On the show today, I am talking to Alicia Roach global thought leader in Strategic Workforce Planning and Analytics and Founder and CEO of eQ8. Her passion lies in helping organisations execute their purpose by understanding their current and future workforce capability, and in this episode, she is going to be sharing how organisations can take their Strategic Workforce Planning to the next level.

In this episode, we discuss:

• The best practices and common pitfalls HR can avoid to setting up strategic workforce planning up for success

• The common misconceptions of strategic workforce planning

• The importance of focusing on your organisations unique strategic workforce planning challenges

• The role of technology to help upgrade your analysis

• How HR can add business value as we start to transition out of the pandemic

Support from this podcast comes from eQ8. You can learn more by visiting:
https://www.eq8.ai/

You can listen to this week’s episode below, or by using your podcast app of choice, just click the corresponding image to get access via the podcast website here.

Interview Transcript

David Green: Today, I'm delighted to welcome Alicia Roach, Founder and CEO at eQ8, and a leading global authority on strategic workforce planning, to the Digital HR Leaders podcast.  Welcome to the podcast, Alicia, it's quite different from when we met last time in Austin, but it's great to have you on the show.  Can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to you and eQ8, and also how you came into the field of strategic workforce planning?

Alicia Roach: Absolutely.  Yeah, definitely different from Austin!  So, thank you for having me, firstly.  I'm the CEO and Co-founder of eQ8, which is a leading software globally in strategic workforce planning.  I didn't always do SWP though; I started my career actually in finance as a chartered accountant.  I was working for a large international airline out of Australia at the time, where the workforce was the largest cost, which it is for many organisations.

At the time, the airline, along with every other one around the world, was putting in these aircraft orders for the next generation of aircraft, the A380s and the 787s, spending billions of dollars on capex, and the board was asking rightly, "Are we actually going to have enough pilots to fly these planes as they drop in over the next decade?"  It's pretty critical for an airline to have people to fly its planes.  So, looking at how many pilots were needed based on things like passenger demands, route networks, how many we had, what was going on with them around turnover, retirement, training downtime, utilisation, things like that. 

Then externally, where we these pilots coming from, these highly-skilled specialised people, what's the supply chain of them, and who are we competing with for these around the world, not only with other airlines, but career alternatives?  And bringing all of these moving parts together with the external environment in a dynamic way, to drive decisioning at the highest level of the organisation, and making those decisions around build, buy, borrow; and then ultimately providing the C-suite, the board and external stakeholders comfort that there was a plan in place to ensure that the airline could fly the planes.

Then the GFC happened not long after, and we had to revisit it all.  But we had that line in the sand to know where we'd been heading, so there was a sense by that stage of where the sales needed to shift, which is something missing for many.  But anyway, I fell in love with the power of SWP, the way it really integrated business strategy with finance and HR; and it's such a game-changer, and just such a different level of conversation for HR functions.  So, that's where I've been ever since.

David Green: So, workforce planning, there are various definitions of workforce planning, and often you hear about people talk about strategic workforce planning, operational workforce planning, just workforce planning, and you hear people talk about org design, demand planning, all under the same umbrella.  So, I'd love you to elaborate on what your definition of strategic workforce planning is, and the different levels associated with this concept?

Alicia Roach: Yeah, absolutely, and I do have that pyramid diagram, which has been widely cited.  We still get people shopping that around years after it was created.  But absolutely, SWP is, for me, one of the most misbranded disciplines out there.  If you ask five different people what they think SWP is, you'll get eight different answers.

The most common default definition, I think, that's been around for a while is, "The right people, the right place, at the right time", and then recently, "at the right cost", and then even more recently, "with the right skills", have kind of emerged, and I think that holds true to an extent.  But for us, it's broader and deeper than that; broader in that we think SWP really is about answering what is arguably the most fundamental question for an organisation, "What is our purpose; and what will it take to get there?" 

This is about recognising that the workforce is the execution vehicle for an organisation's purpose, strategy and operations.  They're not two separate entities, so we can't just set a purpose and strategy and assume the requisite workforce, the size, the shape, the skills will just materialise.  It takes planning, forethought, consciousness.  We have to create that inherent link of why we exist as an organisation to our people. 

