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As the recovery progresses, employers will shift their focus from cutting labor costs back to preserving talent and investing in key segments of their workforce—issues at the very heart of strategic workforce planning (SWP), The Conference Board reports. “Employers who’ve been forced to focus on reducing headcount will return to deciding whether to buy, build, or rent the skills necessary to meet future business needs,” said Mary Young, principal researcher at The Conference Board and author of a new report, Strategic Workforce Planning in Global Organizations.
“The economy’s impact on SWP is likely to be moderated by the level of credibility, acceptance, and integration that SWP had attained before the economic crisis turned things upside down,” Young said. “In companies that were just getting their feet wet with SWP, the global economic downturn may have put a halt to these efforts, although only temporarily. The same is true in companies where immediate financial pressures required that SWP shift from long-term planning to short-term problem-solving. But in companies where SWP was well established, SWP served as a critical tool for managing through the economic crisis.”
SWP is the formal process that connects business strategy to human resource strategy and practices, and ensures that a company has the right people in the right place, at the right time, and at the right cost. SWP and its attendant investment plans take into account such factors as which skills will be critical to business success and which roles will be hardest to fill, as well as regional variations in human capital quantity, quality, and ROI.
“Strategic workforce planning enables companies to make these decisions based on sound data and analytics,” says Young. “Business leaders can use strategic workforce planning to evaluate a variety of options, such as, for instance, the costs and feasibility of building a new plant in Russia, Brazil or India, based on the local skills supply, infrastructure and labor laws.”
The new report finds that, while some SWP strategies work fine on a global scale, others need regionalization to accommodate differences in demographics, skills levels, and labor costs. One case study shows how, in just four years, 3M moved from knowing very little about its workforce to clearly understanding global characteristics and trends, and important regional differences.
“As the company tries to execute a critical business strategy—shifting its ‘center of gravity’ from the United States to other global locations—human resources has become an integral player,” Young explains.
Source: Strategic Workforce Planning in Global Organizations, Report #1457-09-RR, The Conference Board; www.conference-board.org.
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