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#10 JooBee's newsletter
JooBee Yeow
February 08, 2024
TL;DR
🤔 Optimal organisation: WFM, WFO, WFP, WTF?
🚫 Workforce planning (WFP): Avoid these 3 mistakes
❓ Your views on workforce planning
This newsletter edition is brought to you by Hawkwood 💛
Question: With a strong emphasis on the path to profitability, our budget doesn't allow for endless hiring. Our goal is to attain optimal performance by striking the right balance between our organisation’s size and team capabilities - avoiding both over-hiring and under-hiring.
We've heard about Workforce Planning - can you give me a brief overview of how it can support my start-up in achieving this goal?
Optimal organisation: WFM, WFO, WFP, WTF?
Whether or not your business is growing in size and complexity or you have a budget to work with, it's crucial to ensure you have the right people in place to maximise your chances of success.
What I'm about to delve into might not be the sexiest topic but stick with me if you're serious about running a sustainable business. This is essential reading and I’ll try to make the journey both enlightening and enjoyable!
Workforce Management (WFM): Like conducting a symphony
Think of your business like a beautiful orchestra, and WFM is about ensuring that your orchestra plays in perfect harmony. It's not just about handling payroll and scheduling; it's about having the right musicians in the right seats and ensuring they hit all the right notes.
WFM is like making sure you don't have too many violinists or not enough drummers - finding that sweet spot to create the symphony of your dreams, all while keeping the operation running smoothly.
Workforce Optimisation (WFO): Unleash your team's superpowers
In the orchestra of your business, WFO is the process of discovering and unleashing those superpowers. These hidden talents, once unlocked, transform your ensemble into a league of extraordinary individuals. Picture your violinist mastering harmony, your percussionist setting the rhythm, and your brass section delivering powerful crescendos. Your orchestra becomes not just beautiful music but a formidable force (or in business lingo – a key differentiator for your business!).
With WFO, you're not merely conducting, you're revealing your team's true potential. This process enhances performance quality and empowers your workforce to be the superheroes of your business, capable of conquering any challenges.
Workforce Planning (WFP): Embarking on a world tour
Now, picture your orchestra getting ready for future performances. WFP is like composing a score for the upcoming 3-year World Tour. It anticipates workforce gaps due to factors like economic shifts, people leaving, retirements, plans to expand your orchestra or any upcoming changes (and challenges!). This process is all about preparing for the future and the outcome is a proactive long-term game plan, ensuring your orchestra adapts smoothly to future changes.
Summary: WFM, WFO & WFP
The ultimate goal is balancing productivity and achieving sustainable growth
Understanding all three – WFM, WFO and WFP - is crucial because each plays a significant role at different stages of your business's strategy and planning. They all share a common goal: build an optimal organisation to achieve high productivity for sustainable growth - without burning out or losing your valuable team members.
Where should I begin to build an optimal organisation?
It's crucial to have a solid foundation of Workforce Management (WFM) in place – ensure you have the right people with the right skills to meet your CURRENT business needs (roughly within the next 12 months).
Once you've established that, you'll be better equipped to accurately pinpoint the future capabilities gap (within approximately 24-36 months) required to achieve your long-term business objectives.
Your HR team can guide you through both activities, employing various methodologies to build the optimal organisation. Regardless of the approach, there are ‘Seven Rights’ (by Adam Gibson) you must consider during these processes:
Right Capability: The B.E.S.T. fit capabilities - beliefs, experience, skills and traits
Right Shape: The right structure and mix of capabilities across the business
Right Size: The optimal numbers and level of capacity
Right Location: At the right location, both geographically (e.g. country, region, office, remote) and structurally (e.g. function, business unit, product).
Right Time: The time needed to create maximum value (e.g. 12, 24, 36 months).
Right Cost: The right balance between what we pay and what we gain, considering external markets and internal benchmarks.
