By Lisa Cheong

Q What are some of the challenges companies face with long-term workforce planning?

A Workforce planning is a very broad area so you can ask ten different people what workforce planning is and get nine different answers.

We recently did a survey and one of the key challenges that came out of the survey was a lack of standard processes and methodology. There is also a challenge in translating business strategy into workforce requirements.

[Workforce planning] has not been well-supported from a technology standpoint and the [last challenge] is who takes ownership of it. Those are really the big challenges.

Q Why is there a challenge translating workforce planning to the business?

A I think companies tend to do business planning with a focus on operations, sales, marketing and finance. Then when they finish, they’ll say, ‘Okay so what does this mean from a headcount perspective?’

A company might decide to open up a new plant or a new store in a new geography. Before making that decision, we need to do analysis on workforce opportunities [such as] what kind of labour supplies in that market. So getting talent discussion at that level of business strategy planning is a challenge.

Q How can HR get the workforce equation into the discussion early on?

A It is entering into a dialogue, making it a partnership between HR and the business. Depending on the organisation’s cultures, this could mean change management issues. If you start asking those questions, the leader might say, “Why are you asking so many question about my strategy? It’s not your business, you’re HR.”

But if you want to have a talent strategy that aligns with the business strategy, HR needs to know this information. So it’s forging that relationship, getting more plugged into the direction of the business and bringing to the table what the workforce strategy needs to be in order to align to the business.

Q What are some opportunities in the downturn?

A We should take this time to build the [workforce planning] infrastructure and to think through on what the process should be and who the stakeholders need to be.

A mistake is to make [workforce planning] a HR initiative. If it is a HR initiative, it probably won’t go anywhere. HR can be a player and a driver, but finance, business leadership, marketing need to be involved. So there is involvement from different facets of the business to make it meaningful.

Q What is a workforce planning best practice?

A Workforce planning is a process that is already defined. You have an objective, you have supply and demand analysis, and you get plans to close that gap.

First and foremost, it breaking [the process] down in smaller pieces. [Workforce planning] is such a big area that it if you try to do it all, it will be hard to get it off the ground.

What the company needs to figure out is who needs to be involved in the process. Start with a small group, department or functional area. Then, work out who is going to be on the planning team, what roles they are going to play, who is going to be the driver and what components people own.

Then run through a planning process with that group, learn from that, fine-tune the model and move it into other departments. That, I think, is a great practice is to start, because the top-down requests are going to keep coming. So if you start building some foundation, the next time a request comes down, you have something that’s repeatable. Rather than doing it in a new spreadsheet, you have a methodology and you know who’s going to do the work and where the data is going to come from.

Q Do you see more emphasis on workforce planning?

A I’ve had some people say, “Workforce planning? What are you talking about? We aren’t growing so why would we do that?”

But I think the bigger driver for workforce planning has been the ageing workforce. In Singapore, there are about 20,000 birth shortages to keep the population where it should be. Until that changes, we know there’s going to be talent shortages here and in different parts of the world. That dynamic has not changed, which is why talent is still a high priority for companies. When the cycle and business does come back, it’s going to get competitive again. So that, to me, is what is giving companies the incentive to do more workforce planning. In a study that we did, the companies that are impacted most by the ageing workforce tend to be the ones investing most in workforce planning.

Ed Newman is the president and founder of The Newman Group and president of North America Futurestep. Prior to joining Futurestep, Ed was the founder and CEO of The Newman Group, a company which provides talent management consulting services that he established in 1999.