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Engaging Executives in Workforce Planning |
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One of the most common questions we are asked is how to engage executives to Workforce Planning. Although everyone needs to tailor their approach to suit their own organisation and executive, there are some common recommendations - here are three of them.
Show executives why, not how. Too often the focus is on trying to systemise Workforce Planning by creating templates, toolkits and process maps to roll out. This approach usually results in badging Workforce Planning as ‘just another fad from HR’. As many of our clients know, we prefer to start by demonstrating WHY Workforce Planning needs executive attention and so get the executive to ask HR how. So how do you show them ‘why’? Keep reading….
Report the future, not ‘as at’ the past. Presenting a picture of what the future could be if current recruitment and turnover trends continue can be a powerful one. There are some simple ways to do this (our website has one of them – go to Resources and select Workforce Forecaster). This simple forecast shows how your current trends are shaping the organisation’s workforce. This provides much greater insight than the number of employees with a certain profile (age, level, length of service etc) ‘as at’ a particular date in the recent past. Even when executives argue that they know things aren’t going to stay the same, so the forecast isn’t accurate, you’ve still won as they are engaged in discussion about their workforce - be sure to capture their input.
Executive Summary, not the full report. The most important part of your Workforce Plan is the Executive Summary. A 3 - 4 page brief outlining the environmental factors influencing your workforce, key characteristics of your current workforce, key requirements of your future workforce, the gaps that exist between them and the way in which the gaps are going to be closed. As a rule of thumb you should aim for a page for each section with 5 - 10 bullet points per page. Remember it should only be the critical issues. On each page indicate that there is a more detailed report available, but only attach the detail if you are certain your executives want it. Emphasise reading the Executive Summary to your executive team as this is where you put the issues you want to make sure they know about. This is the document that everyone can ‘live and breathe’ and refer to during the year.
And on that note, it is probably time for us to refer you to the detail! For more techniques for engaging executives in the Workforce Planning journey, be sure to read our Workforce Planning White Paper, Wishful Thinking. The paper also proposes some ways to challenge the barriers that arise during Workforce Planning and covers off the key activities for Workforce Planning. If you haven’t already, download a copy now. If you have read it, may be its time to revisit some of the fundamentals. |
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Book Review - The Medici Effect | | |
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The idea behind Frans Johansson's "The Medici Effect" is simple: When you step into an intersection of fields, disciplines, or cultures, you can combine concepts into a large number of extraordinary new ideas. The name Medici Effect coming from the remarkable creativity that was funded by the Medici banking family in 15th century Italy – the Renaissance. |
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We believe Workforce Planning is an intersection of HR and Marketing discipline, HR and Finance fields and business and societal cultures, just to name a few. And we believe it to be a space in which creativity is essential.
The book explores mechanisms for creating the Medici Effect, such as breaking down the barriers between fields, igniting an explosion of ideas, moving past failures and taking a balanced view of risk, and you can immediately relate these to the challenges Workforce Planning practitioners face. One section resonates even more than most with the topic of this newsletter - the section that explores your network. We rely on our networks to validate our work and efforts, ensuring that what we undertake is percieved as valuable, but our network is too often made up of people with like minds to our own. To truly engage executives we need to think like them and understand them. Our existing network (our HR colleagues) may not be the best to undertake a review of what we plan to present.
The book is a good read providing interesting stories about sea urchin lollipops in New York, building designs inspired by termite mounds, the creation of Magic: The Gathering and much more. The value it has for the Workforce Planner is that we need to look at breakthrough thinking, not just progressive increments to be truly effective and this book inspires as to how this might be achieved.
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"An overburdened, overstretched executive is the best executive, because he or she doesn't have the time to meddle, to deal in trivia, to bother people."
Jack Welch |
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Strategic planners ignoring the human dimension - Management Issues UK
Pay rockets as tight labour market bites. Australian employees have hit pay dirt with salaries rising by an average of 6 per cent, on the past year as the tight labour market ramps up remuneration report - Human Resources Magazine, Australia
Older, wiser and still employable
Work becoming the new retirement With the Baby Boomer generation ageing and young people becoming an increasingly rare commodity in the workforce, work is becoming the new retirement for many Americans.
A Cooperative Solution The co-op, or cooperative organization, relies on its employees and customers to make key strategic decisions. The success of self-governing companies could make them an economic power in the coming years.
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Next month we'll give you an update of what's happening in the US in workforce planning |
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