Episode 221: How Lufthansa Group Combines Operational and Strategic Workforce Planning (Interview with Dr. Tobias Bartholomé)
What do you do when the workforce planning strategy that’s worked for years no longer fits the future? You rethink, reset, and rebuild.
In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders Podcast, host, David Green, sits down with Dr. Tobias Bartholomé, Project Lead for Strategic Workforce Planning at Lufthansa Group, to explore why—after nearly a decade—Lufthansa has taken a bold step back to reimagine how it plans for the future of work.
Join them as they uncover:
The reasons driving a complete reinvention of workforce planning at Lufthansa Group.
How to align future-facing strategies with immediate operational needs.
Practical tactics for leveraging external labour market data to stay ahead of the competition.
The art of converting workforce insights into actionable, lasting change.
Strategies for maintaining momentum through leadership transitions.
Collaborative approaches within the travel and mobility ecosystem to tackle shared talent challenges.
Tune in to this episode, sponsored by TalentNeuron, and discover how one of the world’s leading airlines is preparing its workforce for tomorrow’s challenges—today.
TalentNeuron is the future of workforce transformation. From strategic workforce planning to skill gap analysis, TalentNeuron combines external talent intelligence and internal data into one seamless platform.
Why not join global enterprises already leveraging actionable insights to boost organisational performance and readiness and visit talentneuron.com today.
[0:00:00] David Green: How do you balance the short and long term with workforce planning? Hi, my name is David Green, and we'll be diving into this topic in today's episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast with Dr Tobias Bartholomé, the Project Lead for Strategic Workforce Planning at the Lufthansa Group, one of the world's largest airlines. Lufthansa has been doing operational workforce planning for over a decade, and Tobias was there at the outset of this journey. Having reassumed responsibility for workforce planning at Lufthansa Group in the past year, Tobias is now boldly reimagining the game, combining operational and strategic workforce planning together. Why did he decide to hit the reset button? How do you balance long-term visionary strategy with the relentless pressure of immediate business challenges? And, what does it take to spark genuine leadership conversations that drives sustainable change?
In the episode, Tobias reveals his fresh approach, where data meets decisive action, and long-term strategy marries immediate execution. He'll share how engaging senior leaders and integrating cutting-edge technology has not only kept Lufthansa Group competitive, but is helping to set a new benchmark in the airline industry. So, if you're ready for an insider's look at how strategic workforce planning can set your organisation up for success now and in the future, let's take off with Tobias Bartholomé and uncover the secrets behind Lufthansa Group's innovative strategic workforce planning pivot.
Tobias, welcome to the show. Can you maybe start by sharing with our audience your role at Lufthansa Group, but also the journey that led you to lead strategic workforce planning for the company?
[0:01:59] Dr Tobias Bartholomé: Yeah, we should, David. Thanks a lot, by the way, for the invitation. Great fan of yours. So, pleased and honoured to be in touch with the people analytics rock star here! So, yeah, I'm for a year now having a project on Lufthansa Group level where we re-established strategic workforce planning on a Lufthansa Group level. Lufthansa, as the airline industry, is a very volatile industry, so we've been there before with strategic workforce planning. I was there like ten years ago when we started that at Lufthansa Cargo and Lufthansa Technic. Then my career led me some different paths. So, I'm a people enthusiast. I think I've done pretty much everything in HR except from tariff negotiations. I've been recruiting, HR development, change and transformation management, and Head of HR here in corporate now since a year on that journey, to really get the strategic view on people back to Lufthansa on a group level.
Lufthansa Group is a large company, very different subsidiaries and very, very different job groups. So, there is surely no one size fits all, but like the poster case for strategic workforce planning, we have for our technical functions, airline technicians, airline mechanics which, after they are done with their apprenticeship, have lead times of up to ten years until they're fully qualified to handle all airplanes of the fleet. But the challenge here is very, very different job groups and very, very different labour market positions. So, we are kind of reconsidering strategic workforce planning on a group level, and try to do something like customer-centric or business-centric strategic workforce planning where not one size fits all.
[0:04:04] David Green: Of course, and we'll probably cover all of those topics in our conversation, Tobias. Firstly, thank you very much for your kind words at the start. The cheque is in the post! And the airline industry, you're right, very volatile. I don't know if you know this but a long time ago, I worked in the airline industry for a company called Amadeus.
[0:04:23] Dr Tobias Bartholomé: Oh, yeah, yeah.