Right Risk: At the right level of risk in relation to your business (e.g. variability of talent demand, sustainability of talent, speed to performance, etc)
Optimal organisation = Symphony of WFM, WFO and WFP
When you have the right number of people with the right capabilities in place, it paves the way for WFO, leading to increased productivity, improved efficiency and sustainable performance.
Just like in an orchestra, WFM, WFO and WFP must harmonise and work in concert to build an optimal organisation to achieve high productivity and sustainable growth.
Workforce planning: Avoid these 3 mistakes
In the typical start-up scenario, during Workforce Planning (WFP), the HR team creates a spreadsheet and each department leader fills in the jobs and titles for future hires within this spreadsheet. This spreadsheet is then handed over to the Talent Team, tasked with hiring 'the best person for the role.'
Fast forward 6 months, you start to realise that the so-called 'best person' has ended up in a VP of Marketing role that isn't needed right now, or you've prematurely hired too many engineers without planning for a manager to lead them. Worse still, you might have overlooked hiring a BI analyst, leaving you without the crucial data needed to understand your customers' buying behavior for the launch of your new feature.
In my experience, when these scenarios unfold, they typically point to 3 mistakes that occur during WFP.
Mistake #1: Short-term thinking without a big-picture strategy 🌆
One of the biggest mistakes many companies make is to treat WFP as a way to put out short-term 🔥fires (we need this person now!) without aligning it with the company's overall long-term strategy. A company's strategy should translate into clear goals and the necessary work to achieve them, which is essentially workload forecasting.
But here's the catch - before you even start forecasting roles and headcount, you should consider other factors that can help get the work done, such as automation, process streamlining or other means. For instance, if you plan to automate your customer onboarding, you might need fewer people who are more tech-savvy, as opposed to a larger team with a generalist skillset. It's these considerations that should form the foundation for your WFP.
Mistake #2: Thinking it's just HR's job 🤷🏻♀️
You know that saying, "It takes a village to raise a child"? Well, in the start-up world, the business is your baby and it takes the entire company to find the right talent (maybe not the entire company, but certainly more than just one team!). It's not just HR's gig. Here are some key groups of people who should be in the mix:
HR Team: They lead the WFP process and keep things aligned.
Senior Leadership Team (SLT): They have their eyes on the company's goals and ensure they sync up with the overall business strategy.
Finance Leaders: These folks help you understand the financial constraints and give you a reality check on the investments the company can make in the coming years.
Managers: They're the boots on the ground, with insights into the capabilities you need daily and can help you conduct critical gap analysis.
BI/Data Team: They're the wizards who consolidate and leverage business and people data. For instance, they can tell you that your sales team typically hits full quota by month 7. Armed with this info, you can make informed decisions about when to hire or implement initiatives to reduce ramp-up time.
Mistake #3: Overlooking your internal All-Stars 🌟
Within the WFP process, there's one common blunder - neglecting the active review of your internal talent. When you make internal talent gap analysis a priority early in your WFP journey, you gain the advantage of planning ahead and proactively developing existing high-potential employees to step up and grow into key roles, creating a win-win scenario. (Click here to discover strategies for balancing Rising Stars, Current Stars, and Future Stars within your team)
But, if you don't pay attention to your internal talent and solely rely on external hires, this oversight can lead to a loss of critical talent, essential business knowledge and a revolving door of talent, ultimately leaving your business constantly playing catch-up in terms of performance.
So, as you embark on your WFP journey, keep in mind that WFP goes beyond spreadsheets and the HR team. It's about aligning with the broader company vision and actively engaging key teams from within the business in the process.
🤓 PS: If you’re keen to geek out on all things WFP, Adam Gibson is your go-to WFP expert and here’s a link to his ‘Agile Workforce Planning’ blog.
What do you think❓When conducting WFP, how many of the following key groups do you typically engage? (1️⃣HR Team, 2️⃣Senior Leadership Team (SLT), 3️⃣Finance Leaders, 4️⃣Managers and 5️⃣BI/Data Team) |
