Workforce Planning: as difficult as "irony" for many to define? Stacy Chapman 8:53 PM

I have been looking at Zoominfo's latest research report "The 2008 Recruiting Landscape: Five Recruiting Gurus' Predictions", and the number one item is workforce planning. However, the report goes on to complete their description of workforce planning with:

More and more companies are preparing for peaks and troughs in hiring by developing structured workforce plans, including succession planning for key roles, candidate pipelines for other roles, and candidate nurturing programs

What? Sure, all of those are valid activities for a staffing organization, but succession planning is not workforce planning, and neither are candidate pipelines or candidate nurturing. Yes, each of them might be a valid part of the action plan that workforce planning can produce....but in themselves they aren't workforce planning.

It seems the term "workforce planning" is getting more confusing, and people are applying it to more and more things - it's getting like the definition of irony! "I can't, uh, really define irony," says Winona Ryder in the 1994 movie Reality Bites, "but I know it when I see it!". Hmmm - almost as bad as when Alanis Morissette completely missed the real meaning* in her song!

So why is Workforce Planning so difficult to define? Primarily, it's because there are different kinds of workforce planning, which are for different purposes, most readily separated by the planning horizon (plans have horizons of a week, a quarter, a year....or 3-5 years). If you are struggling to understand what workforce planning is, and which of the many interpretations around are right for you, have a look at our brief "Operational and Strategic Workforce Planning: Understanding the differences and when to use each", which should make it a bit clearer...and a lot easier than having to "know it when you see it"!

* Technically irony is when the literal meaning of something is the opposite of the real meaning - but if you have a look at dictionary.com, you'll see that even the experts disagree...a bit like workforce planning!

The next generation of leaders Stacy Chapman 12:11 PM

One of the most critical questions facing companies is how to develop the next generation of leaders. We’ve talked a lot about the shrinking workforce and that today’s workforce market is lacking in qualified employees to fill the necessary job roles. Companies need to be proactive and prepared for future performance with a ‘ready now’ workforce.

We at Aruspex believe that the lack of people in leadership roles is not because there is a shortage of qualified workers; rather, it is a direct result of not Workforce Planning. Failure to consider the future impact of flattening structures in the organisation has resulted in the reduction in the number of middle management roles, diminishing the organisation’s capacity to produce vibrant leaders to sustain the business into the future.

One of the barriers to the development of future leaders is a failure to recognise leadership potential. Leadership is a very broad term – what it means to one person is not necessarily what it means to somebody else. There are many different skills and attributes that make a good leader, however, many people don’t recognize all of them.

To illustrate this, I was told about a recent Monash University leadership seminar on the topic of ‘future leaders’, where delegates were asked to write on a whiteboard the name of a great leader. The people listed, and their leadership styles, were as varied as the cultural backgrounds of the delegates: political figures like Mao Tse-Tung and Nelson Mandela to religious personalities like Jesus Christ, and even sports stars like Tiger Woods.

Whether or not we believe their ideas to be valid, there is no denying that these unique and contrasting individuals from various backgrounds had an exceptional ability to lead others. Apart from their leadership skills, they do have one thing in common, however, and that is that they’re prominent leaders in their fields. Many of our strongest leaders are not well-known or famous and these are the ones that we need to recognise and make the most of for the future workforce.

Leadership skills are not dependent on a University degree: they might not even be dependent on work experience or a managerial role. The single mother who has survived the death of her husband to raise a family on her own probably knows a lot more about leadership than the young University graduate who has been spoon fed his entire life. It’s just a matter of tapping into those skills and making them work in the workplace. This is particularly the case in the modern environment where fully qualified employees are hard to find. The best leaders might not be those that have been trained for it, but those that were developed leadership skills naturally.

Sometimes experience – in work and in life – is even more valuable than a University degree, particularly when considering the next generation of leaders.

Embracing "Employee Mobility" Stacy Chapman 6:03 PM

Environment Scanning happens everywhere, all the time.  Flying a long way south for the holidays, I flicked through the pages of an in-flight magazine to see an ad from the Melbourne Business School (you don't get much further south than that) - a page long "insight" discussing the value of alumni programs for business.  We've long advocated alumni programs as an important tool in tight labor markets, and this was a great quote:

Instead of focusing only on ways to stop people leaving, organisational leaders need to recognise that employee mobility is a fact of life.

Too true!  Of course, implementing an alumni program isn't a silver bullet for all of the issues around employee mobility, but acknowledging the "fact of life" that is movement out of your organization and incorporating it into your workforce plans is very important for your success.  People will leave, even really good people will leave - embrace it.

PS:  The heading of the ad was the slightly silly "the war for talent is over:  talent has won".  But I kept reading anyway....lucky it was a long flight!