“We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist—using technologies that haven’t been invented—in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.” —Shift Happens 2010 video
If you are a part of the HR organization at your company overseeing organizational development you need to be a champion of workforce planning to facilitate your company’s competitiveness in our constantly evolving marketplace.
Companies that are what Miles and Snow call ‘Prospectors’ – tirelessly searching the market for new opportunities and being early adopters of emerging trends – will especially want to take heed. In order to maintain a competitive and proactive position in your industry leveraging the organization’s human capital is more vital now than ever before. Planning like a Prospector will soon become integral to your ability to survive in the fluctuating economy, and ideally should include both a short-term and a long-term outlook.
Short-Term Workforce Planning
- Constant scrutiny of the market and a healthily funded R&D group is crucial to stay on top of current as well as future trends
- Ensuring HR strategy remains aligned to the evolving corporate strategy, or better yet, stays one step ahead
- Engage the business leaders in determining upcoming vacancies and skill shortages that will need to be monitored
- Execute a thorough job analysis of your company’s most dynamic positions at least once per year
- If you have completed a SWOT analysis don’t let it languish. Refer back to it often as it is also a living thing that will be affected by market changes. Resist the urge to become committed to that initial analysis!
Long-Term Succession Planning
The extent of many companies’ succession plans include executive levels only. Jim Collins, author of the bestselling business novel Good to Great argues that truly successful companies don’t rely too heavily on executive management to keep the organization afloat. When we empower our workforce and give employees at all levels within the organization the ability to use their creativity within a predefined framework to drive their own objectives the company is virtually guaranteed to outperform its competition.
Positions for which it is notoriously difficult to find good talent can be within middle management or lower, depending on the type of business you are in. Here is a simple checklist to assist with determining which positions you might want to include in your succession planning.
URGENCY IN TIME-TO-FILL: How disruptive will it be to the business if the role should become vacant?
BUSINESS IMPACT: What is the impact the role has on the ability to achieve the business and corporate strategies?
SCARCITY OF SKILL SET IN THE MARKET: Is there a plethora or shortage of this skill in the market? Will you need to look outside the immediate region or country to find it?
SHORT/LONG TERM COSTS OF ROLE VACANCY: Do relevant HR analytics already exist within your company that can provide this data?
FUTURE TALENT NEEDS: What are some hot skills that your company will soon be in need of to achieve the corporate strategy and future business? Think of the direction your company is headed in and what key roles will be required to realize those future goals. Avoid using current roles as your yardstick, but instead think of innovative and unprecedented positions that might need to be created to accommodate this need. Similarly, some jobs you currently have may need to be phased out due to redundancy.
According to researchers the risks involved in implementing an HR planning strategy can be increased time and energy in making decisions; greater potential for information overload; impossible commitments made to employees; and an over-concern with employee reactions to such a plan that are incompatible with industry conditions. However the disadvantages to not having an HR plan in place seem to outweigh those of having one.
The result: your organization’s overall reputation for being an Employer of Choice will be positively affected by its ability to leverage its internal talent pool and make use of emerging talent trends. As Collins quips, having ‘the right people on the bus‘ and in the right roles not only means a fully engaged workforce, but the reduced need to ‘manage’ them.
Sources:
Strategic HR Planning, 2nd edition, Belcourt and McBey, 2004
Good to Great – Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t, Jim Collins, 2001
High Impact Succession Management, CLC Human Resources, 2009
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