Who Should Be Responsible for Workforce Planning?
by Lois Melbourne(Second of two-part series - Want to Join HR, But That’s Not Your Background? So What?)
Workforce Management provides a basic checklist indicating who does which part of the workforce planning. As with most checklists, this is an oversimplification of the process, but a GREAT place to start.
Your organization will have many ideas for integrating these tasks and tracking key metrics. Just a few observations on the checklist points:
- Why aren’t line managers included in charting the organization? HR can compile (using automatic tools) input from managers and leadership, providing a complete picture of the hierarchy.
- HR should never conduct succession planning alone. Again, line managers play a key role.
- Once competencies are identified, you must also determine how the competencies should be measured. For instance, if you select 6 required competencies can you quantify all of them with a numeric measure?
One of the gaps in both the checklist and the general practice of workforce planning is that HR and leadership often struggle to find people who have the number skills to scan and analyze the trends provided by the numbers. Or, an organization decides it must get outside help to determine which numbers they should track.
Earlier this year at the Human Capital Institute National Human Capital Summit, 2 of the 3 case studies in the Workforce Planning session mentioned that they recruited people from accounting or finance into HR to help focus on the numbers and analytics. These studies support the discussion on Blog TalkRadio , Episode 5 of the HR Happy Hour that HR executives should, at least in part, come from outside HR. The HR executives who must do strategic planning in order to make the workforce match the business strategy typically need business management and/or finance experience.
Sometimes workforce planning appears to be described as a separate discipline from the talent management or succession planning efforts, just because it takes more numeric considerations. But it has to be strategically integrated into those programs as well. It’s exciting to find more and more organizations providing the human resource career pathing that includes extended experience throughout the organization.
Can you see where succession planning is part of workforce planning? And it can’t be just in the executive suite.
Cheers,
Lois
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Hi Lois – Excellent points, especially on the need for HR to include and partner with line managers in workforce planning. In so many ways the success or failure of an organization depends on the ability of the front-line manager. Thanks again for mentioning the HR Happy Hour show, I hope that these shows can find the right balance between fun and useful information and insights.