By deeper, I mean we can't just look at FTE or dollars which, as per my original career start, my finance friends, the workforce is a line on the P&L.  We have to go layers below that and understand what needs to be done, the activities, the tasks, and what are the skills needed for those.  And we need to know what the key skills are for our organisation, for our purpose and strategy, and our competitive advantage.  That's SWP.

So, where I think other workforce planning gets confused, such as rostering or workforce management, they're more shorter term and linked to operational requirements.  I mean certainly, they sequence and fit together, so ideally the organisation does SWP first to ensure it has the right workforce to then be able to deploy on those shorter-term bases.

Where it's done the other way around, which it is for most orgs, by the way, we end up seeing orgs frantically deploying resources that they happen to have, rather than the ones that they actually need, and this short-term view manifests in problems that we see in so many organisations today, where they've got hundreds of thousands of open roles, they've got overtime, they've got workforce burnout, issues with retention engagement, because they're in the permanent state of reactivity and firefighting.

Then more recently, what we're seeing is a lot of confusion again around strategic workforce planning, with the emergence of future-of-work data and labour-market data and skills data sets, which are being conflated with SWP.  They're certainly a very important input into the process, but they're very outside in, rather than inside out.  So, they don't necessarily address what our purpose is and what we need to achieve that.  They show the world of what could be, not what should be.

Then finally, with org design, for me this is like rearranging what you have without knowing it's what you actually need.  Does it really matter that these roles report here or there, if they're not the right roles for us; or they have the completely wrong set of skills; or we need more agility in our business model, and that old-school org structure and reporting lines doesn't actually work for these new ways of working?  It makes much more sense to get the workforce, the size and shape right first, and then we can help structure it in the best way.

David Green: So, workforce planning, it's been around for a long time, but arguably it's not been solved particularly well by HR, or indeed organisations for that matter.  Where do you think HR in particular, given that most of the listeners to this podcast are working in HR, are going wrong with this?  And, what advice do you have for our listeners today to help them avoid some of these common pitfalls?

Alicia Roach: I think for me, the evolution of SWP, I think, has been inhibited by the fact that whilst it is at that intersection of HR, strategy, the business and finance, it should generally be sponsored and driven by the HR function.  They're the custodians of the workforce of people.  But that's a function that indeed has been on its own evolutionary journey, as we know.  So I think HR has emerged from that hygiene factors of good process and paying people and rolling out our L&D programmes, and it kind of got caught up for a while there in the business partner model, where I think we saw a bit of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.  It was almost like HR almost did away with its functional integrity entirely.

Back when I worked in corporate HR and that business partner model was emerging, what was thrown around by a lot of the business partners is, "We can't look at that strategy, we can't look at your analytics, we're doing stuff for the business", and it was "for the business" was the mantra.  But it was like HR became an order-taker.  It was like this over-rotation where the business, with its problems of the day, would come to HR with those, but that conflicted with another part of the business and what it was coming to HR for; and so, the HR function became a discombobulated bit of a mess.

We saw in one very large Australian corporate organisation, where the CHRO completely did away with having an HR strategy, proudly exclaiming, "Our strategy is the business strategy", which seems noble at first glance, but then left the function directionless to what that actually means.  HR is an enabling function, yes, and particularly in SWP, we're always, always about solving those business problems.  But we need to work out how to align our agenda, our expertise as a function to the business in the best way.

A true business partner is not taking orders from the business, it's bringing our expertise to the table, driving transformation, shaping change and creating that path to org effectiveness, not just getting that seat at the table and being a good listener, not waiting to get asked to do this stuff.  And HR is the rightful function to be pushing this.

So, I guess what I'm saying in a roundabout way, back to your question, is I think HR's biggest pitfall in this is getting a bit distracted and not actually doing this stuff, you know, waiting to be asked by the business, and that's a real missed opportunity, if we don't seize that now.

David Green: And, in the organisations that you're working with, are you seeing that that coupling is helping HR maybe break through that barrier to actually deliver strategic workforce planning well?

Alicia Roach: Absolutely, because I think that's where we're seeing a lot of the emergence of that analytical thinking, that business acumen.  So, that's the right place to capture this, because we need to drive that different level of conversation from just, "How's everybody feeling?" and, "How engaged are you?" to how we're actually linking those outcomes quantitatively, to what the business cares about, how we're solving the business problems.  So, that mindset does sit well with the way that the analytics function thinks inherently.

