00.001-08:00

Last week The Economist asked that exact question - under "human capital and the crisis", they pointed out that many organizational responses to the economic crisis are poor decisions, because not enough companies have strategic workforce planning in place:

This crisis is revealing how few firms have really thought through their talent strategies, says Mark Spelman of Accenture. Claims that “our workers are our most valuable assets” are too often platitudes, the emptiness of which is now being revealed. But those firms that have thought seriously about their talent needs have the opportunity to get ahead of those that haven’t

The article questions the wisdom of responses like furloughs and salary freezes, and summarizes some of the downturn activity and unemployment we are seeing. We asked a few months ago how many companies will be ready to respond to future crises, but how many are using strong planning techniques to make today's response wisely? Are you?

Technorati Tags: workforce planning,labour planning,hr,workforce in a downturn

New Year's Resolutions for Workforce Planners

2009-01-23T14:38:00.001-08:00

Every year in our newsletter we publish new year's resolutions for workforce planners, and encourage you to pick at least three for this year. The ten resolutions to choose from are:

I resolve to take achievable, pragmatic steps toward workforce planning. Workforce Planning is a journey which you must travel one step at a time, rather than attempt to implement a fully fledged approach on day one. You might start by introducing environment scanning, creating the right people metrics, or even building a forecast of your "no change future state". Whatever you choose, take the step, and then you can take the next one.
I resolve to look outward and forward, not just inward and backward. Many workforce planning and analysis efforts focus on what has happened in the past inside our organization. Looking at external factors and looking into the future is becoming more important. Ensure that your workforce planning and executive reporting includes these vital aspects.
I resolve to learn Strategic Workforce Planning techniques. Adding skills such as scenario planning, forecasting, and gap analysis to your current skill set might be the most important step you can take in preparing your organization for the future.
I resolve to treat the talent market as a market, and apply marketing techniques to it. The talent market is becoming increasingly challenging, and we need to start competing in it just as we do in the markets for customers and capital - that way we will be competing to win!
I resolve to be willing to forecast the future. Forecasting the future is an inexact art, but many disciplines, including finance and marketing, do so - with varying degrees of accuracy, but almost always with value gained in the process. Remember, all our knowledge is about the past, but all our decisions are about the future.
I resolve to filter data and convert it to information and insight. While a lot of data can be interesting, very little of it is normally useful. Data becomes information when it is positioned in context, and is insightful when it relates to your organization and the executive can easily understand and interpret it to take action.
I resolve to make Workforce Planning a priority in my organization. Can you imagine hearing "it's not a priority" for business planning? With the economy providing brand new challenges and changes, failure to workforce plan could prevent you from achieving your business plans, and the return on investment in workforce planning is usually compelling - make a real business case for your executive!
I resolve to stop letting today's issues make me stop planning for tomorrow. Think of Workforce Planning as the ounce of prevention you need to prevent the pounds of cure you are spending putting out the fires of these burning issues. Look to the future and phase out this fire fighting!
I resolve to share my experiences with other workforce planners.
I resolve to say "why?" and "what if?" at least three times a week!

Ironically, one of my resolutions was to blog more regularly...and this is my first post for the month of January. So MY workforce planning resolutions are starting in February, then - what's happening with you and resolutions?

“Jobs like those that anyone can do” – what’s a critical job?

2009-01-05T12:10:00.000-08:00

A little while ago HRE Online ran a story on some changes that Waste Management made, which incurred big workforce savings by better targeting programs at the managers of front line employees. It concluded:

For our purposes, there are several important conclusions from this story.

The first is how much money can be saved at the lowest level of the company, with positions that are often seen as disposable. "What does it matter how we fill jobs like those that anyone can do?" It turns out that it matters quite a lot.
The second conclusion is that these changes don't have to be rocket science in the sense of radically new ideas. Just getting them executed consistently is enough.

