Strategic Workforce Planning: A Cyclic History
The great thing about following the works of the experts that came before us, is that you increasingly learn that there is very little in the HR world that is truly new. Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP) falls into this category. Many of those long-time experts are retiring, but thankfully they have left us with great books for our reference.
SWP had gone through multiple waves of popularity and disinterest during the time that I have been connected to HR. It's gone through even more cycles long before I knew anything about it. If you want a good historical summary of SWP, I recommend the book, Positioned , by Dan Ward . In it, Dan Writes that:
Strategic Workforce Planning is really about survival—having properly qualified people when and where you need them to achieve or sustain a desired outcome. This need to bring assurance to the future is fundamental to human nature.
Efforts to try to define and organize strategic workforce planning go back to the 1960s and 1970s. Companies at that time made efforts to try to calculate the ROI on people investments, much like we saw in recent years and also in 2003-2013.
SWP received a renewed focus after the rapid economic drop in 2008. Many companies lost a lot of specialized talent after executing mass layoffs without having a list of their key roles in place. As these companies recovered financially, the specialized talent was no longer available on the market and they found hiring for these skills to be incredibly painful and time-consuming. By 2013, strategic workforce planning was the HR buzzword of the year.
By 2015, strategic workforce planning moved into a phase of disinterest, except within a small number of companies. Those that felt financial pain over the years opted to remove long-term strategic initiatives in HR such as SWP in order to "keep the lights on" with the day-to-day HR functions. Conferences and vendors associated with SWP combined the topic with other HR topics in order to remain viable.
As Dan comments in Positioned,
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For those of us who have been in this line of work for more than three decades, it has been surprising to see the number of people who currently take credit for having “invented the concept of Strategic Workforce Planning.” ... The tools have evolved and many process variations exist, but the underlying fundamental has existed since the beginning of human culture.
What has been created over the years are multiple models to view the same concepts. SWP, in modern day, has been diluted in its definition. Further, the pace at which things change has been a reason to forego the implementation of the full process. Originally, SWP had a planning timeline that was 5-10 years into the future. Today, planning two years out is ambitious. The short time period has become a reason not to do SWP.
That said, with a January 2019 report by the world economic forum, some portions of SWP have become urgent. The report issued by the World Economic Forum, Towards a Reskilling Revolution , concluded that “95% of the 1.4 million US workers who are expected to be displaced in the next decade can be transitioned to new positions with similar skills and higher wages.” That makes closing the skill set gap with retraining, one of the most significant portions of SWP. This planning needs to be done proactively or these workers may remain untrained and unemployed.
There are two key groups to manage within the SWP process: "Roles of Interest" (which some call critical roles but I avoid that term for political reasons) and those that will become redundant and need proactive retraining plans. For this reason, quite a few years ago, I created my Build-Buy-Borrow-Redeploy template for planning these two segments of the workforce.
The priorities of workforce planning will continue to evolve as will the tools made available for planning solutions.
Resources:
Founder & CEO at eQ8 | Speaker | Thought Leader | Forbes Tech Council
5 年I should add that the reality is that it is probably even less than 26% doing true SWP. The other issue with SWP that we come across frequently is that it is so misunderstood - with many thinking they have it covered through workforce management, rostering, headcount budgeting or project planning!
Founder & CEO at eQ8 | Speaker | Thought Leader | Forbes Tech Council
5 年Great article Tracey! I think the challenge with SWP and why it keeps being “re-created” is because it is (unbelievably) still missing the radar of most companies - The 2018-2019 Sierra Cedar survey reports that still only 26% of companies are doing it, which is only a small increase since a few years ago!