David Green: There is a rising trend, and you referenced it earlier, in the demand for skills-based workforce planning, but a lot of people are struggling to get this off the ground.  I remember we did some research, I think it was just over a year ago now, and 90% told us they wanted to do skills-based workforce planning; only about a quarter were currently doing so.

What would your advice be again to those getting started on this journey towards skills-based planning; can they go straight into planning for skills, or are there certain steps that they probably need to follow beforehand?

Alicia Roach: Firstly, I think where we get a bit caught up with HR is thinking we have to tick a million boxes before we get going.  They are looking for the perfect data, perfect processes, perfect team until this project happens, or until the business asks for this.  Guess what, while you were waiting to do all that stuff, the business has moved on and made decisions without you.  That stuff can take years, building that perfect job ontology we're hearing from some customers at the moment, and the skills ontologies, that takes a lot of time.

So, the business is making decisions without your data at all.  And look, I am being a little flippant, those things are important to get right, but you can't wait to get started.  We find that the organisations that have the greatest momentum are the ones that get going by starting to solve a business problem immediately with SWP, because that's the way we're creating that link at the workforce to the business needs; so, as an HR function, we can then focus and prioritise what we're doing.

With skills, again I think HR's got a bit of the shiny key syndrome.  The latest buzzword tends to get the focus, which happens to be "skills" right now; it was "future of work" a couple of years ago.  But we can't just breathlessly be grabbing all this skills data without context.  Again, it's that outside-in view of the world.  We need to know about the "So what?"  We always say in analytics, "The so what, and now what?"  So what, what does this actually mean for us; and now what, what are we going to about it?  And the outside-in view alone around the skills data is not going to do that for you, because it's not going to address the business problems that you need to solve for, and the questions you need to answer for, for your organisation.  It's a data point, but it needs to be contextualised into your own business to be meaningful, which we do through SWP.

So skills, yes, critical, important, can't argue with that, but you need that context for your org.  You saw that skill may be in demand for this market or this location or your competitor next door, but is it actually needed for your competitive advantage, your organisation with its value chain and strategic imperatives?

The other thing is, I think, we can't just focus on skills to the exclusion of everything else.  Even this week, I was chatting to a CEO of a large, global organisation, who said he would hire someone any day of the week who had 50%, 60%, 70% of the skills requirement, but was a cultural fit, over someone who had 100% of the skills requirement who wasn't a cultural fit.  And so, you still need to understand the skill fit, but you can't just look at that to the exclusion.

The other thing I'd caution with skills, which I think gets a bit lost in the hype is, they're not free-floating units.  We can't just get this labour market scraping data, or that report that says resilience is an important skill, then go and say, "Let's hire 400 resilients" or, "We need 150 leadership".  It doesn't make sense, it's not actionable.  For skills to match up, we need to quantify it and attach it to something, so it needs to be attached to a task, an activity, or even a role or job, even though I know everyone hates to think about roles and jobs these days; we're trying to move away from that.

But they're also attached to a human, by the way.  We can't just chop up a human and go, "You're doing these three tasks at the same time, because you've got these three skills that we need.  And, we also need to be able to manage skills across the employee life cycle, from the way we go to market, the way we recruit, the way we manage performance and promotion and pay. 

This is not new, by the way.  Industrial agreements, certainly in Australia since the 1970s, there was a notion of increased pay for using skills, allowances that were paid if you had a particular skill, higher duty payments if you performed the role of a manager for the day, or whatever.  That stuff's not old, but it is complex, and it needs to be very carefully managed, because it can result in some very unintended consequences if you don't ground it properly into your organisation.  That's a whole other conversation probably.

David Green: But again, what you're saying, start with a business problem, try not to be attracted too much by the shiny things.  If the business problem is, "We need certain skills within the organisation to fulfil our purpose or strategy", then yes, maybe you're going to start, maybe not for the whole organisation, but for a certain part of the organisation, you're going to try and identify if you have the requisite skills in the volume that you need them across the locations and all the other different parameters that you're going to look at?

Alicia Roach: Yeah.  Fundamentally, what we need to know for our org is, how critical are the skills to us; where are they critical; what roles, tasks, activities need that skill; to what level of proficiency?  That comes through SWP, otherwise it's just interesting data that's not useful.

