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Driving Growth Through Strategic Workforce Planning

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Driving Growth Through Strategic Workforce Planning

By Robert Staeheli and Gareth Cummins

The Eurozones double dip recession has nally come to an end, with the bloc growing slowly through 2013 and early 2014. While the recovery is patchy and core nations are faring better than smaller territories, there are strong indications that consumer condence is increasing. As a result, now is the time for your business to prepare for growth, including investing in your workforce. In fact, youve got a lot to address. Years of economic stagnation have resulted in:  A diminished workforce: Businesses were forced to lay off resources, resulting in a loss of talent.  An aging workforce: Financial insecurity led older workers to stay in place longer than they otherwise would have.  Outdated skills: Reduced budgets have led to reduced training. While businesses in more vibrant economies have advanced, lower recruitment levels in Europe have caused skill stagnation.  Obsolescent technologies: HR is often at the end of the queue for IT systems upgrades. Lack of access to data that provides accurate, meaningful insight into skills, talent, and risks makes it difcult to develop a modern, global workforce. To overcome these issues, you need to focus on workforce planning that strategically transitions your current workforce to meet future needsand, by doing so, elevates HR into a leadership role in the organisation.  Inexible work modes: Companies have missed the opportunity to adopt new, more agile work modes that increase productivity while reducing costs.  Traditional business models under threat: Entire business models are becoming obsolete or uncompetitive as new entrants harness new work styles.

Leading Practices That Support Business Strategy and Operations

According to APQC, top HR performers spend 20 percent of their time on workforce planning compared to 8 percent by low performers. Since businesses live or die by the strengths

of the skills and capabilities of the people who work for them, HR leaders must thoroughly assess their current workforce and understand how they need to develop and evolve their people to meet the demands of facilitating growth while facing increased competition. Certainly most organisations do some sort of planning at some level of detail, but how well do they do it? Successful workforce planning uses a sustainable, methodical, repeatable approach that is recognised and ingrained across the organisation.

 Insight: Insights from qualitative and quantitative sources are needed to produce a strategy and plan aligned with organisational realities.  Dynamic: Workforce planning and monitoring is an ongoing process, facilitating the ability to react and adjust to changing dynamics.  Technology Enabled:To routinely react and adjust with exible solutions, planners must have access to sophisticated analytics, metric libraries, scenario planning, and robust reporting.

Successful workforce planning uses a sustainable, methodical, repeatable approach that is recognised and ingrained across the organisation.
The following six characteristics are keys to HR taking a more proactive leadership role. Do they describe whats happening in your organisation?  Business Alignment: Workforce planning requires close alignment with the organisations business strategy development process. It includes workforce strategies and plans that cover both the near term (one year) and long term (ve years).  Integration: Workforce planning relies on talent functions to provide input as part of an integrated talent cycle, and helps operationalise the workforce strategy and plan.  Collaboration: Inputs, data, and collaboration from multiple levels, people, functions, and systems within an organisation are essential ingredients for success. The right parties must be at the planning table.

Getting Started
It may seem early in the game if youre still feeling the weight of recession. But, in fact, its never too early to plan for growth. Your rst job is to be clear about what you want to achieve through workforce planning. The challenges will likely include providing innovative ways to measure employee productivity and manage talent costs, developing a more exible workforce, balancing the cost/risk ratio of in-house versus third-party resources and subject matter experts, and aligning workforce planning to specic functions, such as IT, to ensure you have the right people in place to support future technology. It could also include understanding and preparing your business to deal with a more competitive talent environment and creating a talent pipeline, or elevating HR into the role of critical business partner from supporting player. With your goals in place, there are six steps you can use now to set the stage for your plan: 1.  Start with the basics of workforce planning and evolve to more sophisticated analysis based on experience and stakeholder needs.

