The results from the latest HAUFE study on workforce planning are consistent with my observations and conversations in companies in the DACH region.

To summarize briefly:

  • Strategic workforce planning is currently still a marginal phenomenon. Only a minority of companies have an independent workforce planning organizational unit.
  • The qualitative dimension is clearly expandable, especially with regard to bottleneck profiles. Jobs still predominate over competencies.
  • The data sources used – with or without planning software – generally do not include market data and permit only very limited well-founded scenario analyses and meaningful regression and correlation calculations.

Strategic workforce planning is the link between corporate strategy and HR strategy! If you think short term, you plan short-sightedly and have to be surprised by future developments. This massively endangers the survivability of an organization.

As the world of work and the workforce change, companies need new approaches to attract, develop and retain talent and leaders, and to build a strong culture that empowers employees and drives performance. I highlight three of these in this post:

  • Focus on Competencies,
  • Expand Internal Talent Marketplaces, and
  • Build Workforce Ecosystems.

Focus on Competencies

When building a more qualified workforce, a number of companies are already moving toward skills-based organizations (SBOs). These are …

  • 107 % more likely to place talent effectively,
  • 98 % more likely to have a reputation as a great place to grow and develop,
  • 98 % more likely to retain high performers,
  • 79 % more likely to have a positive workforce experience,
  • 57 % more likely to anticipate change and respond effectively and efficiently,
  • 52 % more likely to innovate,
  • 49 % more likely to improve processes to maximize efficiency,
  • 47 % more likely to provide an inclusive environment.

Worth reading in this context is the fourth edition of the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2023; an absolute treasure trove of data, insights and visualizations. This includes, among other things, the top 10 skills of 2023.

Expand Internal Talent Marketplaces

According to LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends 2023 study, hiring continues to slow around the world. At the same time, internal mobility is trending upward in several industries and many countries.

Successfully implementing the internal talent marketplaces (ITMs) needed to support this requires aligning employee preferences with the needs of a skills-based organization.

In their article for Harvard Business Review, the authors explain the four main benefits of ITMs:

  • Reduced replacement costs,
  • better placement within a large workforce,
  • more opportunities for generalists, and
  • better aggregation of insights.

In addition they outline how to build ITMs with technology, change, culture, and data in mind.

If you’re also considering adopting an ITM, I highly recommend Mercer’s recent report, which covers the business case, adoption, potential outcomes and ROI, change management advice, and tips for getting started and sustain momentum.

Build Workforce Ecosystems

Ecosystems are particularly effective where companies need to act quickly and flexibly. These follow an HR flex value strategy; i.e., targeted investments in certain areas of human resources management alternate with cost-cutting initiatives that lead to process and efficiency optimization.

In the recently published book “Workforce Ecosystems. Reaching Strategic Goals with People, Partners, and Technologies”, the authors highlight four key phases that resolve structural, policy, and cultural issues in the context outlined:

  • Creation of the Orchestration Team: Leaders assemble a combination of central, local, and external representatives from key stakeholder groups and develop a broad framework for action.
  • Local Experimentation: Local teams conduct pilots to taylor workforce ecosystem goals to their varied contexts and solve problems that arise during experimentation.
  • Coordinated Learning and Resourcing: The central team tracks local experiments, promotes coordinated learning, and implements organizationwide solutions.
  • Ecosystem Expansion: Leaders periodically widen the central team to include additional actors who revise overall goals in response to the review process.

The authors define a workforce ecosystem “as a structure that encompasses actors, from within the organization and beyond, working to create value for an organization. Within the ecosystem, actors work toward individual and collective goals with interdependencies and complementarities among the participants.
Workforce ecosystems include employees as well as external contributors and partners of various kinds — long- and short-term contractors, gig workers, application developers, service providers, and crowdsourced actors.”

All theory? Amazon, IBM, Nike, Roche, Unilever and Walmart are just a few of the practical examples that are included in current field reports.

Conclusion

From Deloitte’s perspective, a skills-based organization is a new operating model for work and the workforce. At its heart is a so-called “skills hub“, an engine for skills data, technology, governance and more to support skills-based decisions.

Employees and leaders who optimize internal talent markets (ITMs) are more motivated and engaged in their work. This leads to higher retention rates and lower cost structures.

In an environment of constant adaptation to new realities, HR will follow a flex-value strategy. The important thing is: agility and flexibility must be stabilized at a level that does not burden the organization in the long term, but instead leaves room for targeted innovation and sustainable development at the same time!

In such a situation, successful leaders adapt their management practices and build workforce ecosystems as companies increasingly rely on internal and external employees.

Short-term action will not create skills hubs, ITMs and ecosystems. This can only be achieved with foresighted and sustainable planning.