We look forward to talking to attending organizations about how we can help, and also hear ideas about how we can focus our products and services to best service the Energy sector.

See you at CEWD!

I’m looking forward to this format, devised by Bill Kutik, because I think that’s what organizations want to see:  what were the criteria for picking a vendor and how do you filter through all the perceived needs to the actual requirements?  Then what does implementation look like in the first 6 months to 1 year.

See you at HR Tech!

Maybe there’s some underlying pattern that we do not see and if that pattern were understood we would study the problem differently.  What if there is a set of behavioral categories that each has its own retirement rules and that could be used to better understand the retirement risks organizations are facing?

Here is a draft idea of 4 underlying groups.

Early retirees. This is always a small part of the workforce… people with a compelling reason to leave the workforce early even if their benefits are not fully accrued.  This is a small part of the workforce that has it’s own trend.

Calendar counters. This is the retirement stereotype, but it definitely does exist.  This is the group that even in a bad economy could be easily convinced by a voluntary attrition program.  In a pension or defined contribution environment, these people are going to move out once they receive their points, or within a couple of years.  They will not modulate their underlying behavior that much unless facing real duress.

Realists. This group would be most impacted by macro issues such as the overall economy and state of the market, life expectancy, children in college, and the like.  And not just major events like the Great Recession.  But also more moderate shifts in the economy and marketplace.  This group defies typical retirement point models based on age and tenure, because those point systems were put in place when different realities were in place for life expectancy and lifestyle in general.

Wedded to work. There are some people who do not like to leave the workforce.  It’s part of their identity.  They stay beyond the early retirees, the calendar counters and the realists.  And they have no sudden spike, but gradually attrite as they can no longer work.

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.

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 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?