Can I ask you a couple of questions?
Think back to when you were 15 years old – what capability were you consciously building?
(Think education, think clubs and societies. Or maybe it was sports. Or a musical instrument)
Got it?
OK. Now come forward to the present day
(welcome back)
What’s the biggest (or silliest) challenge you’ve faced personally or professionally in the past 5 years?
Got one?
OK. My last question:
Were you ready for what happened these last 5 years because of what you learned at 15?
(maybe so, but I’m willing to bet it’s more likely that it’s at most just one part of a whole picture)
If you’ve been following the growing interest in workforce planning over the past few years, you may be thinking it’d be great to have a single, categoric Workforce Plan that prepares your organization for what it will face at 1-, 3-, and 5-year horizons and beyond.
(as Radiohead would say, Nice Dream)
Here’s the thing, though… If that’s your state of mind with respect to workforce planning, then you sound pretty much like a High School career adviser telling that 15 year old that taking “x” and “y” classes will be all they need to live a long, healthy and prosperous life.
ONE PLAN TO RULE THEM ALL
Often, when I’m called in to help with workforce planning, I’ll find such thinking has led to it’s being positioned as a panacea, or used as a Band-Aid.
“If only we had a Workforce Plan, all this pain would go away”
Believe me, I enjoy nothing more than doing great work to make pain go away but, unfortunately, a Workforce Plan can’t:
- Fill the void left by absent Business Strategy
- Solve corporate political turf wars over who gets to do what
- Magically re-skill your workforce to meet customer needs
- Align out-of-touch leaders to their non-preferred strategic direction
I’ve been asked to provide Workforce Plans against each of these contexts
(among others)
and what follows is a very dicey game of doing what’s possible while ALSO re-engineering thorny upstream issues. That’s great fun for a problem solver like me, but it’s risky – anyone who bases their own success upon client success knows to beware an agreement that can’t deliver what’s being asked for.
You see, the business literature – and particularly the HR literature – has been guilty of presenting workforce planning as an exercise in certainty when, in fact, it’s an exercise in PROBABILITY.
So, in a nutshell, what questions does workforce planning seek to address?
Given our CURRENT UNDERSTANDING of the 1-5 year strategic horizon:
- What OUTPUTS will deliver success?
- What WORK will produce those outputs?
- What are the optimal SOURCES (quality, cost, time) to deliver that work?
- How will we put in place the right CAPABILITY and CAPACITY in those sources?
Now, note that the first step of that includes a “current understanding” clause.
In other words, we’re dealing with the “how likely…” of strategic outlook, based upon a confidence assessment.
Which means that the best we can hope of workforce planning will always be scenario-based.
(So, let’s just burst that certainty balloon once-and-for-all, shall we?)
Instead, let’s think of our Workforce Strategy as a “best guess” for where the journey is going, and what the road/conditions may look like…
And let’s construct a Workforce Plan that delivers short-term actions and decisions to put in place the capability and capacity to deliver current and emerging business goals.
Framed like this, we could expect our Workforce Plan to be specific on:
Forecasting
- Business projections
- Internal trends (promotion, turnover, etc.)
- Skills inventory (what, where, quantity)
Sourcing
- In-house vs. out-source vs. off-shore
Capability/Capacity
- Hire
- Acquire
- Develop
- Move
- Remove
And yes, there are ancillary areas of Talent & Organization Capability that connect here: Organization Design, Performance Management, Reward & Recognition, etc.
But these are ancillary to, and supportive of, the Workforce Plan, which is about ensuring capability & capacity to deliver current and emerging business goals.
Business goals that are always shifting.
Which is why, while a single Workforce Plan will not save you, an ongoing commitment to workforce planning might just…
Vincent Tuckwood is a Coach, Consultant, and Founder of View Beyond LLC.