American Gas - August 2012 - (Page 28)

When designing an SWP process to support talent management… 3 Recognize that it takes years to build a well-functioning SWP process. You can gradually build workforce planning capabilities over years—deriving value at each step, and decide as you implement the level and sophistication of the process and workforce planning tools your business requires. 3 SWP will not replace your other talent processes (or fix those that are broken), but it should provide clearer direction and priorities for processes such as sourcing, training, succession planning, and headcount control. 3 Finding experienced workforce planning resources is a fool’s errand (most retired over a decade ago). Instead, look at the underlying skills and experience required to manage SWP. Recognize you will rarely find in a single individual the combination of process and technical skills to support your organization. Therefore, consider splitting these roles. 3 Forecast where current practices are leading your workforce and compare that to business projections. 3 Stop copying others; look inside for the keys to success and leverage the data you’ve been collecting in your HRIS and other talent systems. Go beyond what others are doing, and determine the best fit for you based on your workforce facts. 3 Keep the process and tools simple and easy to use. 3 Create a single workforce data source with consistent definitions. 3 Engage the business leaders in workforce requirements and likely business scenarios, but don’t expect them to articulate detailed workforce requirements—that’s your role. When creating your workforce plan … 3 Keep workforce plans concise and understandable by business partners. 3 Focus on long development lead-time and hard-to-fill positions to anticipate and address potential workforce gaps. 3 Workforce planning should show clear priorities. You generally don’t need to make wholesale changes, but keep the big picture in mind. Your analysis must reveal not only the critical gaps, but which actions will be most effective in filling them. It should also spotlight policies and practices that may be working against delivering the workforce you require. 3 The best actions often focus on the unique differences in the workforce or the business needs. These tend to be more successful than competing head-on for talent. get around the problem of traditional closeended surveys where everything can be rated “important,” allowing for real prioritization of actions. Applied to the demand side of workforce planning, conjoint analysis can be useful in obliging leaders to carefully think through what specific workforce capabilities and behaviors are truly essential to driving business success, rather than simply offering up nondiscriminating responses that paint an idealized view of what the workforce should be and do. For example, an energy company with which we worked used a formal survey process based on conjoint analysis to elicit input from business leaders and their HR partners across the segments. Specifically, they were asked to indicate which workforce characteristics and behaviors were most important to future business performance, selected from among a group of paired comparisons offered in the survey. The company learned that the more generic capabilities and behaviors—such as technical knowledge, teamwork, and adaptability to change—were universally judged to be critical across business segments, whereas firmspecific factors—such as employee tenure and breadth of experience in the company—were judged to be of little value. This was particularly striking given the strong orientation of the company’s talent and reward strategies toward the development and retention of firm-specific capabilities. In a nutshell, the company rewarded long tenure, homegrown knowledge, individual performance, and adherence to hierarchical management, when what it most needed, apparently, was more state-of-the-art technical knowledge, teamwork and collaboration, initiative, and workforce agility. It thus became evident that the current strategies and rigid hierarchical structure were not geared to deliver the capabilities and behaviors that business and HR leaders believed were required for future business success. The same empirical approach is possible with respect to questions about the labor supply. The proliferation of workforce data both inside and outside organizations, along with advances in modeling capabilities, makes possible powerful quantitative assessments of labor supply and effectiveness. Perhaps the most compelling advance relates to methods to understand the dynamics of those all-important labor markets that reside inside organizations—“internal labor markets,” or what we call ILM Analysis™. 28 AmericAn GAs august/september 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Gas - August 2012

American Gas - August 2012
Contents
President’s Message
Industry News
In the Know
Safety First
Tech Talk
Taming the Talent Pipeline
Decision Time
Places to Be
Vendor News
Noteworthies
Advertisers’ Index
Jobline
Marketplace
Facts on Gas

American Gas - August 2012