Nick Kemsley's presentation from our 2013 Building Capability Conference

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?

4. 4
Context
We fail to adequately connect SWP and the business agenda

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

9. 9
Approach
We build spreadsheets not insight

10. 10
Connecting strategy & execution
The workforce planning funnel
Build, Buy, R
etain, Rede
ploy Plans
Strategic
Workforce
Plans
Operational
People
Processes
Business
Strategy &
Context
Resourcing
assignments,
training, reward etc
(weeks)
Rough numbers,
costs, plans
(months)
Trends, scenarios,
profile, scale, gaps,
strategies
(years)

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

14. 14
Capability
SWP is one of the only things going from Digital to Analogue!

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

18. 18
Questions?