David Green: And again, for those that are struggling to get things off the ground, particularly those working in very large companies, 20,000 or even 10,000 employees is still large, isn't it, there's nothing wrong starting with a pilot, is there?

Alicia Roach: No, a pilot's a great way to start, particularly if you're really focused on solving a business problem, or you've got a ready and willing person part of the business coming to you, it can be a great way to get that momentum.

David Green: For those companies, and those people listening, that already feel that they've got a good foundation that want to take their strategic workforce planning to the next level, what would your advice be around that?

Alicia Roach: Firstly, one of the things is getting comfortable with the directional nature of SWP.  One large financial services customer had really gotten stuck with their SWP in the way it was evolving, in looking for that perfect data, that really precise forecast; and SWP is not about predicting the future with 100% accuracy.  I love to cite, "All models are wrong, some are useful", it's a famous statistician quote.  But we're looking for directional insights using a grounded conversation around a quantified model. 

If SWP gets too focused on getting that perfect, ornate forecast, it sacrifices speed, which is crucial for impacting relevance.  Because again, as I said earlier, by the time you get it right, the business has moved on, things have changed and decisions have been made not using your data at all.  So, SWP's really about driving that shared view of the future, and what to do about it.  And that's arguably the most important conversation for a company.  So, I think for one customer, I'd kind of think about that.  Just get going again, don't wait for perfection. 

Secondly, I think cross-functional groups are really important.  We've got an Australian retailer, who had a big shift coming through COVID to a lot of online business model changes, as you'd expect.  But SWP, as I've said, integration between finance and the business strategy and HR; so, we need those cross-functional people.  They bring key skills and strengths to the table.  We want them to be engaged and we want them to be part of the process. 

But where this other customer had fallen a bit short was, they'd brought everyone in, and then no one was really accountable for the actions that came out of the plan.  So, we've got to remember that the P of SWP is Plan.  So, we have a plan that needs to be implemented to be impactful, so we need to make sure that we're seeing what the actions are and we're tracking those, and we're holding people accountable and making sure things get done.

Then thirdly, this is a large global organisation, I think 80-plus countries, very large global footprint; for them, I think they were looking for that one size fits all of their SWP toolkit.  But actually, what you really need is flexibility of approaches to deal with the different business tempos and different business problems that you're trying to solve for.  So, we were really able to help them have that top-down view to set the scene.

Yes, you're trading off a bit of granularity in your forecasts and a bit more directional actions; but driving that heavy strategy debate and consensus to set the scene across the org, we just chatted about pilots, and they are very impactful.  But if you have different pilots, or different siloed parts of the business, and they're using, for example, the same business driver, such as a revenue forecast or customer numbers, and they've got different views of that, then you're not getting that org alignment and people are rowing the boat in different directions, which is what had happened at this organisation.

So, we helped them to create that top-down, to clear a lot of the noise in the leadership around some very fundamental stuff around their purpose, their mandate; fundamental conversations.  But then, we're able to use that with divisions and functions and countries to more nuanced insights, more detailed action planning.  The top-down also enabled them to surface priority workforce segments to then shape a roadmap for SWP rollout, you know, where did they need to go next?  So, they had that top-down, bottom-up, segmented tempo that we'd geared differently, but shared that coherence through a uniting SWP function.  And that SWP team really was able to provide business impact, but consistency.

David Green: Three really good examples, and quite different examples as well, which back to one of your earlier points, what are you trying to achieve as a business?  Once you understand that, then obviously take the steps to try and get there.

Alicia Roach: Right.

David Green: How do you measure success?

Alicia Roach: That's a great question.  I mean for me, the first measure of success is that you've actually got a strategic workforce, right!  I've done a bit of thinking around this, because it's something that we get asked all the time, "How do we know it's successful?" or, "What can we tell our stakeholders to create a business case around this stuff?"

Obviously, in that fundamental question, what's our purpose and what's it going to take to get there, is what SWP is about.  So, ensuring that the organisation actually knows what workforce it needs to execute against its strategic imperatives.  Most organisations, it's scary.  If you say, "What workforce size, shape, skills do you need today?" most organisations cannot answer that; it's crazy.  And if you say, "What about three years?" it's close to zero who have any view of that.  And their workforce, yes, it's the biggest cost.  This is the enabling asset and we're all hyped up about skills, but we don't even know what we need, and how that aligns to enabling our business.  So, that's a big measure of success.

