One of the questions that interests me most is “how long should a workforce plan be?”  There’s a broad concept on the market that strategic workforce plans are three to five years in duration and that anything shorter is a resource plan – code for “not really a strategic workforce plan.”

But I struggle to reconcile this with what I see in organizations, which is executives losing interest unless something helps them execute, and execute now.

I have a lot of theories of course.  One theory is that workforce planning was a significant field well into the 1970s and early 80s, but then fell into some disrepair in many regions of the world.  The last few years have been as much about rediscovering the workforce planning models as inventing new models.  At the time the workforce planning discipline was initially formulated, many forces were still in play that no longer exist – the implied contract that if you are a company person, you can work for the company for your whole career; slow moving business strategies and distribution models; a slower pace of business in general.  But that’s pre-talent war, pre-internet, pre-new business models.

So maybe strategy does not have that much to do with time. Now decisions happen very quickly.  Maybe the workforce planning theory of the three to five year workforce plan is not based on any absolute, but rather the context of the times – yesterday’s times.  Of course, there’s always a time element.  The following question is still correct: what are our key investments in the future that will lead to competitive differentiation?  But it doesn’t trump the other question: what are our key investments in the now that will lead to immediate execution and build competitive advantage? That’s the question that appears to captivate today’s business leaders.

If you are responsible for workforce planning for your organization, think about the time scale at which business decisions are made, and parallel those decisions with your workforce planning effort.  And remember, no one ever got rid of a workforce planning effort that demonstrates a quick win and built immediate changes in talent management.

The ROI of workforce planning… I will admit it – I used to dread that question.  Either the discussion was so qualitative that it wouldn’t do for an ROI pitch.  Or if you try to quantify improvements, they were so out-size that they would appear ridiculous – millions of dollars of cost improvements and strategic opportunities just for being disciplined about workforce planning.

Then I realized it is the wrong question.  Workforce planning is a diagnostic process that helps uncover the cost savings and opportunities to better align the workforce with organizational strategy.  A diagnostic could yield a clean bill of corporate health.  Or it could yield a few areas of improvement.  Or many.  The point is that you really shouldn’t measure the return on investment of doing a diagnostic process – either your organization thinks it’s a good idea to analyze, plan and forecast, or it does not.

If you are being asked to provide the ROI for workforce planning you should try to transform the question to focus on the premise that workforce intelligence – both looking forwards and backwards – is of inherent value.  Then the ROI discussion is just about whether you have the resources, tools and programs necessary for good workforce planning. Do individual hiring managers make good workforce decisions for the overall organization?  Do we know what type of talent we will hire and develop before we do it – or are we always chasing talent demand?  Do we know which internal talent supply scenario for turnover, retirement and mobility is “most likely” – so we can cut through the type and address something specific?  What would the benefit be of centralizing that effort and applying a consistent discipline to workforce and talent planning processes?  What would the benefit be of having data available pre-decision-making vs. after decisions are already made?

I recently made a presentation on the differences between workforce planning and analytics to the Workforce Planning Roundtable, which is a great group that is focused on building the community of practice in workforce planning – strongly recommend that all workforce planning practitioners check it out.

I was really curious about the interest in this presentation because it shows that there is a lot of concern in the marketplace in the differences between planning and analytics, yet I see them as joined at the hip and indispensable to each other.  Analytics is the quantitative, diagnostic process that creates the need to plan – and planning is the more qualitative process of using the analytics to decide what you need and what internal and external supply patterns, trends and predictions merit a response.  Analytics is part of the stair-step evolution towards being a planning organization.

I wonder: How many organizations are doing workforce planning and workforce analytics as separate efforts still?  What are the reasons for separating the two activities and are they the right reasons or are they based only on legacy?