[0:04:24] David Green: You probably know well at Lufthansa, because Lufthansa is one of the companies that started out there. So, I lived and worked in the south of France for seven years until 2011, working at Amadeus. So, I know that certainly from personal experience, I know the volatility of the industry, particularly linked to the economic environment, obviously the pandemic and everything as well. So, you mentioned that you've been back in doing the strategic workforce planning project lead role for a year, but you also referenced that even ten years ago, you were involved with workforce planning at Lufthansa Group. Again, it would be good to understand obviously, as you said, you're trying to re-establish those efforts to take a maybe a different approach, a more business-centric approach. Why have you decided to pivot and not quite start again, but to re-evaluate where you are with strategic workforce planning at Lufthansa Group?
[0:05:21] Dr Tobias Bartholomé: Yeah, I think what I learned from conferences is this is not just a Lufthansa-specific topic, right? The topic, strategic workforce planning, is a bit volatile in itself, right? My personal start was ten years ago, where all the demographic shift was of course foreseeable, but the platform wasn't really burning. And so, we kind of started that off at Lufthansa Cargo, Lufthansa Technic did so too, but it's not too easy to get to the measure level and it is just in some functions, it's very well established over time, where there's absolutely no way around it like, as I said, for technical functions. But for other functions, it kind of lost the urgency to it, right? It wasn't analytic. But as the labour market was still good, I think the operational was always, in a company, a bit favoured over the strategic. So, on a group level, we kind of lost focus on that topic a bit and then been hit hardly by Corona crisis. And now, after that, where all the demographic shifts that we anticipated in the beginning of the '20s are now really kicking in, people leaving age-wise, and also labour markets getting scarcer and scarcer, now there's just another momentum for a restart. And, yeah, the idea to really tailor it to the business, and not to -- as I said, we're on a journey and we're quite on the beginning. We try to develop formats that enable strategic workforce planning from workshop formats, which are maybe two hours, four hours, and lead to first measures or a day.
On the other hand, for the volume functions and technical, we have the full-fledged numeric strategic workforce planning in place. And what we are trying is to really, the organisation is always operationally focused. So, we're trying to establish strategic workforce planning on two speeds, so to say, right? And maybe platforms haven't been burning enough ten years ago, right? It was more a good thing to do, but the need for that was still too far in the future maybe.
[0:08:28] David Green: I know you're a year into the journey, and appreciate that it's not all complete yet, of course it's not.
[0:08:33] Dr Tobias Bartholomé: No, by far not, yeah.
[0:08:35] David Green: So, what does the new approach to strategic workforce planning consist of; what are you doing differently from maybe what you did before?
[0:08:43] Dr Tobias Bartholomé: Yeah, I think it's more, as I said, it's considering the here and now as well as the strategic aspects, right? Most functions, on the one side, we are in a very good position. We're having a strong brand, still attracting people, still performing better than competitors on that. Still, we want to grow and we're on a growth path, and people markets out there are still a restriction. So, what we got on board is some labour market analytics, which really does the trick of getting you in the conversation with senior leaderships. Nobody likes to see that a competitor is performing better on recruiting. We are having some partners there and the labour market data are sometimes an eye-opener and say, "Okay, this can really help us now if we're seeing, I don't know, our competitor is searching for that skill. Do we have that on our agenda or don't we?"
So, we brought in labour market data, we're also bringing in skills data, and trying to bring that to the organisation through formats that are relatively easy to digest. So, one thing we're doing, for example, skills-based is a future job profiling format, where we take out of different sources. We're collaborating with H4 course here a lot, take all the skills for a certain function that are currently searched for, we have all the skills trends, which skills are evolving, we even have something like skills worth in there, so you could even measure your learning and development efforts, right? If we scale for that scale, the market value of employees is rising. So, we are much more flexible with regard to the method because I think it's the hands on, or you get the attention you need if you tailor to the question that the business is having. And on-the-fly, we're then also introducing the long-term view. I think the combination of those aspects, just the trick of getting attention, getting HR to the table, which isn't also that easy, right? The HR function has come a long way and is not always on business eye level everywhere.
