Strategic Workforce Planning: Adapting to Future Scenarios for Optimal Talent Management (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: In the world of investments, would any reputable financial advisor suggest that you predict one scenario 10 years in the future and then build an investment portfolio based on that scenario? Certainly not. Any reasonable advisor would realize that the future is far too uncertain to predict. Instead, the advisor would have multiple future scenarios in mind and continuously update them as new data emerged. The advisor would then fluidly add and remove investments as the future developed. That kind of approach also makes sense when it comes to executing strategic workforce plans. In this video, I'll show you how to use scenario planning to think differently about strategic workforce planning, and I'll show you how to identify the kinds of questions you should ask when evaluating the usefulness of the SWP system that you have developed. Remember, the business environment isn't static. It's volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. That's why it's important continuously to look two, three, even five years into the future to ask questions like, what will our organization look like in terms of the scale of its operations? What are the products or services we offer and the markets we operate in? What are the implications for talent? What are the number and kinds of skills we will need? What are the jobs where our talent has to be better than competitors, and should we make or buy that talent? As conditions change, so also should your strategic workforce plans. The objective is to ensure that your organization is properly hedged against multiple possible future scenarios and risks. In terms of evaluating SWP, both qualitative and quantitative objectives can play useful roles. In newly instituted SWP systems, for example, consider asking questions such as, are those responsible for SWP tuned into workforce issues and opportunities? Are their priorities sound? How strong are their working relationships with line managers who supply data and use SWP results? How closely do they work with these managers on a day-to-day basis? Do decision makers from line managers who hire employees to top managers who develop business strategy actually use workforce forecasts, action plans, and recommendations? In more established SWP systems, key comparisons might include actual staffing levels against forecast staffing requirements. Actual levels of workforce performance against anticipated levels of performance. Action programs implemented against those that were planned. Were there more or fewer and why? Action program costs against budgets and the relative return on investment or ROI of various action programs. Answers to these kinds of issues provide useful feedback to decision makers so they can improve the design and implementation of SWP going forward. Remember, we do not have an infinite supply of any resource, people, capital, information, or materials, so we plan in order to reduce the uncertainty of the future. And it's important not only that we anticipate the future, but also that we actively try to influence it. As management guru Peter Drucker once said, the best way to predict the future is to create it. Managing talent according to plan can be difficult, but it's a lot easier than trying to manage talent with no plan at all.