PwC’s most recent Annual Global CEO Survey revealed that over 70 percent of CEOs identified the “availability of key skills” as one of the top three threats to their companies — an eight-year high for that question. The topic of most importance for business leaders is talent. It’s not just about recruiting but about something much larger and broader. I’m talking about workforce planning and associated strategies.
Episode 88: Workforce Planning Strategies to Elevate Your Business with John Baldino (@jbalive)
During last month’s SHRM Annual Conference in Washington, DC, I sat down with John Baldino to talk about workforce planning basics and strategies. Workforce planning is a very complex topic, and frankly, one I haven’t written or talked much about. For the strategic human resource professional, it’s important to think about the entire human capital cycle within your organization and how it ties to the larger business needs.
What is Workforce Planning?
John first walks us through what workforce planning is and isn’t. Workforce planning is defined as a continual process used to align the needs and priorities of the organization with those of its workforce to ensure it can meet its legislative, regulatory, service and production requirements and organizational objectives. Workforce alignment with business goals and objectives is no joke. It’s an program of massive scale. It touches everyone, which makes it extremely complicated and also the progress is often slow for these reasons.
John and I discussed some misconceptions surrounding workforce planning, like how some people want to think about it just in the context of talent acquisition, but, in truth, it’s so much more than that. There’s succession planning, talent development and engagement as it aligns with the larger business goals to help facilitate your business’s growth or changes.
John walks us through how workforce planning helps align with the larger business and how and why human resource professionals should have conversations with their organizational leaders about the value of workforce planning.
John, is such a comfortable and easy person to talk to. Our conversation wandered to a lot of interesting places. Being at the SHRM Conference, where so many of the conversations and sessions are extremely tactical and focus on short term benefits, plans and strategies, workforce planning was a great topic to get into, since it’s a long game. Organizational change takes 24, 36, 48 months or more depending on how large the organization, industry and change comfort level with your employees, managers and executive team.
Connect with John Baldino on LinkedIn.
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*A special thank you to my production team at Total Picture Radio.