But we had, for example, a case where we came up with a competitor nobody was aware of when recruiting for airline mechanics, for example, which we are very good at. We found that an agency that is just recruiting for all NATO Air Forces was one of our main competitors, but they worked in a slightly different arena. So, that really did a trick. I said, "Okay, they are really fast, but what are the benefits; how can we benchmark against them?" And to combine that with then the long-term view, right, I think that is something that, when I think of customer-oriented or customer-centric workforce planning, it's finding really the pressing issues in a certain function and catering to that in the long term, but also having some answers on the short term.
[0:12:45] David Green: How do you navigate the tension between maybe some leaders' focus on the immediate priorities and challenges that they've got to solve now, and the longer-term strategic needs of workforce planning? We've talked a little bit about how you're kind of doing both in parallel with each other, I don't know if you could talk a little bit more to that; maybe there's an example, or something, you can give as well?
[0:13:56] Dr Tobias Bartholomé: Yeah, we're really trying to establish the burning platform now as a door-opener. And if we do so, talk about measures, right? This is then either about recruiting strategies, competitor analysis, how do we really set up our talent attraction in that specific function to stand out against the competition? And then, for example, in board technical functions in Munich, we're doing that. And then, alongside the same thing, we're establishing and bringing further the quantitative long-term planning. Nobody's willing to talk about tomorrow's burning platform when the platform is burning already. So, I think gaining trust by showing really some actionable insights that we can use now, and then using that trust in order to now see, if we would have done that five years before, the platform wouldn't have been burning by now, right, so let's have a look into the nearer future. It's not about a plan, but about different plans that show a bandwidth and that enable decision-making.
So, just having a look at the long term offers you a lot. Even in a demographic situation where demographic information now gets more and more viable for the process, in the beginning of the 2030s, we will be having a lot of employees leaving, the last ones of the baby-boomer generation retiring. And when we're talking about efficiency measures in the short term, to have that, "Okay, what happens if we look at three years ahead? We will have leavers anyway, so we might have a staffing problem in six years if we go for efficiencies in three years", so the benefit of the long-term view. But also, yeah, get like the interim ticket with stock casing, what you can do now.
Another interesting aspect we're into, but we're just at the beginning of it, it's location analysis, right? I think it's the same in most European workforces, that we're having the skilled worker strategies and we really have to broaden the picture where to hire, maybe bring work to the employees and not bring the employees to work. So, there's a lot of research, a lot of interest, and a lot of business need to figure out, okay, which is our setup in the future in order to acquire talent; where do we have talent supply that is enough; where do we have relatively low competition? And that's also a nice angle we are just beginning to play, right, where are we doing business; how are we maybe using the fact that we are an airline which is multi-hub in Europe, so we can hire in different places as we have a good outreach?
That's just in the beginning but really to get yourself into those discussions and saying, okay, we're having location data that can inform you about talent supply and we can guide you in this decision.
[0:18:07] David Green: Yeah, I've literally just got back from Paris. We had one of our Insight222 People Analytics programme meetings with about 50 practitioners from various companies, L'Oreal hosted. And it was actually interesting that when people started talking about the challenges they're trying to solve for in 2025, how similar they were, but they're all coming from different industries or different contexts, but very similar. And then by talking them through together, people leave with ideas that can maybe help accelerate each of their progress. So, it can be quite helpful. Talking about that, obviously particularly with the data that you've talked about, that you bring from the external insights, all this stuff's great but it's important to drive action. So, really, one question here, how do you work with your leaders, your decision-makers to actually take action on some of the insights that you're providing?
[0:19:06] Dr Tobias Bartholomé: Yeah, we truly consider this the main part, right? If we don't get into action, it's just statistics, right, or it's just a newspaper article, just some information. So, since we are not so far in time, we are just approaching the measure levels with our project, starting to act as a broker to, on the one hand, all the internal capabilities that we have in setting up a programme. Currently, we're working to set up a reskilling in IT, where it's going to be growing demand in one area, and of course demand is growing everywhere, but IT security functions, for example, are very hard to get in the market. And we are involved in kicking this off, involved in acting like a matchmaker with different internal functions, where we get an L&D of the specific company involved, sometimes bringing some external contact. And then the goal is to be tracking, right, and really having a measure tracker, but that we are really driven by getting to the measure level. Even our meeting structure is, we have just one measure-only meeting, so only talking about which measures are being taken in which domain? Yeah, and then it's about really tracking those.
I think it's good that we're involved in some projects that will be tracking the measure results anyway, and have high attention. But yeah, we are also steered by review and we'll be reporting measures and results there. But still, yeah, I think that's the thing that does the trick, unless it's just words or figures. So, current approach is having a high focus, setting up an individual tracking, getting into the tracking systems of programmes, and just considering as part of the job to kick this off and to track this back, because we of course want to learn how successful our impact has been.
