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Workforce Planning and Analytics – The Human Side.

Talking about millennials is the hip thing to do right now. Mostly it’s old folks like myself yelling at clouds about how they’ll be the doom of us all. While I certainly couldn’t name one song by Skrillex or Calvin Harris (are they still in?), I do have tremendous respect for one of the traits that defines them. All of the research shows that they, more than generations prior, value finding meaning and helping the greater good in their work.

I think this worldview is a wonderful aspect of our young friends. Here’s the thing: you don’t have to be in marketing at the newest green, gluten-free startup creating iPhone apps, in a city with a nickname that starts with “silicon”, to create positive change on this giant blue and green sphere we all share as home.

The folks working the plant line that molds safety glasses are helping to keep other blue collar workers safe. The salesperson in medical technology is pushing a product that will save lives. The city planner is out there trying to design roads to get us home to our children more quickly and safely. Those of us that live in a “Silicon somewhere” traffic hell certainly understand the intrinsic value of that.

Most of us don’t work in an office like this.

Which brings me to one of the most interesting questions I’ve been asked. Very recently a friend asked me “why do you like analytics and numbers so much?” It was a passing question to which I gave a passing answer. As the days went on, however, the question kept popping up in the back of my mind. Since I got into workforce analytics and planning roughly a decade ago, I’ve known that I have a passion for it. But I’ve never really spent any time thinking about the reasons why. Until now.

And here’s what I came up with:

Workforce Analytics That Matter – “Trending Now”

Those of us who use Twitter are probably very familiar with the “trending now” feature. It’s prominently featured on your home page in prime web page real estate. It shows which topics are “hot” and trending upwards amongst the millions of Twitter conversations happening every day. What’s new? What’s cool today? What do people care about?

Neat feature, but you might be wondering how Twitter has anything to do with workforce planning or HR analytics. It’s because when presenting HR data, leveraging trends can often be more effective and relevant than the more traditional ways to present data related to your workforce.

Let’s start there. The traditional method I’m talking about is our old friend and mainstay, the pie chart. I’ve seen hundreds, maybe thousands of dashboards and reports people have built, and I’d wager that the pie chart is the most prominent way of displaying current or recent data. I’m certainly not saying that it doesn’t have usefulness in some areas. But I am suggesting that in some cases, there are better, more modern, and most importantly, more actionable ways to present the same data.

Let’s take a look at a “staple” of workforce analytics. The turnover reasons pie chart.

Turnover Reasons Pie Chart

Metric Monday! Tenure is Not One-Size-Fits-All

Welcome to our Metric Monday series. Each Monday, we’ll provide a cutting-edge or cool emerging metric that can help to improve your workforce analytics capability. These metrics have been vetted through real-world workforce planning and analytics projects, so the value has been shown in real business settings already.

Today, we’re going to look at three different ways of calculating tenure. Each tenure calculation represents a different look at the workforce, and they impact largely different outputs. We’ll look at each of these, their strengths, and where they should be applied for effective workforce planning and analytics.

For workforce analytics, tenure is not a one-size fits all.

The three types of tenure that we’ve seen used effectively, albeit in very different capacities, are:

Service Tenure
Company Tenure
Role Tenure

It’s critically important to draw the distinction between the three, and use the right tenure metric for the right purpose.

Flexibility – Workforce Analytics Four Core Values – #3

While those that work at McDonalds might have to sweat over an Orwellian vision of the future where they’re replaced by burger-flipping robots, the HR practitioner’s future is a little less bleak. While big data and analytics are becoming critical to business success, they’re never going to replace the intuition and institutional knowledge that your HR department has. The real power lies in coupling said intuition with the power of big data.

If you took an HRBP for a large division of an organization and showed them 100 graphs representing different data points around their workforce, around 75% of the time, you’re telling them something they already know. The other 25%, however, is where one can make powerful discoveries, as long as the interpreter of the data is willing to be flexible, which is the core value we’ll talk about today.

By no coincidence, these are also my company’s four core values. However, for this blog series, I’ll be relating them to the practitioner side. I’ll also be looking back at past projects and how each core value came into play, both in not-so-successful and very successful ventures.

Flexibility

Metric Monday! “SuperCritical” employee turnover

Today we’ll look at turnover of what we call “SuperCritical” employees.

Cute superhero kids.. just because.

**Disclaimer: we don’t advocate hiring three year olds, however cost-effective it might be. We just Google image searched “superheroes” and thought it was adorable.

As we learn about people’s workforce analytics practices, a common theme is that they start with turnover. This is a very logical and valid place to start. It’s very easy, however, to get down into the weeds when analyzing turnover. It’s an easy trap to want to slice it by every potential view possible, to the point where you’ve got hundreds of of graphs and tables in your turnover report. If you’re presenting these to executives, most of them are “so what?” metrics.