I’m sure we agree with the authors – OF COURSE it can matter how you fill jobs “that anyone could do”…especially, as in this case, if the jobs are critical to the delivery of what the organization does. These roles are strategically core or critical is the point, not just that they are ‘the lowest’…never, ever think that the seniority of the job, or even the skill level required for the job, is what defines how important it is, and how “disposable” it might be.

It’s a good idea to be putting your workforce planning energy towards the most important groups to your strategy. What kind of model do you use to work out where you need to put your creative workforce strategy energy?

Technorati Tags: workforce planning,talent strategy

Forecasts of the workforce in 2018

2008-12-30T21:33:00.001-08:00

Workforce Magazine asked a group of HR leaders to make their best prediction of what HR will look like in 2018, and they are certainly expecting some major changes! Some of the items the experts agreed on include:

An increased focus on infrastructures—such as social networks and wikis—to support building strong relationships and collaboration
Companies will need to balance the need for a unified global culture with local strategic and cultural differences and make core global values locally relevant and easily understandable for all employees
Societies throughout the world will focus on work as a more important crucible for social progress and values

These are serious social changes which will seriously impact the way in which employers interact with employees, and are also just some of the reasons why you can't workforce plan using just historical data...many of the items discussed in the article don't exist yet, so their impact is not yet visible in your historical data. And according to one of the respondents, the rate of change is increasing, not staying constant. Of his 27 years in HR, Ernst & Young's Kevin Kelly said:

In my last five years, the rate of change is greater than in the first 22

Food for thought.

Note that in developing the lists, Workforce used the Delphi Technique, which is also very useful in workforce planning - it's one of the techniques we teach in our workforce planning workshops!

What things are you anticipating will impact your workforce in the next 10 years? OR, since 10 years is really a little long for workforce planning, how about impacts in the next 2-3 years?

HCI: Does Workforce Planning Pay Off?

2008-12-02T09:26:00.001-08:00

Great post by Dr Katherine Jones at the Human Capital Institute yesterday, discussing her recent research into the business value of workforce planning. A great post which includes:

None of us has a crystal ball – the future in today’s world is certainly not at all clear. But through the discipline of strategic, rather than operational workforce planning, HR professionals and their business units can work together to consider the possible, even likely scenarios in the future, and analyze the implications for the businesses’ workforce if those scenarios come to pass. Workforce planning is essential; today’s planners will benefit their companies most by moving to a more strategic model for that plan.

Dr Jones will be revealing the full research results with me at a webcast on Tuesday December 9 and noon - we recommend you join in!

Creating a Talent Strategy with Accountability

2008-11-24T09:47:00.000-08:00

Manage Smarter have covered a recent HCI/Hewitt study on "The State of Talent Management: Today's Challenges, Tomorrow's Opportunities"....and the headline they drew out was Unaccountable Talent Management. A lack of planning, alignment and accountability for talent is evident across most businesses, according to the study...and is why most businesses have trouble executing talent management.

I think it's simpler than that - if Talent Management is the processes we use to shape our talent pool into what we need in the future, how can that possibly be working if we haven't effectively defined what we need in the future? It's that old "shaping it into WHAT?" question!

A good workforce plan is a lot more than a list of required headcount and skill gaps - it's a proper definition of the workforce we will need for future success, how we'll attract and retain that workforce, and how we'll measure and monitor our success! And THAT is what will create accountable talent management - a measurable talent strategy, developed from a strategic workforce plan. Easy!

Workforce Planning: Take Advantage of Opportunities and Hedge Against Risk

2008-11-20T09:56:00.000-08:00

Accenture have updated an earlier article "Trends - Back to the Future". The title is a bit odd given the article talks mostly about trends which did not exist in the past (as many of the trends impacting tomorrow's workforce didn't exist in the past), but it does provide interesting reading.

High performers don’t just find themselves in the right place at the right time. They aggressively scan the horizon, absorb the shifting landscape and act now to take advantage of opportunities and hedge against risk.

