• Products and services — What are new developments?
What will it take to get to this? Who has the competencies?
Where can we get them?
• Process improvement — Will the new process improvement
cause a reduction in force? Will an increase in force
result? How will the process change be measured in order
to know if it’s a worthy improvement?
track? Are those people doing their jobs? Or did they all
leave? Did they know they were on a succession track? You
shouldn’t keep this a secret. Letting other employees know
who is being targeted for succession helps set a standard
for what you want from other employees. It also helps
management as it evaluates the types of projects assigned.
Can You Measure?
The staffing strategy is a building block that ties directly
into the talent management philosophy. If you don’t know the
skills that you need and the kinds of attitudes and aptitudes to
fill an unknown number of roles, what are you managing? You’re
managing tactical functionality but not managing people.
Relate workforce planning to return on investment. You should
measure success factors related to the business. For example,
is the sales department hitting its numbers? Is one person
consistently in the top spot? Maybe that person is a leader in
training. Is one person consistently in last place? Maybe he or she
isn’t a good fit for the position. Is there another department the
person could move into? On the other hand, maybe the company
isn’t the right fit for that person. No matter the department,
measuring success will tell you whether you have been bringing in
the right staff.
Workforce Planning Is Fluid
Building Blocks to Success
• If you don’t know your business’s strategy and are unaware
of what the company will be doing in the future, these
nonsimplistic considerations could derail your staffing
strategy very quickly.
As you can see, workforce planning is fluid. We all have
many options to create workforces that will grow with our
organizations. We can grow the company’s next set of leaders
through great succession planning, good management training
and good leadership training. Management and leadership are
different things, and you need both.
You can be creative and look at a variety of options, including
“borrowing” talent and using consultants, contingent workers and
staffing agencies to help form your successful workforce. Let’s
look at these options:
• Employ — This is straight-up recruitment, so always be on
the lookout. Even if you don’t know where you are going to
put people today, you should always be seeking good talent.
• Partner — Some organizations share employees. Many
colleges and universities do this because it is too expensive
to hire the talent they really need. They share professors,
who are paid by the two different schools. This saves
money for both organizations, and they know they are
getting quality people.
• Reduction — Cutting staff is a workforce strategy. You
may not need as many people as you have. Reductions are
difficult, but you may have a surplus of employees.
• Retention — Remember that retaining someone is not
always in the best interest of the company. Having someone
stay with a company for a long time does not mean success.
The average person currently remains at a company for
a little less than four years. A true retention strategy for
success is something that you can measure; it shows the
person’s productivity for the time he or she works at your
company. It also means you are managing knowledge,
ensuring that it spreads throughout the organization. When
Joe leaves after 3.5 years, Sue, Bob and Mike already share
his knowledge. Measure the effort you put into transferring
that knowledge.
Your business leaders have to know their strategy before hiring.
You need to be attuned to that strategy and hire to support it
now and in the future. If the business strategy changes, your
workforce planning has to change accordingly. Then you will be in
the position to truly manage talent and hire for long-term success
instead of continually filling gaps and playing catch-up.
Understanding the business, knowing what positions
your organization has now and will need and using the right
combination of tactics to build your workforce will help you
change the term workforce planning from a catchy phrase to a
solid, successful path to success for your company. ■
John Baldino as more than two decades of
h
experience in human resources. He is an
industry veteran who holds the Senior
Professional in Human Resources (SPHR®)
and has deep experience in recruitment and
onboarding, performance management,
employment law, compliance, leadership
development, succession planning and sales
training. He has been involved in start-ups,
mergers and acquisitions and expansion and is currently the president of
Humareso, which provides HR solutions and administration for businesses
trying to manage budget and growth. Baldino was named the Delaware
Valley (Philadelphia Metropolitan Area) Human Resources Person of the
Year for 2012.
• Succession actuality™ — I trademarked this phrase
because it is different from succession planning. Succession
actuality can be measured. Whom did I put on a succession
www.HRCI.org
2014: Volume I
CERTIFIED 31