David Green: Or, what we've got even?

Alicia Roach: Of, what we've got, right?  But then, we can't just focus on what we've got --

David Green: No, of course.

Alicia Roach: -- and then have no view of what we need.  So, that's a big measure of success; having a strategic workforce plan, with a forecast view from today onwards of what we need in terms of size, shape and skills.  Obviously, what comes out of that is an action plan; that's a very important point.  That creates the coherence across the HR function, it gives the roadmap for what HR needs to be focusing on to really move the needle for the business.  We could be doing a thousand things, we can be the order-takers; how do we distil for impact for the business; that action plan that comes out of SWP?

Usually, for us at eQ8, we're really focused on grounding that commercially using net present values, cost benefits, and really understanding how it mitigates risk to the business being able to execute.  But fundamentally, this is maybe a bit more ethereal, but I think where we see a real shift in the impact of strategic workforce planning is where organisations fundamentally shift their view of the workforce, from just being a cost, to being a value-generating asset. 

Depending on where the workforce sits in the value chain, where it hits transformation, initiatives, or change in digitisation, whatever the roles are doing, the skills or whatever, this is an asset; and if you don't have it in place, this is not just about cost optimisation, this hits your top line.  You are not going to be able to meet your revenue objectives, you are not going to meet your transformation milestones, you are not going to meet your project delivery.  All of that stuff, this is an asset that generates value for you, and that's a fundamental shift from the way organisations think. 

Trust me, coming from a finance background, it's a real step change.  But I think the ones that nail it, we've seen the World Economic Forum come out with pushing accounting standards to be revised, to treat the workforce differently, and I think organisations that really step up and do this, it's going to be a game-changer.

David Green: So, you've talked about some of the customers on organisations that you've helped, and actually it's not too long ago you made quite a big pivot in your business, from providing consulting around strategic workforce planning to actually a dedicated platform for strategic workforce planning.  What prompted this shift?  And also, as you talk about the platform, how does it help organisations as well see the wood from the trees in the workforce planning?

Alicia Roach: When we left corporate to start our consulting business, we had in our head that a product was the endgame, as we said at the beginning of the chat.  I'd worked as a practitioner in corporate HR for years, and I knew that a proper end-to-end SWP platform would have been such an enabler for me, and accelerator for me in doing my job better and creating better business outcomes through SWP; because, once you see the impact that SWP has and how it really feeds into everything that not only the HR function's doing, but the business is doing, and finance and strategy, you realise that you need that scalability, sustainability and sophistication that you can get from a platform.

I'd been to the market several times globally trying to find one, and I'd used Excel and some cool front-end visualisation tools; I'd also been in an organisation where the IT department was very heavily focused on a particular large EIP vendor, and so I'd been tasked to build an in-house solution using their technology from scratch, and I'm still rocking in the corner with scars from that one!  SWP's definitely not one size fits all, but when we embarked, set sail and left the shores of corporate HR, we knew that SWP wasn't one size fits all. 

We needed to understand more about what different organisations needed, different sizes and shapes and different industries, how they needed to use a platform, what they needed to have on rails versus what could have more flexibility; what were the non-negotiables.  Our real strength has been our methodical, deliberate approach to building eQ8.  This was about creating a practitioner solution, not just tech created by tech, but something that was grounded in deep expertise and actual experience, that met the needs of real-life customers.

So fundamentally, this was driven by the belief that SWP must be owned by the organisation itself at the end of the day, beautiful PowerPoint decks by external consultants can get part of the way, but they're siloed and out of date the minute you hit send on those, not to mention often filed away never to see the light of day again.

The reality is, with the forces of change that we're facing these days, SWP needs to be as equally dynamic, it needs to be centred around dynamic scenario planning and modelling that can be really agile and adaptable and proactive in navigating this change.  We can't forget, I've said this about the P, but we can't forget that the S in SWP is all about strategy, and orgs have to own their strategy, so equally they have to own their SWP.  So, we needed to create a solution that really enabled them to do that, and they weren't reliant on third parties forever.

David Green: And in terms of what the platform offers, again high level, what's part of the platform, and then obviously if people listening are interested, they can go to eQ8 to find out more?