How true that is - yet we still see organizations using only historical trends for their workforce planning....not using horizon or even environment scanning to prepare themselves for different opportunities and challenges in the future!

The trends the Accenture article mentions are:

The rapid rise of emerging-market multinationals
The expansion of “shoring” options
Increasing demand for corporate social responsibility
The need for abundant, secure supplies of talent, energy and other scarce resources
National loyalties slowing the process of globalization
Social networking as a business tool
Increasing demand for sustainability
Major new sources of capital
High demand for new and better infrastructure
Rapid improvements in the delivery of government services
Rising consumerism in emerging markets; uneasy consumers in the West
Evolving sources of trustworthy information and advice
“Free” as a legitimate business model
The rise of Africa as an important source of demand as well as supply

Many of these will have a noticeable impact on your workforce as well as your business, but of course they are not the only things which will have an impact. Using proper strategic workforce planning techniques, you can gather executive assessment of the impact of emerging trends...and incorporate them into your workforce plans. If you don't, you are missing opportunities and failing to hedge against risks. In a talent environment like the one we have today, what organization can afford to do THAT?

Does Your Workforce Strategy Need Stretching?

2008-11-17T09:02:00.000-08:00

HR practitioners who are business focused apply business practices to their HR profession - and here's yet another good example of one to be applied, in a paper from the Boston Consulting Group called "Does Your Strategy Need Stretching?"

The short paper points out that some people think that time spent on strategy is time wasted because the future is unpredictable. We hear that argument a lot in workforce planning, and the short BCG paper gives a very strong response:

If visibility is reduced, the reward for foresight is increased. Competing on responsiveness alone implies a neck-and-neck race with little differentiation among players, as well as thinner margins and lower returns. Strategy - because it can offer a head start in the race and even define a new course - remains essential to gaining and advantage, but it needs to adapt to the current environment.

However, it then goes on to decry how many organizations treat planning as a "rigid, template driven, top down approach"...which unfortunately is how many organizations also treat workforce planning. That template driven top down approach is very operational, not strategic, and does not stretch thinking, change engagement models or ever, EVER "define a new course"...and so can not help you create competitive advantage in the talent market. But strategic workforce planning can and does. And the lessons and parallels in this article are very useful for strategic workforce planners. The report concludes:

Just as athletes cannot predict how a match of a race will turn out, companies in today's markets cannot fully anticipate the outcome of the competitive battle. But those better trained to capture and shape opportunities have a decisive advantage.

NOW is the time to use strategic workforce planning to build your organization a decisive advantage in talent strategy.

Workforce Modeling - "What If?"

2008-11-12T08:35:00.001-08:00

The Economist just published a brief piece on Business Modelling, which explains some of the approaches and rationales for testing ideas through models.

Consultants KPMG say that “to take major [business] decisions without first testing their consequences in a safe environment can be likened to training an airline pilot by having him fly a 747 without first having spent months in the simulator”.

Well, that's a bit melodramatic, but right now we have many clients who are modelling ways they might respond to these tight economic times in a workforce sense. Because they have our software, these HR departments are able to show the executive team the short, medium and long term impacts of options like hiring freezes...and they can show them quickly and with a basis in real data, not just hypothesis. Very cool to be able to provide thorough decision support to such tough decisions....but that's one of the key advantages of having workforce planning software - you can provide solid answers to "what if?".

Aruspex's Thought Leaders

2008-11-07T10:59:00.000-08:00

Question 4 of 5 from the most asked questions on Workforce Planning at HR Tech

Stacy and I often joke that every topic is 3 degrees away from Workforce Planning. We’ll be relaxing, reading the paper, watching the news, or even a dinner conversation when something sets off a cascade of workforce planning connections in our mind. It’s true, we see workforce planning connections everywhere!

No, it’s not insanity. Apparently it’s a common symptom of experience, something that happens to every professional after spending 15+ years in an industry. But if this is the highest price we pay for our years in workforce planning, we think we’re doing pretty well.

