From the field: Addressing workforce complexity in your organization

Posted by: Joel Capperella

August and September had me on the road quite a bit, talking with procurement, human resources and business leadership about their workforce planning for the coming year. The conversations were very broad and covered multiple topics, but there was one consistent theme: complexity.

In almost every conversation I’ve had over the past two months, there has been agreement that these three disparate parts of an organization’s operation–procurement, HR and leadership–must work together to identify reasonable workforce strategies that appropriately factor in every employment segment. The motivation for the objective varies: cost effectiveness (procurement); fill ratio and retention rates (human resources); and reliable talent access to drive product and/or service objectives (business), to name a few.

Unfortunately, this is where the agreement ends. While each group understands that the other is integral to achieving its objectives, there remains the deep-rooted feelings of “the way we’ve always done things” and “territorial ownership” that stand in the way of working more collaboratively. Complexity ensues.

To forge forward and replace (or at least improve) the “way we’ve always done things” requires that the multiple moving pieces involved in comprehensive workforce management be evaluated as a whole. It’s a complex exercise, and it’s not surprising that the conversation has thus been avoided. My travels over the waning days of summer have helped to identify three suggestions for making the conversation easier.

Eliminate Boundaries. Workforce segmentation has historic boundaries that get in the way. Evaluate them for their purpose. Most important, be willing to let go of some control and enlist the help of your peers. For example, while the business is frequently best suited to identify and develop the need to use external project teams in a statement of work (SOW) delivery model, procurement may have keen insight on new ways to define the details of the SOW and procure the service. Similarly, human resources, with its ability to strategically plan a workforce, is well equipped to help identify how a valued resource can be adequately moved between unrelated projects rather than continuously hunt for talent on demand. While it’s rare that an organization is not doing these things at some level, it is rarer that such collaboration strategies are deployed more broadly across the organization. This frequently the result of an unwillingness to let go of some of the control.

Define Requirements. Once control is shared, the next logical step is to have each partner in workforce development specifically define their needs in broad categories. The business must focus on skill sets at macro and micro levels. Break down talent needs discretely in areas that are more transactional in nature–that is, skill sets that are needed on demand or for fixed periods. Procurement or sourcing must ask that visibility into the supply chain and related performance be increased for the express purpose of improving sourcing strategies. Human resources must require that the business provides its macro and micro talent inventory plans and that procurement delivers reasonable alternatives for acquiring talent to satisfy inventory needs.

Measure Performance. I’ve written before about refusing to accept the status quo. To do so, there must be a consolidated effort to evaluate multifaceted performance of talent as it moves through the talent supply chain. This includes quality, expedience, economy and softer elements such as the positive impact to the business. Too frequently I have had conversations with firms that have executed the first two steps here, but never bothered to actually benchmark performance as they progress. For full-time resources, this can lead to poor retention rates. For third party resources, whether temporary labor or project teams, it becomes almost impossible for the firm to demand specific quality service levels.

While these recommendations are in no way exhaustive, they’re a great place to start when seeking to address the complexity of collaboration between procurement, human resources and the business.