Workforce Planning Is No Longer Regarded As Simply “An HR Task”

Impactful workforce planning requires a collaborative effort across the organization, with HR playing a central role

A lasting lesson from the pandemic is that we can no longer let even a vigorous economy lull us into complacency about all that we produce and consume, or the intricate supply chains that enable us to do both. Everything seems more vulnerable, but once discovered, vulnerabilities can also reveal new opportunities.

Specifically, the pandemic exposed how dependent business organizations are on other organizations within their ecosystems, and how well business functions within the same organization are connected and how much they depend on one another. The need to rapidly adapt and respond in a uniquely volatile environment has forced managers to think beyond the narrow definition of their own business functions. They must now take a broader perspective about how they interact with other business functions to adopt new processes, make accurate forecasts, course-correct, and ultimately contribute to overall organizational agility.

Every business function depends acutely on its workforce. Consequently, workforce planning is no longer regarded as simply “an HR task” but rather a collaborative effort across the organization, with HR playing a central role. A workforce planning initiative is an opportunity for HR to guide their peers in other business functions to go beyond the idea that workforce planning is primarily headcount planning, wherein only financial impacts are evaluated. It enables HR to involve leaders across the organization in strategic areas of people strategy, including workforce agility, workforce optimization, workforce visibility, organizational shape, skill management and diversity, equity & inclusion. Successfully bringing together numerous stakeholders in workforce planning results from HR conscientiously managing both processes and relationships.

Traditionally, every department, including HR, manages their own transactional systems, their own data collection, analysis, and reporting activities. But workforce planning requires several departments cooperating and making those connections can create friction that slows the planning process down and decreases organizational agility. Three of the most common friction points HR encounters are with Finance, IT, and line-of-business managers.

Much of the friction between HR and Finance stems from historically dissimilar perspectives about how workers should be reckoned. For Finance, workers are primarily views as costs to be contained, while for HR, they are people to be nurtured, provided with opportunities and developed as future innovators and creators of customer delight. Because Finance is responsible for the organization’s money, it can have far more leverage regarding major workforce decisions and puts HR in the challenging position of having to quantify the value of the workforce in financial terms.

Finance and HR are now finding themselves having to address the same questions: How well do we really understand our customers and their behaviors? How much are we willing to bet on it? How do we create customer value and how does that translate into business value? Is our workforce in the best position to bring about both? Additionally, Finance is increasingly preoccupied with boosting margins, driving growth, and managing risk holistically. The perils of not being able to deliver goods and services on time and of sufficient quality due to workforce deficiencies is no abstraction, especially in sectors hit hard by the pandemic.   

HR and Finance must also contend with a workforce increasingly being asked to do more with less, requiring additional training and support. In an environment where HR and Finance collaborate in planning and budgeting for improved onboarding, engagement, and training, HR can provide Finance with greater insight into the total costs of recruitment and worker replacement and the range of organizational performance outcomes likely to affect critical financial metrics. These can help better inform organizational change initiatives and assure that they are driven by a shared understanding of all cost dimensions. To achieve this nirvana of improved visibility to the financial impact of people decisions, Finance can do a lot to support HR’s evolution into a function that is known for excellence in planning & analytics.

HR technology implementations, configurations, and integrations are infamous for being patchworks of enterprise, point solutions, and spreadsheets. From a time-management perspective, it’s a hefty load for HR and IT teams to pull together data, usually of questionable quality and completeness, from disparate systems, cleanse and structure it into a usable format, and then distribute it all to managers in a way that maintains employee privacy and complies with data protection regulation.
The partnership that HR and IT have worked so hard to develop is delicate and easy to strain. No matter how many clever hacks anyone can call upon, the process is not easily repeatable, and mistakes in data require complete cycles to correct. The whole purpose of agile planning gets defeated by the lack of agility to stand up plans based on current and accurate data presented using the functional and geographic hierarchies that leaders are accustomed to seeing.

Nonetheless, IT and HR have much in common. Both functions are passionate about the opportunity for their work to improve the experience of employees at work. Both functions are on the receiving end of innumerable requests, suggestions and demands from leaders, managers and employees – only a fraction of which can be prioritized, funded and executed. And, as was never more clearly demonstrated than during the pandemic, both functions are critical to the success, resilience and agility of every organization. By supporting an agile workforce planning process through effective integrations, single-sign-on and excellent systems governance, IT can play a key role in delivering an integrated workforce planning experience in partnership with HR.

Line-of-business managers know their department’s operations inside out, and it’s often presumed that their line of sight extends just as keenly to their portion of the workforce. This can cause them to be dealt into the planning process well after the initial stage, given partially refined data and a list of tasks, but little context or guidance.

Nevertheless, they persevere. Understanding workforce data well enough to discuss it confidently in meetings with peers poses a high cognitive load on managers. They can spend excessive time trying to make sense of the data, verifying sources, and making judgment calls on which data is valid or relevant. Ultimately, they have to construct the whole picture for themselves, tell their own story, and drive for the best decisions based on that story and the data available.

Over the past several years, it has become easier for people data to be made available to managers directly without risking privacy or data breaches. However, just in the same way that the general ledger or the customer relationship management system data requires context and education for managers to effectively use it, so does data about attrition, time-to-fill, employee engagement or gender representation (to just pick 4 examples). Line-of-business managers are key players in effectively implementing the workforce plan, and they can also be valuable partners in building the workforce plan when they and HR work together to build simple, trusted, business-focused goals that can be achieved in partnership. 

No other business function touches more of the enterprise than HR and no one is an island in workforce planning. HR is in a unique position to drive faster decisions that are good for employees and exceptional for business agility by forming effective data-driven partnerships between planning leaders (Finance), data and system provisioners (IT), and key end-users (line-of-business managers). Whether acting in its own capacity or as a broker between business functions, HR has a huge opportunity to connect the goals of leaders across many teams, organizations, and divisions, and ultimately improve the agility of workforce planning and the entire organization.

The post was originally posted here

Rupert Bader is the Vice President, Human Capital Planning at Anaplan, where he leads Anaplan’s workforce planning approach and solutions internally, as well as partnering with the Workforce Planning solutions team to connect Anaplan’s capabilities with customer, partner and prospect use cases. Building on his leadership roles in workforce planning and analytics at Expedia, Microsoft, Avaya and other global organizations, Rupert is driven by his mission to help all organizations create inclusive, productive and dynamic workforces through exceptional Connected Planning. Connect Rupert Bader