[0:22:05] David Green: To link to that, you mentioned earlier that you're providing regular communications to senior managers on some of the external insights that are out there. As part of that, are you also communicating some of the successes that you're having on some of the initiatives within the organisation to, I don't know, create even more interest from some of the senior managers?
[0:23:20] Dr Tobias Bartholomé: For sure, that is on the roadmap this year. First of all, it was about awareness, right? And then, once we have really trackable actions, we are going to report that and have those success stories. Of course, we have success stories from the long-lasting SWP project, right? As I told you for the technical function, they are quite well-equipped and they steered far better through the crisis than a lot of other functions because they were informed to take very uncomfortable decisions, right. And when still in crisis, to decide, "Okay, we need to hire. If we believe that we are going to survive this, we need to hire now, because we're seeing a gap in three to five years, and then having a really good return to market and good results", of course, those success stories are there.
But yeah, we are now working with a set of different measures, small ones, big ones, and to have them communicable is for sure a good thing to do and we're planning on doing that. But also, yeah, I like that one, "Be useful", right, "Be useful and be easy to deal with". For example, we had, we tried a format just in a half-hour interview with one of our top executives and said, "Are you informed about your workforce? We have some information", and we have just an interview format, just highlighting the four risk classes, so, what are your most important functions; what are the labour market risks; what are the competency risks; what are capacities that are at risk; and how's your demography? And then, in a very easy interview format, we just see visualisations where we have that four dimensions lined out. And then, we had another one when we come to measure and say, "Okay, in which of these functions do we have over or under supply, and how about skills disruption in this function?" so just a four-quadrant scheme. And then, we could relatively easy set up, "Okay, we see reskilling potential". And that was in an 8.30 to 9.00 early morning coffee.
Of course, the working out of that thing really then takes longer and we're still on it. But yeah, I like to refer to it as maybe the fastest SWP analysis done. I think it's also important, right, to fit in business schedule and come to first insights and first measure ideas relatively fast.
[0:26:28] David Green: So, Tobias, got a couple of questions left. Obviously, we talked about this a little bit, but the airline industry is part of a broader travel and mobility ecosystem. How does Lufthansa collaborate with maybe some external partners that you may have, to address any shared talent challenges, such as if there are shortages in specific roles or regions where there may be an ability to partner together?
[0:26:56] Dr Tobias Bartholomé: This is really, as you said, we briefly talked about it. It's things that are happening in network systems. We are really at the beginning of that, right? When we are at, for example, our hubs, our operational leaders are in very close alignment with the service providers on the ground. And so, they really exchange about hiring needs, have a look not to cannibalise each other's needs, and really having the view that we want to have a performance ecosystem. It's still there a lot of ideas to further go into that, right, to establish partnerships. We have, for example, in Munich, we have a partnership with the airport at Munich for one terminal, so we have a terminal that we are jointly operating. That is an infrastructure partnership and maybe that partnership goes even farther when it comes to job functions.
But this is in the beginning and in the idea stage. If we are so dependent on each other in this ecosystem, why not share some benefits that one or the other have, right? If people from ground service providers would have access to Lufthansa labour market after some time, for example, maybe we have some benefits that will be attractive to others. Still just non-citable ideas, right? But it makes definitely sense to look on these ecosystems together with our service partners, and maybe even other airlines.
Another thing that comes into play there is increasing volatility of air traffic, because after Corona, we've seen some structural shifts. Business traffic hasn't come back as strong as it was before Corona. Maybe some years ago, we were sitting in the same room recording the podcast, which we aren't now. Leisure travel has, on the other hand, increased. So, it's also a tricky task now on the one hand to have our labour and the division of our labour across the month of a year really adapted to that seasonality, but also to look for complementary industries that are having maybe an inverse volatility where we can work, right? Student programmes are something. Brussels airlines is, for example, having students just flying over their summer holidays and after that, studying. So, it's a very limited period that they work, and then they study and after that they can work again, and that works quite well with the schedule of the students. So, finding partners, finding systems that are complementary to us is, I think, a task that is where we're still beginning.
But yeah, if you want to be a leading airline group, you have to be also leading in collaboration with your partners too, because you're always operating under specific circumstances and you cannot just stop at, "We just fly the planes", and I think there will be more strategic development into that direction.
