Workforce Planning for Your HRIT Needs

Yesterday’s Lunch Break discussion focused around workforce planning specifically for your HRIT needs.  Workforce planning has many definitions, but they all boil down to one thing: making sure you have the right person, with the right skills, in the right job at the right time.  When all of these pieces come together, two things happen: the employee benefits from being in a position where they can excel and the organization benefits from having the most productive and valuable person in that position.

In the past two Lunch Breaks we talked about the Employee Gap Analysis and Human Risk Management – both of which help to measure and track the value of an employee in their position.  Now, the workforce planning aspect builds upon these tools by considering the skills from an organizational landscape perspective and then evaluating the organization’s capabilities to meet future demands.

To begin, it is often thought that the first step that needs to take place is to consider the job structure.  But really, this comes about half way through the process.  Instead, you need to start by taking the time to understand what the future might look like.

Consider this diagram when first starting the workforce planning process:

This diagram outlines key areas that must be addressed before you get started – think of this as your project initiation.  You can’t plan anything until you know where the organization is going, how is it going to get there, how fast, and what is needed to achieve the desired success.

Consider the example of a retail organization that wants to plan for growth.  In the current business environment, they may be operating with a lean model – as most businesses are.  Productivity is up, profits are up – but employee complement is down.  Can the business support growth with this workforce model or is it only capable of supporting the status quo – i.e. the current market share and workload?

Although it may seem out of sequence, the next step really involves a bit of analysis around your organization’s future needs.  For a technology assessment, you will need to consider the types of technologies required to support the strategic plan in the future.  In considering our example of the retail organization: is there an upgrade in a Customer Relationship Management or CRM software needed to support this initiative?  Will that change the job duties of salespeople who are hired?  Will there be support required from IT that is more or different from what is currently being provided?  How would HR be involved?

Before going too far into your re-design work – it’s important to consider who may be impacted by changes.  This is your stakeholder analysis.  You want to identify things like adverse impact, resistance, or areas where further investigation may be necessary before making sweeping changes.

Consider this diagram of who and what are impacted by workforce planning within HRIT:

• Starting with HR – will HR have to update the format of the employee’s performance review?  Will the employees need new training for the upgrade or new system that HR will need to plan and prepare for?
• Managers – perhaps the way they monitor their employees will change with this new system.  How will communication between managers and employees be impacted?
• Reporting – how will reports be prepared?  Who has access to them?  Who needs access to them?  How will they change as compared to what is being done now?  Will they provide the most valuable information that the organization needs?
• Budgeting – how does this change compared to my current budgetary needs?  Am I increasing costs while also increasing employee productivity with this new system?

Once you have an understanding of where your organization strategically wants to go – and a “guesstimate” of your business requirements to get there – the information you gain from the current state assessment will have much more value and meaning.

We can apply a needs assessment methodology to workforce planning and conduct a current state vs. future state analysis.  This process will help us identify our gaps between the current technologies we are using and what we think we will need in the future.  But what about the gaps between current employee skills and what we will need, how will the KSA and goals of our HR and HRIT department change in the future, and how will we work with other departments differently such as IT?  And how will changes we make affect our customers?

Workforce planning is not done in a vacuum and handed to the organization.  It is a method that builds on a SWOT analysis – identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats – to determine strategies needs to achieve success.

And logically, all of this future planning is happening while you are dealing with day to day operations.  Working with the employees, answering questions, working through emergencies, and benefits issues that you have to deal with on a daily basis and are probably integrated or supported by HR technologies currently in place.  The workforce planning project has to be supported by a team that may be focused on the planning process one minute and the day to day fires the next.  Ideally, try to provide the team the support to focus solely on future planning for portions of the project execution to allow them to think strategically and with a long range vision.

Finally, what are a few challenges you might experience with HRIT workforce planning?

• Speed of technological changes – technology changes fast and your system might be composed from a wide variety of systems ranging from a full ERP or several point solutions.  Whether you are planning for a system upgrade, addition of a new point solution, a plug-in, But
• Information and data overload – the HRIT team deals with a LOT of data – and personal, employee data.  How is that information kept secure?  Who has access to that information?
• Turnover within HRIT team – every organization has turnover, and turnover is expensive.  And especially in the area of HRIT, where you are taking the time and money to train and educate your team – you want them to stay if they are providing value and getting value from their job.  The challenge is how this can disrupt work getting done and disrupt group dynamics if someone leaves unexpectedly.
• Restructure of organization or its strategies – restructuring of the organization and its strategies.  When a new CEO, Director, or manager comes in they may make system or policy changes. So imagine you’ve planned and prepared for the past 6 months to implement a new program just to have a new manager come to town and shake everything up.  Or the change comes from a complete restructuring of the company.  You have to be prepared for your plan to become obsolete in a second.  What will you do?  How will you handle it?  And how will you move forward?
• Change management – anytime you make a change, there’s going to be someone who questions it, doesn’t like it, doesn’t believe in it and challenges it.  The stakeholder analysis is critical to successfully managing the adoption of the new workforce plan.

At the end of it all, successful workforce planning for your HRIT needs is of course possible.  Following these critical elements and planning for the challenges will make the process more likely to go as planned.

Happy Planning!

Our next HRL Lunch Break is Thursday, November 3rd – same time – 1:15 – 1:45 ET and we will be talking about Project Management for HR – the Initiation Process.

To check out and register for upcoming events, check out our Calendar

If you have any questions or would like the PowerPoint file, please send me a message.   Thanks for reading!

-Heather