Strategic planners in leading global companies are failing to integrate their business plans with their people strategies, according to the latest Ci Group research. "The old model of centralised workforce planning is not working for most organisations that experience rapid change. Plans are so often overtaken by events, that many organisations have - in practical terms - given up planning altogether" says Jonathan Winter, director of the Ci Group.
"The result is that organisations are unable to assess people-related risks. They spend vast sums of money on IT systems that promise total information on the workforce, and then fail to see a train coming towards them at 100mph. For example, many are not taking account of the demographics that will see some of their best talent retiring in the next five years."
Building on a benchmarking study of 44 multinational companies, Ci looked in detail at the strategic planning processes of eight organisations. They found that budget cycles, strategic planning horizons and workforce plans do not operate on the same timelines with the result that they fail to connect. HR then has to pick up the pieces when workforce factors are added as an afterthought.
Responding to the challenge, the Ci Group partners at a Think Tank (hosted by Oxfam) have come up with an approach they´re calling ´scenario-based dialogues´. This places less emphasis on a single workforce plan and focuses instead on a range of well-timed conversations around workforce data. Paradoxically, as the world becomes more complex the Ci recommendation is to rely less on sophisticated computing and more on common sense. It´s a stance that may not be popular with the IT industry.
"HR leaders using this approach will be much more confident in their role as a partner in board-level strategy discussions" commented Tony DiRomualdo, who led the research and co-authored the report with Dr Wendy Hirsh. "However they will need to build their capability to handle workforce data and make projections."
Organisations experiencing rapid change can buy the resulting Ci report or gain the full support of the Ci team by becoming a Partner. The Ci Group is also preparing a focused programme of innovation around retirement strategies, to pre-empt a costly failure in workforce planning and talent management.
About Ci
The Ci Group is an alliance of global companies who work together to create high-trust, high-performance partnerships with their people. The group is supported by The Career Innovation Company - an innovation lab based in Oxford UK - which has a team of researchers, psychologists and web-developers on-hand to support the partner companies. Partners in the Ci Group´s Agile Resourcing (Manifesto) programme during 2005 included Boeing, BT, Marriott International, Nokia, Oxfam, Pfizer, PricewaterhouseCoopers and UBS.
About this research
The research, commissioned by the Ci Partner companies, was in response to perceived gaps between an organization´s strategic planning and their ability to implement. Its aim was to identify a snapshot of current practice in order to develop a coherent picture of the issues and a comparative framework. The research interviews were completed in January 2006 and the findings debated at a Ci Think Tank event, with expert input from Dr Wendy Hirsh (an independent researcher and consultant, with over twenty years' practical experience of workforce planning in both public and private sectors) and Dan Hilbert (Director of Staffing at Valero Energy Corporation, USA).
About ´Scenario-based dialogues´
The focus of this approach is on identifying the planning horizons for an individual business or industry, and then enabling HR professionals to present data in a compelling way to highlight business risk. These dialogues are used to address specific issues, decisions or questions that the organization face or can foresee. This requires the availability of approximate rather than precise data: getting the approximate size, profile (e.g. skills mix) and dynamics (stocks and flows) of the workforce right, rather than returning to the sophisticated enterprise-wide planning and computer modelling used in the more static organizations of the late 20th century.
Contact details
To purchase a licence to use the report ´Workforce Planning - Mapping the Links between Business Strategy and Effective HR Planning´ or to find out more information about Ci, please contact Linda Shelley at Career Innovation on +44 (0)1865 202123 (linda.shelley[at]careerinnovation.com).