Strategic Workforce Planning, the Future of Work, and Workforce Analytics - Articles, Thoughts, and Updates
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Strategic Workforce Planning
The "Peter Principle" is the idea that when promotions are made on the basis of prior performance, everyone will eventually be promoted to their own level of incompetence. It still has resonance some 40 years after is was first proposed, and it has an enormous impact on productivity, engagement, and retention in organisations today.
Any model or framework that type-casts people is dangerous when used inappropriately, but such models can be helpful in understanding the ways that different talent management initiatives will impact attraction and retention differently, depending on the employee.
On the 22nd of February 2013, Yahoo! issued a memo that it would be ending its' extensive work from home program. This was met with a significant knee-jerk global reaction critical of the move. Here's why Yahoo's policy change doesn't matter... and why it does.
I've been working with a great organisation here in Melbourne over the last few weeks and ran a 2-day Strategic Workforce Planning workshop with them recently. One of the questions that kept coming up was how to engage the executive in Strategic Workforce Planning to ensure that the program is successful. In my experience, as well as aligning the workforce strategy to the business strategy, Strategic Workforce Planning is an effective way way of providing evidence that each initiative is providing a Return on Investment - or showing where they are not, and how to improve. It's not easy, at times, to quantify the costs of HR programs in in an organisation - but there are ways of doing it. Turnover and Absenteeism are relatively straight-forward, but how do you put a price on innovation? productivity? creativity? Even more challenging is predicting the extent to which a particular program will increase or decrease these factors.
Wayne Cascio, who I was fortunate enough to meet last year, has some great resources - including the book "Costing Human Resources" - with some techniques for costing some of these aspects. For factors such as innovation and productivity, case studies can be instructive - but as each organisation is different, a well-crafted analytics strategy is the only way to really prove the "return" on your people investments in your organisation.
Business talks the language of numbers - and though it can be challenging, justifying proposed HR programs, and uncovering the value of existing ones, is one way of elevating Human Resources to become a strategic partner to the business.
HR, The seat at the table won't be yours for long if you can't hold a conversation once you get there
Hitting the news last week was a story about an employee who outsourced his own job to China, at 20% of his wage, so that he could watch cat videos all day while getting paid.