Alicia Roach: Yeah, so I think SWP's definitely getting a lot more momentum in the market through all this change.  I think there's a lot of muddy waters out there around what is SWP and what it isn't, and it can be frustrating and confusing for us as practitioners.  But I think really the main things for us are, you need to be able to quantify demand.  So, we can't just have qualitative, conceptual discussions about this stuff; it doesn't engage your business leaders.  They want to know about their business data and have that grounding.  So, quantification of demand really gives you, where are we needing to head; and without that, you really stop.  That's the main thing.

The other thing is, I just touched on dynamic scenarios.  The reality is things change from one minute to the next.  We need to be able to understand what that means quickly; we can't go, "We'll come back to you in a month and tell you what this means".  We need to iterate, so we need something in our platform we really focus on the ability to have that dynamic scenario.  What if customer volumes halve; what if they drop in this particular part of the business to zero; what if they quadruple?  We need to be able to model that and instantly see the impact on the workforce that's needed.  What if we delay this transformation initiative, or accelerate this CX programme, because that's now so critical; what does that mean?  We need to understand that instantly. 

So, that's one of our key strengths in eQ8.  Yes, we need that external context, so we bring that in, but we bring that in in a contextualised way so that it makes sense and it's meaningful, and as I said earlier, it's actionable; like what's the "so what, now what?" we can do that in a platform.  Then you need that action plan, as I talked about.  We need to have something that we actually are putting into place, we're doing something.  We can't just go, "We've got all these cool insights, this external data", we need to go, "What are we actually doing with that?  Who's on the hook to make sure that we're going to have the workforce size and shape we need to execute?"  So again, that action planning and the ability to monitor and see how that's going.

For us, we really see ourselves as our strength being that end-to-end SWP, this is our focus.  We're not just an add-on to other things, this is our game, and so we're really focused on nailing that end-to-end and those key differentiators.

David Green: That's really helpful, Alicia.  I think that gives people, I think, enough to go and find out more if they want to find out more, which I'm sure many people will listening.

David Green: We covered a little bit of this, but it might be a good opportunity to bring it together.  So, I think people see why strategic workforce management is a must-have, and I think that was already happening, but it's probably been accelerated a little bit in the last two and a bit years since the start of the pandemic.  What advice can you give our listeners to help them ensure that they solve their unique workforce planning challenges, rather than jumping on the latest trend or tool?

Alicia Roach: Absolutely.  So, I couldn't agree more.  We ourselves have really seen that shift of where orgs have gone from needing to understand what is SWP and why do we need to do it, to actually how do we do this; so, they're hitting the marketplace looking for these answers.  As I said, it's become quite muddy, but I think there's a lot of things out there that promise instant gratification and can be a bit dazzling. 

But the truth is, with any change, whether it's organisational, functional, or indeed personal, for it to be lasting and effectual, it needs to be embodied.  Things that are worthwhile take effort.  So, I'm not saying that there can't be external factors that trigger the need for change or make us wake up to ourselves, like COVID, or whatever; but what I mean is that if we're truly looking for change, we have to get causal, address the root problem, the cause, rather than tinkering with the effects.

I touched on this earlier; org design is a classic example of tinkering with an effect, which is why we see that orgs have gone from a couple of decades ago, where you have a restructure every once in a while, to where it got to maybe annually, then quarterly, and now where they're in permanent states of restructure.  You ask any org at any point in time, and there's some sort of restructure going on somewhere; and some of them call themselves agile, when they're just actually reacting.

The reason is because they've never stepped back and addressed the cause.  So, they've never created that inherent link of what the workforce is doing, to what the org needs to be doing, which is how you truly become agile, by the way.  So, any time pressure builds up, whether that's internally or externally, cue react and restructure, and that happens again and again.  Or, if we're looking at skills from a labour market data perspective and then deciding to reskill people with X, Y and Z skills, that's an effect.  The cause is stepping back and looking at what skills your organisation needs, and then aligning that to your unique purpose and strategy and react to things your organisation needs to do.

As we tinker with the effects and HR scans the market and finds this labour's cool trend, or check what everyone else is doing, they're buying the hammer when they really need a wrench, or the drop saw when they just need a level.  To become causal is really to effect change.  And to do this, as you said in the question, it cannot be cookie-cuttered, it's unique to each and every org, it must be contextualised; and that comes back to that fundamental question I said right at the beginning, "What is our purpose and what will it take for us to get there?"

