Lacey Partipilo and Brandon Laws of Xenium HR discuss how organizations can use a workforce planning process to identify talent in the organizations so they can staff their teams appropriately.
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Brandon Laws: Lacey, when we think about the talent that we have in our organizations, I don’t know if employers are really looking at it holistically. What are the assets that we have and what areas are we missing? What’s the name for that? I know there’s a name and a thing that you guys do in the HR world. What is it called?
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah. When the employers take a look at the holistic approach to staffing, recruiting, it’s workforce planning.
Brandon Laws: OK. And what does that process look like? Is it literally an analysis of who’s doing what? Are all the leaders coming together and figuring out like, OK, here are my people, here are the skills that they have, here’s what they’re missing? What does it look like?
Lacey Partipilo: Kind of just like that. So it’s a strategic approach to look at what are the needs of the organization now and in the future. What’s the talent that we have within the organization? What’s the gap, right? What’s the difference between the two? And then creating a plan so that we’re able to execute on those business objectives. So getting that talent in the door. So creating, recruiting and retention strategies.
Brandon Laws: If somebody is going to walk through this and they’ve never done it before, are there certain steps that you would take to do it?
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah, it’s a holistic approach. So I would recommend that employers are doing this on a pretty regular basis, at least annually. You’re getting all of the stakeholders in a room together. Oftentimes HR is involved. Looking at the business objectives, the goals of the organization and then looking at talent. So what is our skillset? What is the tenure of those employees? Do we have career-pathing employees? What about succession planning? And then what’s the difference in the skills that we have in that talent and then what we need? And then we create the plan from there.
Brandon Laws: Does it ever inform compensation strategies also?
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah. It absolutely can because if we’re looking at the talent that we have in those skills and then looking at attracting what is needed, sometimes what’s needed is a different kind of skillset.
So an organization might be benchmarking new positions that they need to create. It might be how do we get competitive with the talent and really making ourselves an employer of choice where people want to look. So absolutely they would be looking at compensation.
Brandon Laws: When somebody finishes – seemingly somebody is owning this process. But when you’re done and you have this workforce planning gap analysis, if you will, what do you do with it? What does it look like and what do you do with it in the end?
Lacey Partipilo: I mean ideally what leaders would walk away with is retention strategy. So we got to keep the awesome people that we have on our team and then a recruiting strategy. So how can we attract that talent? And then there are steps within each of those plans on executing. So it might be building relationships outside the organization to be a place where people want to come to work. It might be creating retention strategies within. So increasing PTO for people who have been there, implementing sabbatical. So it’s sort of both things happening and then talking to people too, talking to the employees, what’s working well and I think it’s just – it’s a continual process, really staying engaged with employees on that.
Brandon Laws: Does it ever inform, for one, how you’re hiring in the future or even like restructuring?
Lacey Partipilo: Sure. I mean it absolutely should inform how you’re hiring in the future and I think that’s the challenge honestly is most employers do this reactive recruiting. So somebody gives notice. They’re leaving. We’re going to backfill that same position rather than looking at, OK, this is an opportunity maybe to do some type of restructure.
Brandon Laws: Like this is an opportunity to restructure how we’re doing …
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah, how we do our work, how we serve our customers, how we create widgets, whatever it might be. So I do think there’s an opportunity to look at that and it doesn’t necessarily have to be this big reorg or we change reporting structures. I think sometimes it’s just as simple as, “Is this work on the right desk? What’s the talent that we’re going to need six months from now or five years from now?”
Maybe what we had we just we’re dealing with because that person had been here for a long time. It’s an opportunity really to look at what’s needed for the future.
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