More evidence of evolution, responding with workforce design

Posted by: Joel Capperella

Just finished up a meeting with our Enterprise Program managers. These are the folks responsible for managing our workforce transformation programs for clients. Leadership at Yoh meets with them once a quarter to review and measure how well we’re performing for our client base.

It’s an intense, day-long session that is honest and frank. The objective is to make sure we’re continuously monitoring the maturation of our clients’ programs and identifying new ways to deliver value.

What was striking at today’s session — particularly in light of the worst economic downturn since the early 70s — was that while there has definitely been some contraction in certain areas of the workforce, there’s actually a higher level of dollars being addressed by the current program.

Clients are allowing us to help them identify and properly deploy methods that better categorize areas of work, resulting in lower cost and risk. While the desire to attain this goal isn’t new, organizations today are more aggressively pursuing and accepting this increased level of control over less traditional areas of the talent pool.

I recently wrote about the evolution of the workforce, and noted that it’s unlikely the composition of the large enterprise workforce will ever revert back to what we saw in the latter part of the 90′s and the early part of this decade.

Among our clients, we’re seeing savvy, well-unified firms beginning to invest in defining different components of the workforce, and identifying how they should be managed. They now recognize how each segment of the workforce can impact the strategic objectives of the firm, and how a complex workforce can be deployed with the highest quality and cost effectiveness as possible. It’s thrilling, really.