When presented with the spin-off from its corporate parent American Express, the Ameriprise Financial HR team launched a new workforce planning and analytics mission for the company. The company created an Human Capital Analytics Center of Excellence (CoE) team to set organizational data standards, identify workforce issues through dialogue with business leaders, and analyze data. For example, Amerprise’s workforce planning initiative identifies key job families and business dynamics in order to help the company align its human capital with business needs for the future.  Penny discusses how Ameriprise built its workforce planning and analytics capabilities from a “clean sheet of paper”, closely aligning their mission with the organization’s overall strategic goals, gaining the support of the CEO and the Executive team, and quantifying the financial impact of workforce plans.

Penny discusses the importance of viewing HR as a business. HR must ask what is your vision and strategy? Who are your customers and what do they need? What value do you drive? How will you measure success?  HR needs to drive talent management, strengthen employee engagement, and ensures effective human capital management. All of this drives an increase in shareholder value. Focusing on the data in HR and viewing it as a business line shows how value is added and measured.  A successful organization needs to know the strengths and skills of people and understand as well that workforce planning is a new competency for many people. 

Gaining Executive Buy-In for Workforce Planning

Susan Slater, VP Talent Acquisition, McKesson Corp
Lucia Erwin, VP, Consulting Services, Vemo Inc.

CEO’s are concerned with meeting Wall Street expectations and satisfying their shareholders. They know that the right talent is key to achieving business results. Human Resources can provide a strategic value directly to the Executive Team and shareholders by implementing Workforce Planning. So how do you win buy-in?

Susan Slater is sharing how McKesson is implementing Workforce Planning enterprise wide across their complex organization after piloting it successfully within several business units. McKesson leveraged the successes to drive a top down approach and have senior leadership wanting to embed it in their processes.

McKesson knew that Human Capital was its greatest expense but knew very little about workforce- in terms of demographics, internal inventory or critical roles.  They needed to change the perception of HR internally and build confidence. They also needed to articulate and brand exactly what workforce planning was and make it a consistent — just like a marketing initiative. Susan stresses to keep it simple and visual! Use a “from and “to” so that executives and others can understand where HR is coming from and where they need to be.

A  question from the audience– “how long did this process take?” The answer from Lucia and Susan- it’s still not finished.  The heads or executives are now aligned, but the rest of the organization needs to still understand the whole brand of workforce planning.

McKesson tried to put a pilot of WFPlanning in a major business division of the organization.  This allowed a small win for a larger initiative within the corporate landscape. Susan says “with a small win…the buzz will start.”  It ensures credible data and got people interested.  But when people catch on, you need to be ready to respond, and respond consistently!

Susan next stresses that you should leverage and communicate both successes and non-successes. Influence all senior HR leaders and a few executive committee members. Also, build a business case with a charter, a model and anticipated outcomes.

Lucia Erwin of Vemo also shares some key points for anyone wanting to ’sell-up’ to management on making a strategic investment in this area. A great session at the HCI conference!

 

At a mining company like Rio Tinto, some projects may run for 40 or more years, requiring workforce plans to take an extremely long-term outlook, while at the same time being relevant to managing the current year’s business. With the world economy in flux the workforce plans have become more tactically focused to address Rio Tinto’s 1-3 year demand around the globe.

Rio Tinto’s HR organization has designed and adopted a range of workforce analytic tools tying them into their existing HRIS system and forecasting models. This helps tremendously with the challenges that are particular to locating and hiring talent (whether full-time or as contractors) in the developing world.

Key elements of workforce planning at Rio Tinto are a deep understanding of business context and local community agreements. Rio Tinto strives to drive business value performance, and this year will focus on full company workforce gap analysis on critical roles with scenario planning.  Hugo points out that this not be a costly effort– their technology system was developed  in-house for less than $100,000.

Next up at the Workforce Planning Conference we have Jeremy Shapiro, author of the Ultimate Performance, and SVP of Hodes IQ.  Jeremy examines the main obstacles faced in leveraging human capital insights into organizational change.  There is a significant gap between having HR Analytics and using HR Analytics to create change inside of the organization. 

How much can you trust your data? If the data in HR isn’t trustworthy, you can’t translate it into organizational change.  Where is the data coming from — is there human error involved? You should use the data that you have right now, but use it better and you will gain new insights.  Watch for common mistakes in your data that discredits your efforts.  Use the economic slowdown for your advantage– leverage the time that you may have for your advantage.  Use standardized measurements and make your data trustworthy!  All of these can factor into organizational change.

Welcome to all our Workforce Planning participants and all of our HCI members joining us virtually! The next two days should be eye opening for those in all phases of workforce planning.

Allan Schweyer of HCI takes the stage first, presenting research co-authored by HCI and Aruspex– “Identifying Business Value in Workforce Planning”.    He summarizes:

Workforce planning has been an evolutionary process. From an original focus on short-term staffing requirements, companies began to project further ahead in their workforce needs, but still in a very operational way, looking at skills required to build a new product or the headcount implications of moving to a new geography. Still, despite recent lip service, only 56% of participating companies in the Human Capital Institute’s new research are actively planning in any way for tomorrow’s labor force.

Yet momentum is growing, as 36% of the total companies surveyed indicate that they will begin considering more proactive planning of their labor needs within the next 12 months. However, while workforce planning has evolved from the demand-driven personnel planning of yesteryear to a more operational stance, it is in general far from the strategic planning evidenced in other areas of the business today.