The fact is, Stacy and I have been involved in workforce planning for some time. Stacy Chapman is a renowned human resources software strategist with more than 15 years of experience in the industry. Prior to Aruspex, she held a successful global strategy role with PeopleSoft, where she designed and launched market-leading workforce management solutions. Her expertise and thought leadership is recognised by her status as a member of the Human Capital Institute's Expert Advisory Panel, and her work appears in publications around the world.

I’ve also learned a thing or two in my 16 years of strategic human resources experience and studying in Policy Studies and Strategic Foresight. In many ways my thinking is the personification of the Medici Effect -
intersections of our lives and experiences (HR and Futurism) to turn the ideas into path breaking innovations. I’ve worked with clients from around the world on a diverse range of strategic HR initiatives, designing and implementing Workforce Planning strategies, planning ahead for future workforce needs.

And then there are our learnings and inspiration from people such as Mary Young of the Conference Board, Don Ruse of Axiom Consulting (previously of Sibson Consulting), Gary Hamel (especially his book with C.K Prahlad 'Competing for the Future'
and 'Leading the Revolution'), and Peter Schwartz's book The Art of the Long View'.

Together, Stacy and I have used all of our experiences and inspirations to build our wealth of strategic planning experience which shapes the framework and methodologies used at Aruspex. Modestly, we are the thought leaders of Aruspex and we are the people that continue to work with our clients, so that our approach and learnings continue to evolve.

Being successful in Workforce Planning.

2008-11-05T02:24:00.000-08:00

Question 3 of 5 from the most asked questions on Workforce Planning at HR Tech

How can Aruspex help our organization be successful in doing Workforce Planning?

Aruspex is a full solution provider, Strategic Workforce Planning doesn’t start with the software. As presented at HR Tech, by Melissa Cummings of Aetna, there is online and offline activities in workforce planning - there is art and science to the process. Aruspex’s workforce planning collaboration with our clients often begins with helping aspiring workforce planners build their capabilities by sharing our tools and ‘tricks of the trades’ via our training workshops.. As positioned by Lacey All, VP Workforce Planning at Starbucks, “demystifies a complex business solution and provides an approach that you can deploy straight away - a great kick start to our workforce planning efforts"

A key focus at the workshops is ‘executive engagement’ approaches. We believe HR should show executive why they need to workforce plan before how. Engagement is critical for successful workforce planning and right now, concerns about economic conditions is an opportunistic catalyst for getting executive to think about the decisions they are making right now, the impact they have on their workforce and how decisions are positioning their organization for the future.

Will you at least be prepared for the NEXT challenge?

2008-11-03T10:02:00.000-08:00

Mary Young at The Conference Board sent me links to recent articles about the increased profit that Entergy has recently announced. It seems they are creating value with scenario planning:

"During the quarter we experienced both the worldwide collapse of the financial market and some of the most devastating storm activity (Gustav and Ike) to ever hit the Gulf Coast area. Through sound integrated scenario planning and preparation, the company was able to meet the operational and financial needs without sacrificing our commitments to our goals and objectives," said J. Wayne Leonard, Entergy's chairman and chief executive officer.

Entergy could respond to major changes in their operating environment because they had used scenario planning techniques. When you have made these preparations, responding to major events and challenges can be targeted, calm and effective. If you are currently working in an organization which is panicky about the current economic situation or one who is having layoffs like American Express, you would no doubt be wishing you had explored some scenarios earlier - if you had, you would know how to respond in the way which sacrifices the least value, maybe even creates it like Entergy have. That's what a strategic workforce plan does for Talent Management decisions - allows you to target, respond - and meet needs without sacrificing objectives!

Now, there are many organizations for whom it's too late to be prepared for current events...and the wiser ones of these will realize that it's a critical priority to take steps to not be caught short again. It reminds me of an old expression:

"The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now"

If you weren't prepared this time....better be prepared NEXT time!

Is your Talent Strategy prepared for surprises?