So, we need to step back as an HR function and look at what truly enables this, what do we need and what questions are we trying to answer, and I think that should be the grounding thing as orgs look at this.

David Green: Yeah, and that leads on quite nicely to the next question, which is more technology-related, and obviously our advice, or your advice, would be, "Don't start with the technology, start with the purpose and what you're trying to achieve".  But obviously, as a firm that provides technology that helps organisations with strategic workforce planning, you might be a little biased perhaps, but what are your thoughts on the role of technology in the present and future space of strategic workforce management?

For those listening, for example, who maybe don't have the budget for sophisticated technology, can they do this in Excel, or will they get stuck at some point?

Alicia Roach: Firstly, I'd emphasise that yes, we are a platform organisation; but I really want to emphasise that you do need philosophy and process in addition to a platform for SWP success, at the end of the day.  You need to understand the philosophy and be brought into what that means for your organisation, and it's a shift in how you're doing things and how you're doing things as an HR function.  You need to have a clear process on how you're creating the outcomes, creating impact, linking to the business; and then, yes, platforms.  So, let me chat on that.

Again, as I've said, it is confusing.  Platform, yes, you can have the coolest tech in the world, this incredible AI or whatever, but if it doesn't answer your questions, solve your problems or cover your process, then what's the point.  In SWP, we need that end-to-end, quantifying demand, that translation of strategy into the workforce implications comes through that demand piece, being able to dynamically model that against your supplier, look to the future, the skills and external data insights and action planning, we need all of that. 

Unfortunately, Excel, as much as I do love it, I plan my life in Excel still, I planned my wedding in Excel, but it just won't cut it at a point.  Early in my career, I used Excel, but never on its own.  I always had some front-end visualisation tool to augment it, because the reality is, it's very hard to get your C-suite or board to sit around looking at your spreadsheet.  Excel can be a great place to start, particularly, as we said, if you want to start with a small pilot.  But eventually, you will get stuck.  Spreadsheets, everyone's got one, so if you have yours and Jo from finance has theirs, and Sarah from ops has theirs, it becomes a bit muddled, loses credibility and that source of truth.

As we also said, this stuff is complex.  We need to be able to look at the organisation vertically, look at the org hierarchies, look horizontally at the job architecture, at the skills, diagonally, everything in between.  And we need to bring together internal supply and demand with external supply and demand, and we need to be able to rapidly change and iterate that as the world around us moves.  So, at some point, you will need that scalability and sustainability that you get from a platform.

David Green: I love what you said, philosophy and process as well as platform.  So, looking forward, what do you think is next for strategic workforce planning; how do we make sure that HR doesn't miss the moment?  It's in a good moment, I think, for HR at the moment.  What would, say, three years out look like if we do this right?

Alicia Roach: Yeah, so I touched a bit on this before about the evolution of the HR function, beyond being just a business partner, to being more of a strategic transformation partner.  So, in my mind, the way for that to happen is for HR to get a very clear view on how it brings its functional expertise into coherence with the business agenda, beyond just enabling, but actually contributing to the strategy and its execution.

SWP is inherently about business enablement and impact and as you said, this is the time for HR to stop dithering and step up.  The HR functions that are stuck in their old ways of enabling good process, or being a good listener, just won't get there.  And I love to say this one, because it's just so impactful to me all the time, but the number of times I've been in rooms where it's been the CEO, the COO and CFO, and they're literally looking across the table, or Zoom more recently, at each other and realising they're in complete misalignment on what their agreed strategy means in practical execution.  They're literally rowing the boat in opposite directions.

SWP has surfaced this and brought an alignment back to the organisation, and HR has brought this to the table.  Now, that's the seat at the table.  So, the reality is, the businesses are asking for this.  COVID has really brought all things workforce to front of mind for everyone.  So, if HR doesn't step up now, someone else is going to step in.  We need to do things differently.  We can't wonder why we have these talent shortages, why we have constant restructuring, why we have hundreds of open roles we can't fill; why do we have these same problems over and over when we're doing nothing differently?  Why do we call ourselves strategic and commercial, but no one treats us that way?

It's back to that cause and effect; it's that Einstein quote, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result".  Honestly, if HR can't do things differently, look to the future, become proactive, ground itself in data and business acumen, it's going to stay relegated to the back office in support and processing functions.  We're seeing these other roles, Chief Transformation Officer, Sustainability Officer, Happiness Officer, Employee Experience Officer.  Things are starting to eat into the realm.