Long term workforce planning is in its infancy. Companies just beginning to look long term can look at operational planning, that focuses on a tactical approach, or strategic planning, which provides the discipline of considering different “futures” in detail and then plan for those futures. The result of the latter for planners, although only few in this research population are there yet, is the determination of business criticality, and the preparation of a workforce plan to address changes in that criticality should they occur over time. Strategic Workforce Planning is a methodology, centered in the business units, that provides the HR professionals charged with workforce planning a direct line of sight into the business strategy, a key factor lacking in operational planning.

The exercise of planning through scenarios has proved a valuable decision support tool in the current economic crisis. Because companies focus on what is core to their business strategy, and ascertain the workforce needed to execute on that strategy, they are also better able to right size intelligently without undercutting their vital ability to conduct their business.

Wow, time flies when you are having fun!  Our last session today is a panel discussion on Talent Brand- moderated by Claudia Faust, from Improved Experience, Ramiro Medina from Raytheon, Erin Pierpoint from Johnson and Johnson and William Uranga from Tivo.

Question: According to CareerXRoads’ 2009 Annual Source of Hire Study, 60% of corporate recruiting budgets are spent in online job advertising yet only 12% of hires come from job boards.  Why?

Ramiro: We’re spending less and less on advertising- just posting on a job board is not necessarily how you are going to hire top talent.  I like to ask, "Is this a business habit?  Can we validate the results? Is this worth our investment?"

Erin: We’re also moving dollars away from advertising and looking at other resources like LinkedIn.

Another awesome panel!  This session, moderated by Bill Craib, included Susan Strayer, Ritz-Carlton, William Uranga, Tivo, Peter Brasket, Jobs2Web and Scott Morrison, Salesforce.com.

Susan began the conversation with the question "How long does it take to get 50 million users?"

Question: Is social networking for recruiting a waste of time and productivity?

Susan: It’s really a question of how you use your time.

Peter:  Sourcing should incubate prospects, and need a way to automate the results of social networking.

Scott:  We jumped in early to some social networks, and realized that every social networking tool is unique- they aren’t one size fits all, and each of benefits and disadvantages.  We’ve decided that Facebook is a waste of time for us- we aren’t generating talent leads there.  Using it to tell our story, build our brand and reputation, is a better fit.

William:  At Tivo, we started a blog in 2004.  But it has changed dramatically over the years.

(Editor’s Note: This session was so interactive that I was running all over the room with the microphone! But, Francois from LinkedIn took very diligent notes and I’ll get those from him later to synthesize and share with you.)

Cody Horton asked, "what is the most important thing you can do in relationship recruiting?  Be consistent."  He shared the Wal-Mart recruiting engagement framework, that begins by giving a seat to each recruiting division on the overall Recruiting Steering Committee, deploying engagement teams, and operating divisional recruiting councils.

"Why are we engaging in candidate pools?  For branding and eminence building," said Cody.  It is additionally important for his company to ensure a multi-touch approach with top talent.

At Sodexo, "Diversity is part of our DNA," said Arie Ball, and impacts key areas like the recruitment philosophy, college recruiting, sourcing, strategic relationships, media outreach and branding, and performance and culture.

College Recruiting at Sodexo is focused on 29 key schools.  Partnering with student-run organizations, participating at on-campus events, targeted communications, and affinity groups to attract diverse candidates to the hospitality field.  Arie stressed that they track ROI on all of these activities.

Sodexo recruits through strategic alliances with veterans and military candidates.  "Military candidates provide really great experience for our operations- they are a candidate pipeline for us," said Arie.  Sodexo operates a military micro-site.

Leveraging technology and Web 2.0 is part of the diversity strategy at Sodexo.  Sourcing, employee referrals, an alumni community, mentorship programs, internal mobility (including direct internal sourcing), internal career fairs, succession planning, and recruiter-manager coaching.

Our first panel session at the conference includes Gene Zaino, MBO Partners, Jay Lash, Allegis Group, Amy Huddlestone, Tapfin, Larry Kihlstadius, Guidant Group, and Jai Shekhawat from Fieldglass.

The first question to the group centered around what to call contract talent, and why this debate is important.  Is it temp labor? Contingent workforce? Contract talent is the proposed solution; a flexible workforce that meets a variety of talent needs for an organization.

Is contract talent a procurement initiative or should it be managed as part of the overall talent management?  "When HR finally gets a seat at the executive table and drives this conversation, we’ll see a change," said Jai Shekhawat.  "You can’t afford to have a lot of people on staff and survive the ups and downs in business; a contract talent workforce can help businesses ride out any economic scenario," said Jay Lash.

Gene Zaino asked, "as the skill level of contract talent increases, what are the pros and cons of being managed by HR or procurement?"

Amy Huddlestone said they encourage organizations to bring both HR and procurement into the conversation.  "If you don’t have HR involved and engaged on a larger workforce plan, that talent will probably will only be used on a on-off basis."

Larry Kihlstadius agreed that "Procurement is really good at the numbers, and HR needs to manage key talent."

Jay Lash said that planned use of contract talent prevents permanent talent from viewing contract workers negatively, instead, they see it as a welcome need to help successfully complete a project, for instance.