2008-10-30T14:38:00.001-07:00

McKinsey Quarterly have a discussion happening on line on seven ways China might surprise us in 2009. The suggestions range from China announcing that by 2020 half of their cars will be electric to banks in Taiwan merging with Chinese banks.

Each of the 7 is a plausible event, each is what people call a "game-changer" - and each could happen in the next few years. For an individual organization, each might look more or less likely, and each would have a different level of impact - but smart organizations are of course already exploring potential scenarios like these for their business. Unfortunately for these organizations, they are usually NOT doing such exploration and planning about how these things might impact their workforce - but they should!

One of the main reasons that people don't do this scenario work for workforce is that they don't know how to develop the right scenario conditions - you can't just Google "the things that might really impact my workforce over the next few years"! But a good strategic workforce planning framework allows you to do this and more - and it's not rocket science! And if you don't do it, you can be certain that your talent strategy is not going to be prepared for a "game changer".

Is your talent strategy prepared for surprises?

How do current economic conditions affect a Workforce Planning initiative?

2008-10-28T18:49:00.000-07:00

Question 1 of 5 from the most asked questions on Workforce Planning at HR Tech

Right now organizations are visiting their strategic plans that design their organization’s future, this includes overall business vision, financial, marketing and workforce (if they have them) plans. For those organizations without a Strategic Workforce Planning it is most timely to at least ask and answer critical questions such as those below.

Which roles are critical to the delivery of our strategy? So that we can ensure that we have strategies in place to retain these resources, give them confidence of the organization’s future.

Do we have the capability and capacity to deliver our strategy? Is our business strategy changing at all to accommodate business conditions? If so do we need to review the types of capabilities that are needed? If we believe that we need to scale capacity (i.e. reduce staff), where are the smartest places to do this.

What should we spend our people budget on? What should we spend on right now that positions us correctly for the future?

Of course those organizations with a Strategic Workforce Planning tool, such as CAPTure
are enabled to present a visualization of their future workforce needs.

Can Aruspex do operational planning as well as strategic planning?

2008-10-24T06:44:00.000-07:00

Question 1 of 5 from the most asked questions on Workforce Planning at HR Tech

The short answer is YES. We actually don’t see operational and strategic workforce planning as mutually exclusive. In order to have an operational plan that is meaningful you need to know what the targeted future is. Financial, Marketing and Policy areas do not prepare annual operational plans without a 3-5 year view. The workforce plan shouldn’t be any different.

As we explained to many of our HR Tech booth visitors, when someone is recruited to your organization they are usually recruited with the intention to have that employee for a minimum of 3-5 years. However without strategic workforce planning, and only an annual operational plan, you haven’t got anything to guide the decision making, except that you need them right now with the skills needed for right now. Hire decisions are not just for the right now; every hire decision is affecting your organization’s future (that includes the decisions not to hire, but more on that in our blog how the economy affects a Workforce Planning initiative).

A strategic workforce plan with a 3 to 5 year timeframe aligned with your business strategy is needed for every organization to be sustainable. An operational plan needs to be sourced from a 3 to 5 year vision of the workforce. CAPTure our product, presents the long term view and the granular snap shots as to what your workforce looks like for certain timeframes of 1 year, 6 month, 3 month and even 1 month, which in turns powers you to be able to progress check.

We believe Strategic Workforce Planning is an imperative to good operational workforce planning. Wouldn’t you agree?

The 5 most asked Workforce Planning questions at HR Tech

2008-10-22T06:27:00.000-07:00

HR Tech 2008 Chicago was great but an exhausting few days!

Aruspex client, Melissa Cummings , Vice President Workforce Planning of Aetna presented (refer newsletter) the Aetna workforce planning journey. Melissa’s presentation was well received(see here ) and generated great questions creating quite a bit of traffic to our booth. To those that visited us, we look forward to keeping in touch and furthering our relationship.

In de-briefing after the conference we identified the top 5 questions asked of us on the booth.

