Building capability 2013 - Aligning resourcing strategy with business strategy, Nick Kemsley
1. www.henley.reading.ac.uk18 May 2013
Executive Education – Centre for HR Excellence
Aligning Resourcing Strategy with
Business Strategy
Nick Kemsley
Co-director of Henley Business School’s HR Centre
Owner of Org-onomic Ltd
2. • Co-director of the HR Centre at Henley Business School since
2010 – research, events, programmes, networking, consulting
• Also run my own business
• Work with Boards, SMTs and HR functions all over the world on
organisational capability and risk and HR effectiveness
• Corporate career across six industry sectors for a variety of
organisations including Mars, BOC, Prudential, Rolls-Royce
• Have run OD, Resourcing, Leadership, Talent, L&D, Performance
at global and regional level
• Worked first half of career in wider business roles
2
Brief introduction
3. • HR functions are talking ‚strategic workforce planning‛ (SWP)
an awful lot
• Push for SWP from Boards, regulators, investors and analysts.
The ‚How‛ of strategy and share price/market confidence
• Push from efficiency standpoint
• Yet very few businesses are gaining proper value from strategic
workforce planning
• Why is this? – going to explore how 3 things make the
difference……Context, Approach and Capability
3
SWP – where are we?
5. 5
To employees To regulators
To customers
To investors
& analysts
To shareholders
At the heart of strategy lie promises
6. But what makes your CEO confident
that these promises can be delivered?
Leaders are
proficient
at gauging
external risk
But how well
do they
understand
internal risk?
Do they understand what the strategy means in
practice, and where the risks to its delivery lie?
6
7. A business strategy without the
corresponding organisational
capability will likely be
delayed, diluted or blocked
After all, every organisation has a strategy – so what is
going to make you more successful than them?
Understanding people
and organisational risks
associated with your
business strategy is
critical to competitive
advantage
Organisational capability and risk
7
8. Internal &
external
context
(Business)
Internal &
external
context
(People)
Market capitalisation / Business valuation
Confidence of shareholders, investors etc
Business strategy and longer-term
financial planning processes
Organisational capability/risk/SWP
HR functional strategies
Operational planning
People process
management
Suppliers &
systems
Employer
brand
Internal &
external
context
(Business)
Internal &
external
context
(People)
Connects the
strategy and
activity
conversations, s
upporting
growth AND
efficiency
Value released
• Strategy refined
• Budgeting
• Confidence
• Risk mgt
Value released
• Prioritisation
• Alignment
• Efficiency
• Engagement
• Focus
SWP connects two key conversations
8
11. 11
Coming at it from this
direction just gives you
bigger spreadsheets and
the illusion of accuracyIn practice, often
get an impasse of
paradoxical needs
In
practice, asking
for Resource
Plans
Not actually
Strategic
Workforce
Planning
Operational
Resourcing
Processes
Business
Strategy &
Context
“Business
must give
us better
data”
“need to
be more
proactive”
BSS – Bigger Spreadsheet Syndrome
12. 12
The 5 key SWP elements
What are the
people
implications of
the strategy?
How does this
sit alongside
what we have?
What are the
(critical) gaps &
issues?
What are the
strategies to
address?
Connecting
with budgets &
operational
processes
• Deducing the type, rough phasing and approximate scale of
resources and skills implied by the strategic plan
• Understanding how this compares, broadly, to what we
have or plan to have currently
• Understanding what gaps need must be addressed by
when? Understanding whether or not we have a problem.
Feeding critical dependencies back into strategic process
• Identifying the appropriate route to close the gap in the
given time – Internal? External? Develop? Buy? Acquire?
• Meshing with business planning processes and moving
requirements into execution phase as appropriate.
Iterating, converging & monitoring need and progress
13. On timeDelivery
When data good enough
Workforce
plans
Based initially on judgement of macro data
Refining & updating as we know more
Integrated approach
13
Strategic
workforce
plan
Workforce
strategies
Acceptable data
accuracy
Supply capability in place
C
h
e
c
k
i
n
g
Delivery
vs Need
Strategy & business planning cycles
15. • Strategic Workforce Planning does not give you nice neat
numbers – if it does, they will be wrong anyway
• It is a ‘flexible connection’ between future direction and
operational execution, and is vital to strategic deployment
• It means engaging with ambiguity and making pragmatic
deductions based on the interpretation of macro data
• It is a land of scenarios, what ifs, themes, magnitudes, and
trends which must be tamed in order for operational processes
to deliver strategic value
• By the time the requirement is clear, it is often too late
15
The Reality of what SWP involves
16. 16
Key SWP capabilities
Tolerance of
ambiguity
Comfort
working with
macro data
OD & diagnostic
skills
Judgement &
deductive skills
Application of
pragmatism &
flexibility
• Comfort working in an environment where there are no
black & white answers. Asking the right questions to create
a workable level of structure
• Scenario planning, trend analysis, understanding approx
scale and type of resource need, importance of gap to as is
• Using diagnostic methodologies with business clients to help
pull out the potential organisational implications of strategy
and looking across the organisation at enablers/blockers
• Choosing the right strategy. Assessing the relative
importance of the issues and determining the most
effective solutions
• Being realistic. Understanding the percentage plays.
Accommodating changes in requirement over time.
Getting 80% impact for 20% effort
17. • Are you connecting SWP into the business risk agenda?
• Are you working sufficiently ‚upstream‛, or are you just trying to
make bigger spreadsheets?
• Are you actively using SWP to inform the strategy itself, input to
top level business planning/budgeting processes, prioritise
people activity?
• Do you have the right people involved? HR people or cross-
business team?
17
Summary – consider four questions
You see, to maximise the chances of success, TWO things are needed. A business strategy alone is not enoughHow many of your organisations have a strategy? Pretty much every organisation does, and if your competitors operate in similar markets with similar products and similar customers – their strategy may well be very similar to that of your own organisation – so what is it that makes one organisation win out over others? Do you really think that yours is the only organisation with clever people having sensible ideas? It’s organisation which is key– the ability to translate, deploy and execute strategy THROUGH organisation quicker, cheaper and at higher quality. To put the organisation UNDER the strategy at the right time in the right way to deliver the promises you have made. In a world where strategy is a constant, organisational capability is the differentiator.Therefore, it follows that a good and up-front awareness of the critical people and organisational risks associated with the strategy – is critical to competitive advantage
Proper application of organisational capability and risk thinking allows value to flow most effectively through an organisation – making it efficient and integrated in the delivery of strategy.Think of this picture initially as a sandwich, where the organisational capability and risk layer is the filling! It is what cements together what are often two conversations which are often only partially connected. The first is a strategy creation and financial planning conversation, which makes the promises and sets the medium term financial parameters. The second is a load of “stuff” – activity happening in the organisation which may be sub-optimal in terms of prioritisation and alignment. The assumption here is that when the strategy is agreed and communicated, work can start on delivering what is needed to support it – fine if you are not planning anything new, but possibly an issue if something comes up which you didn’t consider a riskAn appropriate consideration of organisational capability and risk allows the strategy process itself to be better informed, releasing value through supporting decision making between strategic options, creating confidence and identifying key risks in time to do something about them – rather than waiting until it’s too lateEqually, it puts something in the middle of the table against which to filter your activity and align your processes and supply chain. In an environment where you must justify any support function cost, you have the opportunity to make sure that, as a minimum, you have the critical organisational risks covered, and have a blueprint against which to tweak or re-align your downstream pipeline