Relevance – Workforce Analytics Four Core Values – #2

So you’ve got your workforce analytics and/or workforce planning practice going. Well done! Now it’s time to start answering those questions your business stakeholders are asking, and driving real strategic value. Now, stop. Say the word “relevance”. Now repeat it ten times. This is going to be one of the major keys to the success of your internal analytics “product”.

Workforce Analytics Workforce Planning Accuracy

Relevance

Accuracy – Workforce Analytics Four Core Values – #1

Graphs and charts are easy. Captivating and engaging your internal business stakeholders with HR metrics is not.

Throughout my career, I’ve been fortunate enough to have been part of many, many workforce analytics and planning projects. While just about all of them have been ultimately successful, I’ve seen some struggles along the way. It’s tough sledding out there sometimes. I’ve also been proud to see many clients, current and past, be triumphant in their workforce analytics and planning endeavors.

I’ve developed a budding case of carpal tunnel from building PowerPoints and project plans and helping companies go from zero to analytics hero. However, just about everything I’ve learned about analytics can be boiled down to four core principles. If you keep these top of mind throughout your initiative, you’ll win far more than you’ll lose.

Accuracy

Today, I’m starting with one that might seem a bit obvious. Accuracy. It’s not the sexiest and oftentimes being 100% accurate can be tedious. But it’s probably the most important value. If you’re not reporting accurate numbers, you’re certainly not helping the business. In fact, you might be hurting it.

A “not so great” example:
The sitting VPHR of a large manufacturing company had built workforce an Continue reading

Workforce Analytics – What Marketing Can Teach Us

I’ve come across a few recent posts on LinkedIn where people are asking “does HR have a fear of workforce analytics?” or “why is HR fearful of workforce planning?”. This question is important, but I’ve heard it asked for years now, if not a decade. A recent study shows that over 90% of CEOs want their HR department to leverage talent data into actionable analytics. So why isn’t it happening?

The standard canned answers I hear are that HR doesn’t want to do analytics, or they don’t understand the value in it. I call BS on this one. This may have been true a decade ago, but it’s largely a misconception now. The majority of HR leaders that I speak to understand the value of workforce analytics and workforce planning, and they absolutely have the appetite and desire for it. The issue isn’t fear or lack of understanding. The biggest roadblock I’ve seen is the “if we can’t do everything, we can’t do anything” mindset.

Workforce Planning for Talent Acquisition – the ROI

Recruiters have a tough job these days. They’re asked to fill requisitions faster and more often. At the same time they’re asked to recruit only the best candidates. Even with that demand, less than 7% have the support of predictive workforce planning to show them exactly where, who, and when they will need to hire.

Many might have a rough headcount or staffing or headcount plan. This will tell you how many positions will grow or contract. It’s a start. But the majority of the time, more vacancies are created due to turnover, retirement, transfers, and promotions than due to new positions. So why are recruiters not equipped with this information for the future as well?

We’ve created a quick infographic that outlines two of the major ROI points using strategic workforce planning to project for turnover and movement. This allows the talent acquisition team to proactively pipeline candidates in the right places at the right time, instead of scrambling around in a fire drill every time somebody leaves.

Click here or on the image below to take a look at the infographic!

The ROI of workforce planning in talent acquisition

Are “Optimal” staffing levels truly optimal? Part 2: Redefining the phrase “Fully Staffed”

In part 1 of this blog post, I took a look at a particular mini-case-study from a healthcare organization. Using some fairly routine math, we showed they would actually save money by constantly having a “one-up” nurse, meaning someone who sits at home collecting paychecks until an active nurse leaves, at which point they step in for the nurse that left the organization.

If you haven’t read part 1, I’d encourage you to do so before proceeding with part 2. Then again, if you’re the type to try to put together your entertainment center without reading the instructions like I am, feel free to ignore my advice.

In part 2, we’ll examine different scenarios including a real-world example where a household name, Fortune 100 Company, used this exact theory and reaped not only the financial benefits we explored, but other intangible benefits as well.

To start, let’s play devil’s advocate and immediately disqualify any scenarios where one-up or similar theory does not apply:
– In exempt environments where overtime is not paid
– In environments where the average time between leavers/exits does not catch up to the overtime cost of being short (as demonstrated in part 1)

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let me tell you about what I found to be the most fascinating, albeit unexpected part of this exercise—that a juggernaut of a company is already practicing something like this. The following information was relayed to me by Noel Hannon of Hannon Associates, a friend who I consider an elite professional in the HR consultancy space.

The above mentioned company was practicing One-Up Theory almost to a “T”, with one ingenious modification. Rather than having the surplus resource sitting around at home, the employee was splitting time between two things. First, the employees were doing advanced career classes and continuing education. Second, the employees were being “lent out” Continue reading

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