[0:31:13] David Green: Two questions. First one, most of the people listening to this, in fact probably all of the people listening to this are working in HR or servicing HR professionals as technology firms or consultants. If you could give one piece of advice to the HR leaders that are listening on how they can build or improve their best strategic workforce planning capabilities, what would it be?
[0:31:38] Dr Tobias Bartholomé: I think it would be the 'be useful' thing, right? Really be useful, be strictly in a way to get a foot in the door, to get your seat at the table, figure out what is the biggest business problem that your leaders are having, and be useful in that and be perceived as a partner consulting in that. I think that will do the trick then for a long-term partnership. And yeah, I think there's been a lot of talk about the rise of HR just from a labour market perspective and it depends a bit on the industry, but most industries are people industries and the role of HR, of course, there's a good momentum to increase the role and the impact of HR. But we have to maybe let go some old ways and be solution consultants on the people aspects of business problems. I think that would do the trick.
[0:33:02] David Green: Yeah, good piece of advice, find a big problem, solve it.
[0:33:08] Dr Tobias Bartholomé: Sounds so easy, right? I think you don't even have to solve it, but contribute to the solution and I think HR may have more to contribute than we are aware in the first place.
[0:33:26] David Green: Yeah, I think we need to be braver and a bit bolder sometimes.
[0:33:31] Dr Tobias Bartholomé: Yeah, basically all business people doing the same with, "We are buying planes with", I don't know, "more than ten years ahead", so that of course is a scenario view that we are taking there when buying that. Does anybody know how the future looks like? No. But we have some hint as to educated guesses, right, and we have some factors that we know about, I don't know, whose workforce is developing. So, let's do the same thing that in any other business function is already part of the game, right? Taking scenarios and proposing measures to fulfil those.
[0:34:17] David Green: Right, we're at the last question, Tobias, so this is a question that we are asking everyone in this series, and I think you've talked about this without mentioning the word in a number of questions that you've got. So, maybe you might summarise from here. So, the question is, how do you leverage people analytics to inform strategic workforce planning initiatives?
[0:34:42] Dr Tobias Bartholomé: A lot, I think, right? People analytics are a broad term. We are bringing a lot of analytics on the people who are not already in the company to strategic workforce planning when it comes to talent supply on specific sites, skilled supply, location analytics. So, there's a lot done there. Internal people analytics, of course, when we do strategic workforce planning, we have an assessment on the internal workforce on main dimensions, we're bringing that too. We also have a dashboard project where we link internal and external data where you can see, "Okay, in my function, in my roles that I have, which kind of skills disruption has there been throughout? What are skills disruption trends and what are labour market demand trends?" so that me as a business leader, I'm informed not only about workforce, age, skills, and so forth, but also can relate that to the labour market and say, "Okay, I'm hosting functions that are in high demand on the labour market, and that hasn't been the case like two years ago".
So, we're trying to link the two, since a lot of talk is about that the purpose is, on the one hand, to use it for recruiting, but also for further development and reskilling. Yeah, and we are really trying to complement that in parallel with building skills management, for example, internal skills management on the way there. So, in some time, we'll be able to complement strategic workforce planning with internal skills development. Having that link to learning offers, right, where you can, for example, compare yourself to the skill in the market and then see, "Okay, what learning offers can get me there?" So, there are a lot of use cases to link people analytics data to strategic office management.
[0:37:21] David Green: That's good. It's a good way to end it I think. I think it sounds that data and analytics is underpinning everything that you're doing, from the insights, whether that's on the supplier side or on the demand side, and then for the actions as well, so really interesting, Tobias. Well, really enjoyed our conversation today. I think in a year, you're doing some impressive stuff at the Lufthansa Group in quite a challenging environment and industry as well. How can listeners stay in touch with you, presumably on LinkedIn, and maybe find out more about your work?
[0:37:57] Dr Tobias Bartholomé: Yeah, just find me there, follow me there. I'm getting a lot of requests, so I'm not the fastest answerer of direct messages on LinkedIn, but yeah, we can definitely be in touch there.
[0:38:13] David Green: That's great. Well, Tobias, thank you very much for sharing your story with listeners of the Digital HR Leaders podcast and I look forward to maybe seeing you in person at a conference or event at some point this year.
[0:38:27] Dr Tobias Bartholomé: Thanks so much for having me, David. See you.