As I said, getting this right is a fundamental shift for the organisations in their view of the workforce as a cost to the asset, and SWP opens that clarity on just how valuable our people are, and gives our leaders the chance to have honest conversations with their employees on change, which you need to have a shared view of the future to be able to do that.  We can't be socially responsible, whilst in the next breath, we're behind closed doors working out who to lay off, without org charts on the wall and a Sharpie, because we're reacting to the latest whatever.

Once we get SWP happening, we break that fire and rehire MO, we become consciously responsible for humans, and that's where HR should absolutely be aiming.

David Green: And that leads nicely, Alicia, to the question that we're asking everyone on this series.  We're thinking maybe a bit more near term now; what are the two to three things that HR really needs to do to add business value as we continue to hopefully come out of the pandemic?

Alicia Roach: I'll try and keep it to two or three; I'll give you three, I'll take the max of that range!  So for me, the first one, with skills and remote hybrid working and talent shortages and all of the complexity around talent, as I said, COVID's provided the opportunity where the business is feeling the impact of people uncertainty.  So, this is HR's primetime; it cannot squander this.  So, HR needs to leverage this power, it needs to rise to the core by being that transformation enabler; that catalyst for change, while balancing the fact that it is the custodian for people, and bringing that socially responsible lens.  So, let's not just react to the whims of the business, but bring our functional integrity to the table.

Secondly, it needs to push leaders to plan.  I said earlier, most organisations don't even know the workforce they need today, let alone in three years.  They're investing billions of dollars in people and related programmes, and they're flying blind.  They're so caught up in their problem of the day that they never step back and lift their gaze, and then they wonder why we're in this same situation a year later and a year after that. 

There's always going to be an urgent problem of the day, a fire to fight, but that short-sightedness, amidst all the change and dynamism, that leads to disaster for HR, because this is where we see those reactive short-term knee-jerk decisions that destroy the very things that HR professes to care so much about: culture, engagement, employee experience.  Things that take years to build can be wiped out in weeks, or even days, with a poorly-timed hiring freeze, or a reactive restructure, or those blanket X% workforce layoffs.  We can't just keep doing these same things again.

Then finally, HR needs to adapt.  This is not about organic capability growth for the function because honestly, and to speak frankly, the function's too far behind.  It has to be serious about business acumen and data literacy.  The reality is that order-taking for the business is not commercial and strategic; driving good processes, once others have decided what needs doing, no.  It's always something that's amazed me about HR.  And one of the reasons I first moved into the function from finance was that every other function around the org was using data and planning to make decisions.  Finance obviously, supply chain procurement, ops, legal, marketing. 

But HR, usually the largest cost-free organisation, arguably the largest asset under its remit, not so much.  So, this is a step change for most HR functions, and the gap is widening as data and technology and the change is happening; it's exponential, so we can't just organically bumble away, we need to step change.  And so, HR functions need to look at new professionals from other academic and professional backgrounds, and unfortunately this is why we're seeing more and more CHROs from other parts of the business.

It's time to get with the times.  The ones that nail this, that get this right, they're being headhunted to be the next CEO or COO; how cool is that?

David Green: Yeah, you're right.  There's been a few examples of that in the last few months.

Alicia Roach: And I guarantee they've got a very strong people analytics function behind them.

David Green: Well, I mean certainly obviously, probably the most famous example that listeners will know of, it's obviously quite recent, when Leena Nair moved from Unilever as the Chief Human Resources Officer, very good people analytics function, to be the CEO at Chanel; and there are other examples out there as well.

Can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you, follow you on social media, read some of the fantastic articles and content that you produce; but also find out more about eQ8 as well?

Alicia Roach: Absolutely.  So, find me on LinkedIn under Alicia Roach, and all thinks strategic workforce planning, and my passion come through there.  Also, you can find us at eQ8.ai.

David Green: Alicia, thank you so much.  Hopefully, we will be at some point in Austin, or maybe in Sydney, next time we meet.

Alicia Roach: Or London!

David Green: Or London, yeah.  It's raining at the moment, so hopefully when you come here, the sun will be shining.  So, yeah, a pleasure as always, Alicia.  Thank you very much for being a guest.

Alicia Roach: Thanks for having me.