What characterizes trying times for Workforce Planning is how fast the variables on which we make decisions can change from one day to the next, and the impact that has on the business. The time to make decisions can be shorter than your normal comfort zone given the impact these decisions have.
The not so long ago “long-term focus on growth” has shifted to a today-focused survival mode for many businesses.
What can be helpful right now?
- Focusing on key variables to make workforce decisions and being upfront about uncertainties
- Framing needs clearly between response (what is needed today to stabilize – short-term) and recovery (what is needed to move forward: adapt, transform, build – longer-view)
Workforce Planning recommendations should be based on managing Risk Tolerance, Skill Demand, and Skill Supply
- Risk Tolerance: There are always competing priorities. Maintaining a workforce is not the only need of an organization. Every decision is an investment with risk associated, as well as intended and unintended consequences. Some are easier to assess than others.
- Be clear on where the executive team is on their risk tolerance and be transparent on the uncertainty in your projections
- Nothing is going to be perfect: everything will not be able to be studied and reviewed to the nth degree to decide. What needs to be covered for the executives to be comfortable deciding?
- Frame the needs between “Response” – addressing current situation (i.e. survival or staying afloat) – and “Recovery” – ensuring we have the skills in place for long term sustainability
- Understand risk tolerance based on how long the “rough seas” may last, how to keep the workforce balanced to address short- and long-term needs, and in light of the potential scenarios
- What is seen as “ok to do today” may not be ok if we are in a response mode after 4, 6, 8, 10, or 12 months. Explore: What could you be saying 8 months from now that would sound like: “If I had known it would drag so long, I would have …”?
- What is the better or worse place to be at the start of recovery?
- Decent cash balance with drastic shortages in critical skills, loss in know-how and intellectual property, or
- Extremely strained cash balance, but ample critical skills ready to leverage the recovery wave
- Keep your awareness on people who, under pressure, become hesitant or unable to make decisions. The pressure of the current environment, the uncertain conditions, how people make sense of what is taking place, the severity of some of the decisions to be made – all these can create conditions where a manager’s capability to make decisions is altered.
- Skill Demand: Understanding skill demand means being Customer Centric. Customers drive the demand, which defines all the processes, the skills and associated work effort required to deliver:
- Become closer to operations than you have ever been before to understand customer demand shifts and their impact on the skill requirements: bottom falling out, wiping out the need for whole teams temporarily or long-term, challenges in supply chain requiring more people on deck to process same amount of purchase requisitions, etc.
- Does the operation have a good grasp of how it is changing, understand the cascading effect to be expected, and can translate it into reliable data for Workforce Planning? Do they understand how their customers are changing and their customers’ needs / capabilities at this time?
- Which processes need to be altered or created to mitigate changes or keep going?
- Do these new processes or shifts in customer demand drive a different skill mix required from employees?
- Will some of the temporary changes in behaviors asked of customers (e.g. do online work rather than via the store) change customer behaviors for the long term, never coming back to “the way it was?” What is the impact on skills needed for recovery?
- Skill Supply: This is a Total Workforce focus, understanding where the skills and expertise required to support your organization’s mission reside, within and outside the boundaries of the organization chart. It is a holistic understanding, an association between traditional HR and Supply Chain/Procurement to supplying skills and expertise.
- Focus is to sustain the capability of the current workforce – physically and mentally – to ensure performance during Response and readiness for Recovery.
- From a health / safety perspective: Business must provide a safe environment for all to work in, providing assurance not only to their employees but their customers that it is safe to do business with your company. This is part of the employee and customer value proposition.
- Unemployment shooting up does not mean you can quickly replace someone with critical skills or knowledge of your business.
- Changes in the subcontracting landscape may be very fluid. Be in tune with your supply chain risk management expert, if you have one, to understand shifts that may happen requiring the organization to mitigate performance variations from suppliers (increase quality control, higher rate of repairs, even bring some activities in house, etc.)
- Recovery Processes:
- Keep in mind that to ride the recovery, it requires:
- Having the skills available to deliver on what customers need, and follow the customer demand curve
- Having the support processes in place to provide these skills on time to operations: recruit, onboard, train and ensure people have the right proficiency when needed (i.e. having workforce plans for your support processes)
- Depending on the speed of recovery, slow or fast, your support processes may be adequate or may be overwhelmed:
- How long does it take you currently to onboard someone and have them at the level of proficiency that they need to be to support your operations? Will it be enough to support recovery?
- Do you have hiring approval processes streamlined to ensure the most flexible response in case hiring picks up steam?
- If you grow, how long will it take to get approval on how the organization chart is going to evolve? Expanding from one to three teams, who is going to lead each team?
- How many new employees can your payroll department onboard in a week?
- Many other considerations
- Now is the time to look at your support processes to streamline as much as you can to remove the waste: delays in reviews, unnecessary approvals, data flow requiring copy and paste, multiple forms creating more paper work, etc., and re-evaluate metrics used to assess when additional capacity is needed, and where that added capacity is going to come from:
- At what level are your current support processes going to be overwhelmed to be able to staff operations in an adequate way?
- When does the additional capacity need to be ready to operate, not just get ready?
- Ex: When will you hire more recruiters or hire a firm to do recruiting so they can ensure you will have the right people when you need them?
In the current environment, speed is of the essence. The rapidly changing environment requires rapid analysis and frequent iteration to understand what decisions must be made. The need for agile workforce planning capabilities is greater than ever.
Want to chat about your workforce planning needs? Let’s talk.
