Which of these challenges frustrate you the most?

Complexity Challenges:

• Our recent mergers and acquisitions activity has complicated our workforce composition. We are struggling to find the right way to optimize
• We have outsourced too many processes too fast. How can we deploy key talent from those processes?
• We have expanded into new business lines and geographies. Each entity has its own workforce planning model and none of them look the same

Cost and Efficiency Challenges:

• We must reduce our cost and we will be reducing headcount—however we must not lose key talent in the process
• We need to do MORE with the SAME headcount level—efficiency is now the key driver of how we utilize our workforce.

Recovery Challenges:

• We want to take advantage of the increased supply of top —talent that has become available due to the downturn. How do we know how much we would need?
• We need to understand how to predict our staffing requirements as we begin to recover—things are so volatile that is difficult to see what the business will need.
• As we plan for the future, we need to know the leanest level of staffing needed to execute our business plan.

The Solution to your Challenges

Each of these challenges is due to a short-term and micro-level approach to Workforce Planning. Strategic Workforce Planning helps you tackle all of them.

What We Know—Leading Practices and Common Practices in Workforce Planning

Our experience with global clients shows a clear difference in the way successful organizations approach Workforce Planning, as compared to common practices found in trailing organizations.

Leading Practices

• Keep strategic workforce planning at the enterprise level.
• Identify and focus on critical roles, skills, divisions, etc.
• Conduct interviews and discussions with managers to understand issues.
• Put thought into accessing the historical workforce data.
• Keep a dedicated team of resources throughout the process.
• Establish a baseline (single point in time) for data used to project demand and supply.
• Identify success measures for the effort.
• Focus on managing change proactively.
• Develop a robust, single, organization-wide methodology to plan for future workforce requirements.

Common Practices

• Sponsorship by senior leadership is in name only (responsibility is delegated to middle-management).
• Failure to identify critical groups, roles and skills. Attempt to include everything .
• Tactically-driven, management of current workload—no emphasis on future.
• Project team not engaged and fully committed to the effort— more focused on their 'day job'.
• Inability to identify and/or access data sources. Don’t do anything until they have more data about everything.
• Have and know lots of workforce 'facts' but don't really use the data to build insights.
• Rely too much on what other organizations do.

What We Know—The Importance of Workforce Planning Throughout the Economic Cycle

Many organizations believe that Workforce Planning is necessary only in a downturn—to rationalize workforce and drive productivity. Workforce Planning is actually a key management instrument that is important throughout the economic cycle.

What We Know—The Complete Process of Workforce Planning

Strategic Workforce Planning is not just one of the initiatives below. It involves conducting all three, in great depth and based on a variety of data sources.

What we Know—The Three Core Factors

In order to deliver substantial business results, Strategic Workforce Planning needs three core factors: deep expertise in the area, strong industry knowledge & experience and dual-strength in data-capture technology and employee listening.

1. Expertise in Strategic Workforce Planning

The Hewitt Advantage

• We partner with clients globally and across industries. Being a 'one-firm' firm, we are uniquely positioned to deliver this advantage to your context.
• Our expertise in parallel areas like BPI and outsourcing help us deliver flexible solutions, tailor-made to your needs.

2. Industry Knowledge and Experience

The Hewitt Advantage

• Hewitt consultants delivering to a client in an industry always have rich line experience in that sector.
• Our consultants not only demonstrate strong grasp of the industry –specific dynamics, but also bring in the cream of best practices in the sector globally.

3. Data Capture Techniques

The Hewitt Advantage

• Hewitt understands the role of both technology and qualitative data capture methods in workforce planning solutions.
• The dual advantage of our partnership with Vemo and our employee-listening skills is unique and unmatched by others.

¹The award-winning software created by experts in workforce planning , used and trusted by major US corporations