www.henley.reading.ac.uk10 April 2023

Executive Education – Centre for HR Excellence

Aligning Resourcing Strategy with Business Strategy

Nick KemsleyCo-director of Henley Business School’s HR CentreOwner of Org-onomic Ltd

• 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

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Brief introduction

• 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?

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ContextWe fail to adequately connect SWP and the business agenda

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To employees To regulators

To customersTo investors& analysts

To shareholders

At the heart of strategy lie promises

But what makes your CEO confidentthat these promises can be delivered?

Leaders areproficientat 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

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

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Internal &externalcontext

(Business)

Internal &externalcontext(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

Employerbrand

Internal &externalcontext

(Business)

Internal &externalcontext(People)

Connects the strategy and

activity conversations, supporting growth AND efficiency

Value released

• Strategy refined

• Budgeting• Confidence• Risk mgt

Value released

• Prioritisation• Alignment• Efficiency• Engagement• Focus

SWP connects two key conversations

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ApproachWe build spreadsheets not insight

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Connecting strategy & execution

The workforce planning funnel

Build, Buy, Retain,

Redeploy Plans

Strategic Workforce

Plans

Operational People

Processes

Business Strategy

& Context

Resourcingassignments,

training, reward etc(weeks)

Rough numbers,costs, plans

(months)

Trends, scenarios,profile, scale, gaps,

strategies(years)

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Coming at it from this direction just gives you bigger spreadsheets and the illusion of accuracy

In 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

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The 5 key SWP elementsWhat 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

On timeDelivery

When data good enough

Workforce plans

Based initially on judgement of macro data

Refining & updating as we know more

Integrated approach

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Strategic

workforce plan

Workforce

strategies

Acceptable dataaccuracy

Supply capability in place

Checking

Delivery vs Need

Strategy & business planning cycles

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CapabilitySWP is one of the only things going from Digital to Analogue!

• 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

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The Reality of what SWP involves

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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

• 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?

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Summary – consider four questions

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Questions?