2.  Prole and understand current internal capabilities and, based on organisation direction, focus on the critical jobs that drive your business. 3.  Create realistic shor t-term and long-term plans, including any investments needed to meet the future work requirements. These could include role/capability designs to adapt to changing and challenging markets, succession planning (addressing immediate and longterm risks), and recruitment/retention planning for critical organisation roles. 4.  Focus on determining the best t for your organisation and how it operates rather than strictly relying on best practices or benchmarks to make key decisions. 5.  Prioritise your workforce needs based on bridging the gaps, and dene a clear business case demonstrating the value this will bring to the organisation. 6.  E stablish a timeline and set realistic, tangible measures of success.

providing grounded insights into challenges that matter to the business.

Addressing an Environment of Challenges

Over the past several years, many organisations have had to deal not just with the challenges of holding a business together, but also with the recessions impact on employees. Employee torpor is a challenge many businesses face, especially in light of the decline of real wages in relation to the cost of living. HR must take part in re-motivating the workforce, but it needs the right tools and levers to help. As the economy inevitably improves, youll also face other challenges and risks as you implement your workforce plans. Many older workers who stayed on instead of retiring may feel more financially secure and interested in leaving. Youll be recruiting replacements from a very different generationand managing the complexities of rapid succession planning. Having said that, we are still seeing older workers stay on the job longer. So, youll be addressing the needs, cultures, and aspirations of different generations. While you dont

The best workforce planning organisations started small and focused on building credibility first through accuracy and then by providing grounded insights into challenges that matter to the business.

want to lose the experience and knowledge your older workers provide, you also need the innovative, creative ideas of a younger generation. Navigating this balance means developing a strategy for how to meld this mix to best meet the companys needs. As the economy grows and more organisations begin to hire, not only will you have the opportunity to pick up talent, your competition will have the ability to do the same.The Internet and social media have made it much easier for employees to learn

But most importantly you need to get started. The best workforce planning organisations started small and focused on building credibility rst through accuracy and then by

about workplace culture at other companies. How does your business stack up in regard to benets, exible working choices, social and ethical commitments, access to new technologies

and ideas, career development prospects, and opportunities to innovate, travel, or work overseas? Finally, as mentioned above, if you want the business to view HR as a strategic partner, you must determine how you can provide the business with critical workforce analytics and insightsnot just for basic operational activities but also in regard to workforce demographics and forecasting future workforce needsand the people strategies required to achieve them. Do you have the technology in place, as well as the time and competencies, to accomplish this?

next. You have the ability to revive a diminished, disengaged workforce, cut through the challenges the recession has wrought, and take the initiative in establishing a strategic workforce plan that will help drive business strategy. Growth is coming. Your business cant be caught unprepared. A forward-looking plan that addresses whats just ahead as well as the burst of energy to follow will set the foundation for your companys success and place HR in the position of strategic partner.

Greeting the Other Side of the Downturn

As we see a glimmer of light at the end of this vast tunnel and, yes, its thereHR is well placed to help lead the business forward to meet new opportunities.Your business relies on the quality of its people, making you the fulcrum of what happens

Robert Staeheli is the Global Practice Leader of the Human Capital & Business Change Practice at Wipro Consulting Services. He is based in Washington, D.C., and may be reached at robert.staeheli@wipro.com. Gareth Cummins is an Associate Practice Partner in the Human Capital & Business Change Practice at Wipro Consulting Services. He is based in London and may be reached at gareth.cummins@wipro.com.

About Wipro Consulting Services

Wipro Consulting Services helps companies solve todays business issues while thinking ahead to future challenges and opportunities. As a business unit of Wipro, one of the worlds leading providers of integrated consulting, technology, and outsourcing solutions, we bring value to our clients through end-to-end business transformation think, build and operate. Our model for the includes implementing lean process transformation, exploiting new technology, optimizing human capital and physical assets, and structuring next generation partnering agreements that create value and win/win business outcomes for our clients. For information visit www.wipro.com/consulting or email wcs.info@wipro.com.

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