• Can Aruspex do operational planning as well as strategic planning?
• How is Aruspex’s offering different from the other software vendors?
• How can Aruspex help me be successful in doing workforce planning?
• Who is Aruspex’s thought leaders?
• How do current economic affect a Workforce Planning initiative?

We will be covering off the responses to these questions over the next few blogs...once we fully recover from HR Tech. Stay Tuned!

Fewer future graduates for finance?

2008-10-09T10:16:00.000-07:00

Computerworld thinks that the credit crisis might just be helping to ease the "inadequate pipeline for IT professionals" which exists in the US.

Bryant said he expects that the troubles on Wall Street will likely influence some students to switch majors in the coming months from business to other fields, including computer science. He also urges caution to those students.
"I like to tell students that if you make your career choice that quickly based on what is hottest this month, you're going to be graduating in four years and that field may not be hot anymore," Bryant said. "I tell them to major in something they like and not what's a likely short-term fluctuation in the job market."

There is certainly plenty of finance talent on the market, and likely to be more over the coming months, but organizations who need finance graduates (and are there any that don't?) might want to consider how future graduation trends might be impacted, even if only for a short term. IT, however, might have something to smile about!

This is an example of an external environment factor that needs to be considered in workforce planning....one of umpteen such factors that show why you can't plan your future workforce using just your historical data. Are you scanning your environment and incorporating emerging trends into your workforce plans?

Workforce Planning and Layoffs

2008-10-07T15:38:00.001-07:00

Business Week this week has an article about corporate budget cutting (the budget knives come out) in the face of the credit crisis, including this comment:

The most painful trim, of course, is in payroll. Many executives expect layoffs to be swifter and deeper than before, accompanied by pruned salaries and bonuses for those who remain

I worry about organizations who haven't implemented strategic workforce planning in a climate like this. If we need to lay people off, but we don't have a strategic workforce plan, how do we know who the right groups to lay off are? Your workforce plan lets you quickly see which groups are strategically important, which groups are already short staffed, etc...so you make informed decisions if you have to make layoff choices - or even better, are able to know that attrition, retirement or other trends mean you shouldn't actually lay off at all! A solid future view of the workforce is necessary to make good calls in this tough situation.

Of course, those who have already explored this workforce scenario in their strategic workforce planning process already know how to respond, but many organizations haven't even started down the path - this economic environment makes workforce planning more critical than ever.

Strategic Workforce Planning - Growing Role!

2008-10-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

More and more organizations are learning the value of dedicated teams for strategic workforce planning, as this job ad at our client Starbucks shows:

The role of strategic workforce planning has never been more important than it is today both in the marketplace or here at Starbucks. Join an innovative team and help us move this practice forward.

"Never been more important" - how true!

The attention of the business, the CFO and the head of finance to the issues around the future workforce mean that teams who are using a strategic, pragmatic approach to workforce planning are delivering real value to the business and being rewarded for it, although it's still tough to find the right people for the role. It's an emerging discipline, but more and more people are learning how to become great workforce planners, to meet the growing demand globally for the skills.

Is your team growing and getting more attention from the business...and are you becoming a great workforce planner?

Will the Election Impact Your Workforce?

2008-10-03T10:00:00.000-07:00

Talent Management magazine has published an article on Obama vs. McCain: What the Election Means for Employers - and there are potential changes which will impact many aspects of employment policy and practice. This means potential change for many....but the article only really looks at likely to change to direct employment law. But of course there are much bigger (longer term) potential issues - healthcare reform, energy policy, trade policy impacting offshoring, etc. When we are thinking about effective workforce planning, these bigger issues need to be considered.

If you only look at the employment law issues, you are, as they say, not seeing the forest for the trees - the bigger, less tangible changes are the ones with the challenge and so the opportunity in terms of your long term talent management success.

Unfortunately, this is often what happens in scenario planning - rather than developing rich pictures of potential futures by exploring uncertain, intangible issues and thereby improving our ability to identify and respond to different future outcomes, people take small, easy variables and use them to create slightly altered forecasts of the future. Think of those as trees instead of forests.

So which way are you exploring how the election might impact your workforce future - the forest, or the trees?

The CFO and Workforce Planning

2008-10-02T11:25:00.001-07:00

CFO Magazine (October 2008) has published an article on retiring baby boomers, talent shortages, strategic workforce planning...and how the CFO should be responding to these issues. While being unconvinced there is a major across the board talent crisis, the article definitely advocates action:

"Macro trends don't matter that much to any given company," says Mary Young, senior research associate with The Conference Board. "What they really need to do is analyze their own workforce." Enter the CFO, who can help with everything from projecting labor supply and demand to handling cost/benefit analyses of retaining specific people. Why should finance get involved? As Young tactfully notes, "The ability to do statistical analysis is not traditionally within the realm of HR."

We are asked this question nearly as often as the question of where the workforce planning function belongs in an organization. We've known for a while that the CFO is concerned about workforce issues, but what IS their role in workforce planning? Of course it is as a key player and business partner in the process. However, as with all business partners in the process, be sure you get the right level of person. You don't want to end up in an annual budgeting process (that's what you do with operational workforce planning) when what you are trying to achieve is a longer term strategic view - so be sure and include the CFO or someone near her to be a key player. Like HR, the role Finance needs to play is a strategic partner to the business, not compliance police!

Planning for Workforce Intangibles

2008-09-30T17:09:00.001-07:00

Harvard Management Update recently pushed out an old article on Hiring for Intangibles, which got me thinking about intangibles in workforce planning. The article stated what most HR professionals see as the obvious:

Whether you’re trying to fill an executive-level position or one closer to the front lines, intangibles such as attitude can spell the difference between a hire who proves merely competent and one who goes on to shine. Of course, serious candidates usually need to meet a certain baseline in terms of their education and experience. But beyond that, other criteria come to the fore in assessing how well the candidate is likely to perform one year, three years, five years down the road.

Well, duh! BUT, when most organizations are doing their workforce planning, they are still focused on headcount and (sometimes) skills - all hard, demand based stuff...not planning for how they will identify, attract and retain the people with the intangibles the organization needs for real success. Time to move on - a good strategic workforce planning methodology can very definitely incorporate intangibles as well as tangibles....so why are many people still stuck in the numbers game?

Economist Summary of Scenario Planning

2008-09-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

If you are looking for a good summary and some references for real Scenario Planning (not just slight changes to your forecasts!) to use in your strategic workforce planning, the Economist posted a good online Idea recently.

Demographic Projections - Change is Constant

2008-09-16T11:41:00.000-07:00

"If demography is destiny then the British are roaring forward" starts a recent article in The Economist about changing demography in Europe. The article includes some very interesting facts, figures and trends about UK population, current and projected, but I think more importantly it points out some of the challenges of using demographic projections in anything, including in strategic workforce planning:

But demographic predictions are notoriously unreliable. In the 1940s one projection failed to predict the post-war baby boom and showed just 35m people living in Britain by 2000. As recently as 2001 British women were having an average of 1.6 children each, a record low. Today that has risen to 1.9, a number not seen for a quarter of a century, for reasons that are still unclear (although immigration plays a part). That much of Eurostat’s predicted boom comes from immigration makes it even wobblier, since migration flows depend heavily on economic circumstances, as well as on fickle changes in politics and migration law.

Sometimes people use reasons like this as excuses to not include the impacts of demography on their future workforce, but when you consider some of the significant changes forecast by the article (aging, immigration, environmental impact, economic benefits, increased outward migration, overcrowding, etc, etc), it is clear that to ignore these major social trends is perilous for a country, just as it is perilous for an employer. The lesson to be learned from the warning, is not that you should ignore foreast demographic change, but rather that you should monitor the forecasts regularly - as part of the environment scanning so critical to workforce planning!